Spotlight: Joshua Agunos, YA Intern

Welcome Joshua Agunos! 

Young Audiences Intern from High Tech High Chula Vista

Tell us a bit about you.

I'm seventeen years old and a junior at High Tech High.  I love being outdoors, some of my earliest memories are hiking and biking Cowles Mountain and Chollas Lake with my dad.  I was born and raised in San Diego.  I love the sunshine and feel like this is the town I was meant to be in.

Tell us a passion of yours.

I love working with kids.  I feel like working with kids brings out the child in me.   We are forced to grow up so fast, and by working with kids we remember the joys of childhood.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I want to be an artist.  I say artist because there are so many different art forms that I am interested in.  I want to discover more about it.  Right now I really love singing and acting.  I also want to be an activist.  I want to learn to combine being an activist with being an artist.    I believe that the arts can change the world and I want to leave the world a better place then when I got here.

Why did you choose YA for your internship?

It is a perfect fit for what I want to experience as a professional.  I worked on a project recently where I wrote a children's book and discovered that I loved working with kids.  I love working in theatre, this past year I performed with the high school theatre in the "Laramie Project" and "You Could Die Laughing," and over the summer I performed with the Golden Garter theatre company performing, "Twi-Lite".  This seemed a great way to work in a field that combined both my interests, the arts and kids.

I also love the cause.  With arts disappearing in schools, the work Young Audiences does is so important.  I wanted to be a part of something meaningful and this is a cause I can get behind.

What have you done while working at YA?

I have sent out email blasts, called parents to inform them about events like scholarships and film festivals, volunteered at an art fair and I was a photographer at the scholarship event.  There have been several impromptu tasks that have kept me active, inspired, and engaged.  I especially love working with the National City Theatre Youth Ensemble.  I get to work with kids, help them with their work, and see it all come together.   Tonight is their opening festival and I am looking forward to it.  This has been a very diverse internship, and I love that.

Josh with NCTYE Students 

How will you continue the work you have begun here at YA?

I feel like there are so many directions my life can take and art especially can take you anywhere.  The idea of perfecting your craft as an artist and then using that knowledge to teach others is very interesting to me.  I love the idea of working as a teaching artist.

Anything else you want to say?

If you are thinking about an internship for you or your child you should come here.  It does take a certain kind of person to work here- you have to have patience to work with kids, know how to get the job done, and you have to be selfless.  It's not really about you.  It's about the kids and their work.  This is so rewarding, being able to help others and promote something so important.

If you want this internship, you have to step up.  But it is well worth it!

Josh has infused our offices with his light, laughter, and youthful spirit.  We are so thrilled to have spent the past three weeks with him.  He has one week left of his internship and we keep trying to figure out how we can get him back with us.  Thank you Josh.  Here's a cute video.

Spotlight: Michael Arata at Young Audiences National Conference

Michael Arata in New York

As the artist representative from the San Diego Chapter of Young Audiences (YA) it was an honor and a privilege to be included in the 60th Anniversary National Young Audiences Conference in New York. Aside from the circa 1924 ambience of the Roosevelt Hotel and the foray out into the harbor and the streets and sights and sounds of Manhattan, it was revelatory to sit in on break out sessions that dealt with all the different levels of YA's work. 

Click here for the National Website and some photos and highlights from the conference.

Michael Arata, YASD Teaching Artist

Being in direct services w/ students myself, it was great to get some fresh ideas in sessions and compare notes w/ colleagues, but it was also revelatory to be amongst the development folks and directors to gain a more complete picture of the engine that keeps people like me (teaching artists) out in the schools with the kids. I could not have had a better and more interesting time. 

It was a pleasure and a privilege to be in Manhattan w/ YA, and to score a front row center seat (for the first half) at the last minute for Bill Irwin, David Shiner and Nellie McKay's Old Hat's.

I'll treasure the card David Shiner's Bert the Magician handed me with a hug ("You're gorgeous, call me...") as he crawled over me to try and smooch a woman in the third row and was also bear hugged by Bill Irwin while he was in his campaigning politician guise. My only disappointment of the whole trip was that I was moved out of front row center at intermission to allow the late coming ticket holders of those seats to take their rightful places and missed out on maybe being included in the cowboy and dancehall girl skit. That would have been the icing on the cake, or the carmel on the Big Apple (I once came out of the audience for a similar skit w/ the clowns of Circus Vargas...)

Michael Arata, Teaching Artist

One of the most rewarding and fun sessions was put on by CAPE (Chicago Arts Partners in Education), a Young Audiences affiliate chapter. The session was "closed" after we were told we'd be wearing blindfolds for about 15 minutes. I think one person left. Each of us had an object placed in our hands. Mine was a hard plastic cone shape on the bottom, and a squishy foam rubber ball on top. A button launched the soft ball part out on a foot long string.We were given five minutes to familiarize ourselves with our objects, then five minutes to use single describing words. We all kind of fell into a mutual cadence, taking turns w/ mostly single word descriptions. Then we used "relational" words describing action and attitude towards the object. This period also lasted five minutes. The last blindfolded activity was to make noise with the object and then use an utterance to attempt to match the noise. For example, I whirled my ball around by the string, holding the cone. I whistled in an attempt to match the whistling the string made. The last part involved taking off our blindfolds, but only after the "objects" had been put away. We then worked in groups (again for five minutes) to create a 5 minute performance piece using any of the elements we had explored and were drawn to. This is definitely a process I would like to use in my own practice with students.

Young Audiences Residency Program