Community Arts

Yes, as an artistic process and performance, Forte Fine Arts Academy was successful in achieving its mission. After a planning process that began in January, rehearsals starting in May, Shrek Jr was performed on July 21st and 22nd. Forte Fine Arts Academy's production of Shrek Jr was able to meet the goals set forth in the grant of building theatrical skills for the 34 youth performers and 4 technicians through a structured rehearsal process. The students were an integral part of the development process, they were able to take time to learn about the art and science behind live performance. Students aided in the creation of the play through development of their characters, as well as, hands on time spent building and creating the physical environment. The student actors built costumes, props and participated in scenic painting and set construction. They ran and learned about the use and responsibility of live sound accompanied with performance in a large auditorium as 90% of the cast wore body microphones for the shows. Additionally, Shrek Jr gave the students and adult leaders the opportunity to explore the themes of inclusion and acceptance expressed in the script. As the students were ages 10-16, these themes are immediately applicable to their lives. Shrek Jr also allowed for the exploration of a history of Musical Theatre as the script is referential of the genre. One a weekly basis, the adult leader explored with the children the history of musical theatre and comedy and its role in society. Using the script as source material, the production team were able delve into process and create foundational learning opportunities for the students. The challenges were often of a logistical nature. During the summer, families are pulled in many directions. Commitment and regular attendance were sometimes outside the control of the children participant. Other times, older student participants made choices that reduced their availability. The adult leaders had to work to be both compassionate but also offer structure, guidelines, and expectations around this behavior. In future years, we intend to create a contract for the students and parents to sign in setting these expectations at the start of the commitment. We are also investigating ways to better accommodate our participants and families and to balance their commitment in the very busy summer time. Another challenge of future productions will be in finding equally strong source material for this age group. The strong themes of belonging, acceptance and parent- child relations in Shrek Jr aided in the learning and development process. Yes, we did reach our intended audience. In regards to youth participants, we fell slightly short of our goal of 37 paid and 3 scholarships. We had 30 paid youth performers. In regards to audience, we exceeded our audience predictions of 200 patrons per performance with 287 and 212 attendees for a total of 499. We made a decision to reduce our average ticket price to make the show more accessible but while that increased our patronage it did decrease our predicted ticket sales dollars. (Forecast $3000 in tickets sales. In actuality, sales totaled $2705.) We did seek youth participants that represented socio-economically, as well as, ability and racial diversity. As a result, we outpaced the local demographic with 6 (17%) need based scholarship students, 5 (14%) students with Individualized Education Programs and varied levels of ability, and 7 (20%) children of color out of 34 youth participants. In future productions, we plan to continue to focus on material that allows for and engages diverse populations. In recruiting participants, we worked with teachers and administrators from the local 3 middle and 2 high schools, we provided a channel to privately request scholarships and kept the paid participant pricing in line with what was offered by the schools similar programming. (In our post production survey, 78% respondents placed the participation fee of $80 as appropriately priced or low.) We engaged the school district's art, music and band teachers to promote the show to their students. We also drew on our participants for our previous year's production and their family and friends which included students from the home school community, private school and a charter high school. We were uniquely able to serve a population of students that bridged 11 schools (including a student from intermediate school district 917 which serves children with disabilities), as well as, a private school, home school and online school students. This artistic endeavor included youth performers and technicians (34 performers and 4 technicians). The two performances reached 499 audience members. In the post-show survey, 90.9% of respondents remarked that they were Very Satisfied with the overall production process and the remaining 9.1% identified in the next highest category as Somewhat Satisfied.