Programming Spotlight: Playwriting with the New Victory Theater

 

The talented and charismatic Marisol Rosa-Shapiro and Hassiem Muhammad recently returned to Passages Academy’s Belmont site to reprise their mini-residency centered on playwriting and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in collaboration with Mrs. Ernyey, Belmont’s English Language Arts teacher.  The  artists taught students from Abbott and St. John’s groups about the elements of playwriting and engaged students in creative writing activities that culminated in student-written dialogues performed in our school library today.  Students worked earnestly and had so much fun when it came time to perform!--Jessica Fenster-Sparber

Programming Spotlight: Malcolm X & Julius Caesar

New Victory Teaching Artists Janet Onyenuchea and Chad Beckim pose with students after a pre-theater workshop.  Photo credit: Jessica Fenster-Sparber

To get students ready to see X: Or, Betty Shabazz vs. The Nation in repertory with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, placement advisory classes have been reading Myers’ Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary for the last two and a half weeks. Part of a larger interdisciplinary collaboration with Social Studies and Art teachers, and heavily supported by Belmont's speech and reading specialists, placement students at Belmont have approached the historical figure and his context with a variety of lenses.  Last Monday, songwriter Janet Onyenuchea and playwright Chad Beckim deepened the unit of study further when they visited Belmont to conduct pre-theater workshops with all placement groups in their roles as teaching artists with the New Victory Theater.  Chad and Janet engaged students’ growing base of knowledge of Malcolm X’s life and death and then invited students to create tableaux and portraying a variety of roles relating to the play they are rescheduled to attend at the end of the week.  We can’t wait! --Jessica Fenster-Sparber

Programming Spotlight: Our first MoMA field trip of the school year!

Our community partnership with the Museum of Modern Art is off to another exciting year of programming. Yesterday, some very appreciative students (and staff!) from Passages Academy--Summit went on a VIP tour through the galleries of MoMA on their only day of the week closed to the public, led by the ever-inspiring museum educator Lauren Adelman. We stood in front of van Gogh's Starry Night and other famous works of art; all of us feeling very special when we had the art all to ourselves. After the tour, Ms. Adelman facilitated an art-making workshop where students created sculptural pieces inspired by art that we saw in the Talk to Me exhibition. One student perfectly summed it all up at the end, singing "Today was a wavy day." --Anja Kennedy