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.
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| 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...)
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| 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.
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| Young Audiences Residency Program |
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