A New Home and a Look Back

After twenty-six years at Fort Mason Center, Performing Arts Workshop has relocated to 1661 Tennessee Street in the Bayview District of San Francisco. The move is only the fourth in the organization’s 43-year history. It marks the end of two generations of service based at Fort Mason Center, during which time the Workshop taught more than 50,000 young people in four Bay Area counties.

Gloria Unti and David Sarvis founded the Workshop at the Buchanan Street YMCA in 1965. In the years before, Gloria had used the Telegraph Hill Community Center and the YMCA as a laboratory for developing her distinctive teaching method. She taught the creative process as a dynamic vehicle for learning, problem-solving and social change—a method she first defined in On Stage in the Classroom: Performance Art from K though 8.

The Workshop continues Gloria's tradition at its new home on Tennessee Street. On August 23, 2007, some two hundred artists, community partners, board members, donors, funders, and long-time friends of the Workshop christened the new office with spoken word and world dance performances by Vanessa Lewis and Akat Dance.

With the move, the Workshop created five times the working area for community meetings, professional development workshops, administrative functions, and trainings of our artistic staff. The new location also brought the Workshop geographically closer to the majority of youth we serve, particularly the more than 300 students in Bayview/Hunter’s Point and Visitacion Valley who participate in the After School for All initiative through the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families.

Artists-in-Communities: How Digital Recording Classes Work

Young people are a large proportion of the consumers, listeners, and viewers of music and videos pumped out daily by the mainstream media. Most young people listen to hip-hop. Commercial hip-hop continues to romanticize violence and drugs, promoting misogyny and the false promise of easy rewards. The damaging influence on youth is easily visible.

The Workshop's approach is that of popular education, which gives ownership to the students with regard to the themes they address in their work. The digital recording process includes group building, confidence building, and trust building, a process that counteracts the individualism and competition that is glorified by commercial rap and gang culture, and creates a supportive, communal learning environment. This is achieved via leadership by the trained facilitator, as well as through games, theater exercises, and other activities that reinforce cooperation, self-respect, and mutual respect. Besides the technical knowledge, media awareness, and skills developed, youth also benefit from improved self-esteem, and an improved ability to work as a team. Their attitudes and academic performance improve and they develop critical thinking skills. Parents, teachers, peers, and community members begin to regard them in a new light, especially when the work leads to opportunities to perform hip-hop with original, positive lyrics.

Digital Music Composition

In spring 2007, I was hired through Performing Arts Workshop to teach spoken word arts at two inner-city neighborhoods in San Francisco. Both classes were after-school programs with middle-school-aged students. The students attended my class after completing homework sessions. This made it difficult to do any writing since they had already been in school all day. An inventory of their interests proved that the kids from all ethnic backgrounds wanted above all to rap, sing, and perform. This made me decide to use digital recording as the entry way into writing and performing. To create original music, students learn some basic music theory about notes on the keyboard, what is a key, transposing into a higher or lower key, time signature, giving texture to music, and arrangement.  In cases where students can play acoustic instruments, including acoustic drums and percussion, I teach them how to set up microphones and record instruments. Their instrumental pieces inspire lyrics and students have an urge to sing, perform poetry, or rap to their pieces. I allow freestyle (improvising) to experiment with and teach about the use of vocal microphones and voice recording techniques. The immediacy of the work is so gratifying that students are encouraged and excited. This leads them to want to add voice to their instrumental pieces: hence, the incentive for writing.

Writing

In order to record lyrics for a final product, students are taught different writing styles, topic selection, and definition and analysis of themes. By working on their pieces, students learn that the art of writing is writing and rewriting. They also learn language skills including figures of speech, metaphors, similes. They learn to write from the first and third person. I often have to struggle with youth whose lyrics at first reflect the misogyny, bragging and consumerist, “bling-bling” materialism they absorb from commercial media and neighborhood gang posers. One exercise we use is improvisational collective story creation. Students create a collective story by each student adding a few lines. This exercise is adapted into story telling through song. This way, the youth can address difficult issues that they are struggling with by creating fictionalized characters who face those issues. This also creates a level playing field for aggressors and victims of bullying and intimidation.

Performance

Whenever possible, we create or seek opportunities for students to perform their creations in front of their peers and families or in community settings. As we near completion of the product, students prepare for performance. There is opportunity for rehearsal, sharpening performance skills via instruction in use of the stage, use of the body, and relating to the audience. In some cases students create skits or dances to accompany or precede their songs or poems.

Exposing Students to Professionals and Professional Experience

A group of the students in my spring 2007 classes were able to record a CD of their own work as their finished product. With a modest budget and transport help from site staff, I was able to access professional facilities and take students to the studio to record their work. Each participant was able to keep and share a professionally mastered CD containing their song. The point is not at all to create illusions that everybody can make it as a rap star. Our teaching about the music industry shows why this isn’t likely. But in addition to all the other benefits described above, the process helps youth to recognize that the packaged, commercial media methods and messages are not the only possibilities. In this way it helps young people and the community to reclaim some control over their culture.

A Few Observations

Despite their problems, these youth are simply normal kids facing intense peer pressure to act aggressively and pretend to have street knowledge. Their interactions with teachers, staff, and each other involve “fronting,” demeaning women and girls, making threats, putting each other down, and using the “n” and “b” words and other slurs. Some after-school programs provide outlets for their energy through team sports, which teach teamwork but also promote competetitiveness and don’t always teach kids to question physical or verbal aggression. Our work provides a non-threatening, non-intimidating, non-accusatory way for youth to look at their own anger and its sources, to recognize aggressive behavior, and to consider the consequences of violence. Often, some of them keep “fronting” and resisting instruction: it’s hard for them to admit in front of their peers that they are not rap stars already! But the combination of patience, firm guidance, insistence on decent language and high musical standards, along with the allure of the technology and the immediacy of the results, enables us to create what seem like miracles.

