With a popular culture swarming with tween superstars like Justin Bieber, Rebecca Black, and Jayden Smith it’s hard to deny that many youth today will jump at any opportunity to perform. A fledgling student and faculty initiative, the Guilford Afterschool Arts Program, seeks to celebrate this reality and inspire disadvantaged youth in the Greensboro community to start moving.
GAAP was a shared initiative for Theatre Studies professors Jack Zerbe and David Hammond, James Shields from The Bonner Center for Community Learning, AmeriCorps, and CPPS. Targeting a variety of ages from Glen Haven and Avalon Trace, GAAP is meant to provide an imaginative outlet for adolescents from areas without such resources readily available.
GAAP’s first task was enticing Guilford student applicants that wanted to contribute their own unique aptitude to the program’s curriculum.
“The Guilford students have made remarkable discoveries and prompted some amazing creativity among the participants,” said Hammond, in an email interview. “The program draws in its participants with such focuses as African drumming, music, hip-hop, slam poetry, and dance — all of which came from suggestions made by the Glen Haven youth — despite the general neglect of society to recognize this age group’s artistic potential.”
“We became interested in middle school students when we learned that this age group is historically ‘underserved’ in arts education in the public schools,” said Hammond.
Yet, as this is the first year of the program, it was a challenge for the collaborators to predict the best way to execute the program without any idea of what to expect.
“It’s basically like we’re asking, ‘how do we make fun a program?” said junior Arthur Wood, an Art and Religious Studies double major and student collaborator in GAAP.
Wood recounted stories exhibiting the eccentricities of the children he’s worked with, most of which highlighted their instinctive imagination.
“They are screaming individuals,” Wood said. “I guess we’re trying to get them to want to show who and what they are.”
Yet, the ultimate objective of the program is to bring all of the lessons and experiences shared throughout this year into a final, comprehensive performance at Guilford College. This will include a compilation of the various art styles and improvisational activities that have been the concentration of the program.
“The instructors — Josh Rodriguez, Helen Gushue, Ene Ekoja, Sarah-Jaana Nodell, Arthur Wood, and Jodie Geddes — have done an incredible job making something from nothing and have worked hard to collaborate in solving a problem that they have had little tools or training to solve,” said Mary Pearl Monnes, the AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer who in part designed GAAP, in an email interview.
GAAP’s final performance will be on Thursday, April 21, at 7:30 p.m.