Arts Activities Support

Over 80 youth spanning from 2nd-12th grade shared a stage for a full concert. 100% of youth that attended enjoyed the experience. We certainly accomplished our artistic goal of building cross-cultural understanding by using multicultural music to foster cultural identity conversations. This concert occurred after the Jamar Clark shooting and was in response to that. We used African-American poetry as well as Civil Rights songs including Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around and We Shall Overcome. We talked about the context of these songs and invited our audience into this perspective. We also accomplished our goal of collaborating with different levels/ages of musicians to build awareness of and encourage music as a lifelong pursuit. Youth sang with Central High School youth and both ComMUSICation choirs (including the training choir) and listened to each other sing. Unfortunately, the pen pal project didn't happen due to the tragedies at Central High School. The challenges were scheduling and communication due to Central happenings. Something that truly worked was having so many different youth on the stage. Next time, we will have our training choir only on stage for part of the performance as they lost their attention span and thus were not able to fully engage after an amount of time. We will use watching a performance as a measure of growth. This performance didn't have the best turnout, but taught us some important lessons. Only 2/3 of our training choir youth attended this performance, which taught us an important lesson; they aren't in the program for the performance aspect, but rather the relationship and 1:1 time they receive from our teachers. This made us rethink how we talk about performances and get buy-in from youth and their families. Audience-wise, we had great board turnout, which has been a struggle in the past. However, it wasn't very well attended by community members. We learned the importance of the venue in where we perform, despite proximity to the neighborhood.