Did anyone else see this article this morning? I literally double-taked this blurb I saw on the NPR homepage.

Born and bred in a liberal home in Midwestern Chicago, I guess I just cannot believe that something like Prom ISN’T integrated. At a public school, no less.

Mississippi School Holds First Interracial Prom

As far back as 1997, actor Morgan Freeman, a Charleston local, offered to pay for the dance if everyone could go. This year, officials finally accepted the offer. A Canadian film crew led by Paul Saltzman documented the event for the upcoming Prom Night in Mississippi.

A photographer working with the crew says people in Charleston didn’t question the segregated dances. But as the big night approached, the importance of the change became clear. Catherine Farquharson followed several kids as they washed their cars and had their hair done.

She describes one encounter in an African-American beauty parlor, in which an elderly woman who’d been part of the civil rights movement stopped in to see what the hubbub was about. The woman ended up giving an impromptu testimony about the history these young people were about to make. “It was almost like it didn’t occur to a lot of the kids, until the day of the prom, how important what was going on really was,” Farquharson reports.

Student Chasidy Buckley says that Charleston’s first interracial prom made for a happy and comfortable night. Some white parents wouldn’t let their kids go, and some insisted on holding a private prom for their kids. But mostly, Buckley says, students enjoyed themselves — even if they’d expected a boring formal.

“It was just magnificent,” Buckley says. “That night, when we stepped in that door, everybody just had a good time. We proved ourselves wrong. We proved the community wrong, because they didn’t think that it was going to happen.”

Buckley says the school has decided to host a prom next year, giving black and white kids another chance to dress up and step out. “It’s going to continue to go on in our school, and if it continues to go on in our school, then our community will continue to improve,” she says. “It’ll impact them, too, because once they see that blacks and whites can come together in school and have fun together, then they’ll see that the community can change, too.”

Theater Aids Emotional Development
By: Psych Central Senior News Editor
on Friday, Jul, 20, 2007July 20, 2007 at 8:05 amUniversity of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, and the study’s lead author.

Reviewed by: John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
on

Researchers report high school theater programs can strengthen
adolescent emotional skills.

In a unique study, researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign conducted open-ended interviews and observations to gain an
in-depth understanding of one setting—a high school theater program.

Ten teenagers were interviewed every two weeks over a three-month
period while the theater group rehearsed a musical.
The study appears in the July-August 2007 issue of the journal Child
Development.

Adolescents face formidable challenges in emotional development. To
become functional adults, they must learn to manage the emotions that
unfold in complex social interactions, including those in
collaborative work groups. Yet little is known about the day-to-day
circumstances of adolescents’ emotional development.

Two adults who led the production also were interviewed biweekly. In
addition, the researchers observed the rehearsals weekly. During the
rehearsals, teenagers reported frequent emotional experiences,
including disappointment, anger, anxiety, and exhilaration.

The program provided a culture that helped them learn to respond
constructively to the events and feelings associated with these
different emotions, the researchers found. The adults provided models
and helped the teens cultivate strategies to manage strong emotions.
The youth learned from repeatedly using these strategies to employ
positive emotions to motivate their work; they also learned how to
manage their own and others’ negative emotions.

The theater setting supported this process by putting the youth in
situations in which emotions were likely to occur because the
expectation of hard work created stress and tension. Moreover,
intense emotions were accepted and discussed openly with a climate of
concern for others. The adults and youth alike stated shared beliefs
about the importance of emotional experience, and the adolescents
drew on the models and ideas of the culture as they learned about the
dynamics of emotions in themselves and in groups.

The researchers also found that the young people were very actively
engaged in the process of emotional learning. In the theater setting,
they were proactive in learning to manage emotional situations,
evaluated experiences and put to use the insights they gained, and
actively drew on the ideas and assistance of adults and peers.

“The development of ‘emotional intelligence’ is important to adult
work and family life, but many young people arrive in adulthood with
incomplete emotional skills,” according to Reed W. Larson, professor
of human and community development at the

“These preliminary findings suggest how, under the right conditions,
adolescents strengthen these skills. Although further research is
needed, youth programs and schools that provide these conditions may
be more likely to facilitate emotional learning. “

Source: Society for Research in Child Development

This is a recent letter I received from the Illinois Arts Alliance.

“On May 21, the Illinois House passed HB6429, a budget plan that would restore all of the $4.5 million cut from the Arts Council’s FY2008 budget and allocate an addition $2.6 million.

