Accomplished artists from all over the world grace the Music Center's stages in Downtown Los Angeles. But the Music Center also brings world-class artists into classrooms all over Los Angeles County through a range of innovative education programs. Nationally, the Music Center is not only a premier performing arts, but also a leader in the arts education field, vigorously committed to advancing arts learning in the community's pre-K through 12 schools.
Distinguished professional performing and teaching artists have been at the core of the Music Center's approach to arts education since 1979, when it started producing in-school programs. Music Center artists undergo a rigorous selection and training process before interacting with students, teachers, and family audiences. Teaching artists work at the intersection of artistry and education by using their expertise, creativity, and passion to provide distinctive arts learning experiences for students and teachers.
Internationally recognized mimes Sharon Diskin and her husband, Keith Berger, known as The Chameleons, have been Music Center teaching artists since 1990. "These days, artists in the classroom are asked to connect more deeply with the academic curriculum," says Diskin. "We're connecting to language arts and even science, math, and social studies. One reason schools rely on the Music Center," adds Diskin, "is that we are working artists first, teachers second."
"We're not doing something a teacher could offer in a couple of days. Rather, it's based on years of training and professional work in our field."
The Music Center works with nearly 50 teaching artists in four disciplines : music, theatre, dance, and visual arts.
Classroom teachers observe Music Center artists working with their students and learn how they can continue teaching the arts in their own curriculum. Susan Cambigue-Tracey, who has served as Director of Curriculum and Teaching Artists Development for more than eleven years, says the approach used by teaching artists is student-centered and based on the California Visual and Performing Arts Standards. "The arts inspire students to find personal meaning in what they're studying," explains Cambigue-Tracey, who has also been an dance educator for 45 years. "The Music Center is a leading light in quality arts education because we have high artistic standards for our artists and also teach them to incorporate "best practices" in their work in schools."
In working with a group of sixth graders, dancer-choreographer Kristin Smiarowski, a teaching artist since 2003, used a video of Kurt Jooss' 1932 ballet, The Green Table, to make connections between dance and the students' lessons in persuasive writing. After viewing the ballet, as well as seeing the original student work it inspired, a boy in the class proclaimed, "Every sixth grader in our school needs to have this experience!"
Says Smiarowski, "We examined the section of the dance where diplomats are negotiating and identified the ideas the choreographer used to create this dance, specifically gesture and the different energies Jooss used to communicate an idea.
"From that," she adds, "we were able to connect with persuasive writing. The students could express feelings of anger, frustration, disagreement and negotiation through movement and augmenting something we were already doing with writing."
A teaching artist for 25 years, Alvaro Asturias, is a painter from Guatemala who incorporates history and storytelling into his work. He begins his workshops with a story or poem to stimulate the students' imaginations and make connections to curriculum. Sometimes he sets the stage with stories from the Panchatantra - the East Indian book of animal fables originally designed by Vishnu Sharma to teach the children of the Raja lessons about politics, science, social interaction, and history.
For his work with first graders, Asturias selected the story of a monkey and a crocodile who learn how to gain and maintain friendship. He taught the students how to create rod-puppets based on the characters of the story and other river animals. Asturias points out that, in this project, "Puppet-making skills are important, too, because brain-hand coordination and manual dexterity is needed for many careers: engineers, doctors, dentists' not just for making art."
"In my opinion," Cambigue-Tracey says proudly, "the teaching artists are very special, for they have a great desire to share with young people what they themselves have learned in their own journey of exploration through their art. They all have a great love and sense of connection to children and teens."
--Victoria Looseleaf
Victoria Looseleaf is an award-winning arts journalist and regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Tu Ciudad and Performances Magazine. In addition, she is the Program Annotator for the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Geffen Playhouse, as well as the producer-host of the long-running cable access television show on the arts, "The Looseleaf Report."
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