Assembly Programs:
Solid Ground: A Play about Landing on your Feet is based on true stories of young people growing up in NYC and uses dance, spoken word to explore issues of domestic violence, teen suicide, and relationship abuse while celebrating the powers of friendship, community and contribution.
workshops:
Solid Ground Residency
* Using scenes from Solid Ground: A Play about Landing on Your Feet, we invite students to play a game we call, Freeze in which they coach the characters to open up communication when they see it breaking down within an improvised scenario.
* Using a step-by-step process, and prompts from spoken word pieces in the show, we invite students to create their own spoken word pieces based on their life experiences.
* We invite students to create their own conflict scenarios to explore underlying needs and feelings, in order to identify and address critical issues that touch their lives.
* We use video to document scenes and spoken word performances and hold screenings for the school community.
Critical thinking about Gender, Race and Power
Actors perform monologues from our new work in progress "Difficult Discussions: On Race, Gender and Power" Then, using a framework of inquiry we call a “Power Lens” We examine personal, cultural, economic and political forces at play within race and gender issues.
The Power Lens as a Community building and Research Tool
Community Building
*We begin by offering theater games to create a sense of relaxation, and ease within the group.
*We then invite students to write a free-form narrative about, "A time you felt powerless, and then found a power that couldn't be taken". Actor/facilitators give examples from their own lives.
*Students share their narratives with a partner, a small group, then the large group.
*To close we ask students to summarize their "take-aways" and state their visions, and goals for the future.
Research Tool
Actors demonstrate ways in which research questions can be generated through the use of the power lens to facilitate penetrating, comprehensive research writing about how personal, economic, environmental and political power dynamics help create and can point to solutions to critical social issues.