A few days later, on May 23, the Illinois Senate passed SB1130, a measure that would restore $3.5 million of $4.5 million cut from the Arts Council’s FY2008 budget.”

This is great organization for the arts in Chicago!

This is what Ra Joy, its Executive Director, had to say about the Arts in our own Prairiegrass State:

“The arts are the very fabric of Illinois and represent a powerful tool for attracting and uniting residents, strengthening our cultural heritage, stimulating innovation, and contributing an overall culture of excellence in our neighborhoods and schools.

To find out more about the Illinois Arts Alliance go to:

http://artsalliance.org

Children need to go to the theatre as much as they need to run about in the fresh air. They need to hear real music played by real musicians on real instruments as much as they need food and drink. They need to read and listen to proper stories as much as they need to be loved and cared for.

The difficulty with persuading grown-up people about this is that if you deprive children of shelter and kindness and food and drink and exercise, they die visibly; whereas if you deprive them of art and music and story and theatre, they perish on the inside, and it doesn’t show.

So the grown-ups who should be responsible for providing these good and necessary things – teachers, politicians, parents – don’t always notice until it’s too late; or they pretend that art and theatre and so on are not necessities at all, but expensive luxuries that only snobbish people want in any case; or they claim that children are perfectly happy with their computers and video games, and don’t need anything else.

I’m not going to argue about this: I’m right. Children need art and music and literature; they need to go to art galleries and museums and theatres; they need to learn to play musical instruments and to act and to dance. They need these things so much that human rights legislation alone should ensure that they get them.

But just let’s think about the theatre for the moment.

The experience of being in the audience when a play or an opera is being performed is not simply passive. It’s not like watching TV; it’s not even like going to the cinema. Everyone in that big space is alive, and everyone is focused on one central activity. And everyone contributes. The actors and singers and musicians contribute their performance; the audience contribute their attention, their silence, their laughter, their applause, their respect.

And they contribute their imagination, too. The theatre can’t do what cinema does, and make everything seem to happen literally. There are no pixels on the stage; what happens is caused by physical bodies moving about in real space, not by computer-generated imagery on a screen.

So it has limitations. That isn’t a real room, it’s painted canvas, and it looks like it; that isn’t a real boy, it’s a little wooden puppet. But the limitations leave room for the audience to fill in the gaps. We pretend these things are real, so the story can happen. The very limitations of theatre allow the audience to share in the acting. In fact, they require the audience to pretend. It won’t work if they don’t.

But the result of this imaginative joining-in is that the story becomes much more real, in a strange way. It belongs to everyone, instead of only to the performers under the lights. The audience in the dark are makers, too. And when it all works, the experience we take away is incomparably richer and fuller and more magical than it would ever have been if all we did was sit back passively and watch.

I can remember evenings in the theatre, both as a child and as an adult, which were among the most important things I’ve ever known. Seeing Frankie Howerd as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Vic when I was nine, and laughing so much I fell off my seat; watching Peter Hall’s production of the Oresteia at the National Theatre, and feeling a sense of awe at the gradual unfolding of this ancient, savage, profound story; more recently, simultaneously helpless with laughter and shivering with pity and terror at the extraordinary Shock-Headed Peter. If I hadn’t seen those things, my life would be much the poorer. Theatre feeds the heart and nourishes the soul and enlarges the spirit.

When we are adults, and if we’re lucky enough to have developed the habit, we can find our own way to plays and operas, but children can’t do it on their own. They need to be helped into the experience by people who’ve been there before, and who can excite their curiosity. A little knowledge helps a great deal. A theatre especially set up for children helps even more; and plays presented by people who know how to perform for children without talking down to them, or being facetious, or leaving their brains behind, are best of all.

Hello!

My name is Amelia, and I am an intern at The Viola Project. I am from Chicago and have been a part of TVP since December. This is my first blog!

TVP recently went to Normal, Illinois to hold a workshop at Illinois High School Theatre Festival. It was an amazing experience! While in the cornfields Ellie, Alex and I were able to share in watching this YouTube video. Its theme is creativity in schools, and is very inspiring.

If you watch the video, I would like you to answer this question:

How do you feel that this video connects to what we do at The Viola Project?

If you decide to hold off and watch it later, riddle me this instead:

What would you like to see posted on The Viola Project blog?

I wait on baited breath. Until next time…

-Amelia