The youth are excited and surprised when they discover their own potential to create. Parents are thrilled by their performances, some moved to tears. A mother and stepfather came to class to help their son record his song about alternatives to street life. The youth are justifiably proud of themselves: their self-image and their stature with their peers have been raised. This is accomplished not through commercial hip-hop’s negativity, but through strong style, high standards, and positive content.

* Delmance 'Ras Mo' Moses-Ras Mo is from Dominica in the Eastern Caribbean. He is a dynamic performance poet, drummer, recording artist, composer, theater director and teacher, and specializes in the use of performing arts for youth development, personal transformation, organization, and participatory learning. In the Caribbean, Ras Mo trained artists, teachers, farmers, peasants, and women's organizations to use popular education and theater for social change. In the US, he has trained staff for many agencies and worked directly with inner-city communities, women and girls, and youth connected to the juvenile courts. Ras Mo currently teaches creative writing and electronic music production to teens. His latest project, "The Pink and Blue Arts for Violence Prevention Project," includes a musical theater production, "Testify." His website is www.rasmo.net

New Faces

Program Manager, Artists-in-Communities: Mariel dela Paz
Mariel brings five years of youth development experience to Performing Arts Workshop through her previous work as an out-of-school youth program coordinator and vocational counselor for teenagers within the East Palo Alto/Menlo Park community. Originally from San Diego, Mariel moved to the Bay Area to pursue a degree in Development Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her studies and deep involvement with the recruitment and retention of the Philipino/a community in places of higher education, in combination with her postgraduate participation in a leadership development and civic engagement apprenticeship, influenced Mariel’s passion for social justice and youth development. Mariel is currently pursuing her master’s degree in Social Work at San Francisco State University and loves the idea of integrating art education in strengthening communities. Other than daydreaming, Mariel’s hobbies include traveling; journaling her adventures; and embellishing photos, paper and most recently, fabric, as a means to tell stories and express the beautiful things that she has seen and experienced.

Program Manager, Artists-in-Schools: Karena Salmond
Joining Performing Arts Workshop in the fall of 2007, Karena looks forward to cultivating new and existing relationships with schools and Workshop artists.  She brings experience from both visual arts teaching in San Francisco and education administration at Chicago Children’s Museum. Her operating values of social justice and community align with her interests in youth development and non-profit work. She holds a bachelor's degree in Fine Art from her hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan and a master's degree in International & Multicultural Education from the University of San Francisco. When not working, she enjoys cooking, traveling, and attending the occasional ballet class.

Program Coordinator: Anne Trickey
Originally from Seattle, Anne spent four years in St. Paul, Minnesota studying Political Science and History. While an undergraduate, she spent time at the Goethe Institute in Berlin and the University of Vienna improving her German Language skills. Anne interned with Performing Arts Workshop during the summer of 2005. As Executive Assistant, she had the chance to experience working in a well established, goal-driven organization, help coordinate the 40th Anniversary Event, and get to know the Workshop’s dedication to Bay Area arts education. As Program Coordinator, Anne hopes her contributions will only strengthen the Workshop’s ability to help young people develop their critical thinking and creative expression skills. Outside the Workshop, Anne enjoys reading politically charged comic books, climbing trees, and watching the ocean.

Development & Administrative Assistant: Devon Nandagiri
Devon brings three years of large scale event organizing experience to his position at the Workshop through his work with San Francisco Pride. After graduating from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, he moved to San Francisco and curated JUNK, a traveling film festival that showcased queer independent filmmakers. He is also co-director of the short film Malaqueerche, which has screened worldwide and was an official selection at NYC’s MIX Festival, Park City’s Slamdance and San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival. He is currently working to create dirt, a community based San Francisco arts and culture magazine. He is passionate about making art accessible to everyone, and is excited about his new position at the Workshop.

Johnny Mansour, Board Member
Johnny Mansour is the founder of PodOmatic.com. PodOmatic specializes in the creation of sophisticated tools and services that enable anyone to easily find, create, distribute, promote and listen to both audio and video podcasts. The premiere destination for veteran and novice podcast creators and consumers, PodOmatic is the largest and most widely used service for creating and hosting podcasts.

Johnny has spent his career working within technology and telecommunication organizations, moving early stage start ups forward and negotiating and capturing key accounts with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies. In addition to assisting early stage technology startups, Johnny launched a successful brand consulting company that provided services to such companies as eBay, Accenture and Intrawest.

Sajjad Masud, Board Member
Sajjad earned his MBA at Harvard Business School and his MSE in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has held many titles: Director of Product Marketing, Group Product Manager, CEO and Founder of Apvision, an offshore software and services company focused on solutions for the financial sector. Earlier in his career, he held several engineering and consulting positions at Oracle Corporation. Sajjad is a board member at San Francisco Contemporary Players and currently serves on the Workshop's Marketing Committee.

Jason McMillan , Board Member
Jason joined Tides Center in August of 2004 providing comprehensive human resources management services to the organization. Jason has over 15 years of experience in benefits and human resources management with companies such as Aon Consulting, Calvin Klein, Hilton Hotels and Restoration Hardware. Jason is certified as a Senior Professional of Human Resources through the Society for Human Resources Management and is a member of the Northern California Human Resources Association and the California Association of Non-Profits.

Jason joined the Performing Arts Workshop board in November of 2007.  Jason loves the performing arts and is very excited to be able to contribute to an organization that promotes learning and education for youth.