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The Dance Academy of SC come dance and spread your wings. |
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Puck’s Theatre: changing the world through art. |
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YouthArts |
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Puck’s Theatre - Projects |
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Puck’s Theatre works with most of the schools in our district. We teach the students the performing arts as a way of addressing critical social issues. The curriculum is tailored to the group of students. We have worked with children as young as four years old and as old as college students. One school we worked at was Sonovista Alternative School in Darlington County. This school is for students who are failing in their regular schools for a variety of reasons. Many times it is because of behavior problems. If they turn themselves around, they are allowed to return to their home schools. We worked at the school in the Fall of 2000. We taught 15 kids theatre techniques to address the problems that they are facing. We explored various ways of solving problems like peer pressure and teen violence. The class was for one hour a week for fifteen weeks. At the end of the term, a total of 25 students returned to their home school from all of Sonovista. Thirteen of these kids were from the theatre class. The percentage returning to their home school from the general school population was seventeen percent. The percentage returning to their home school from our class was eighty seven percent. |
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After School Programs |
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We have worked with the 4th Circuit Solicitor's Office in South Carolina and Coker College on the YouthArts Project. If a student in South Carolina misses ten or more days from school, they go before the judge. The judge can take the child away from his parents and send him to Columbia to be institutionalized. Not a great scenario. The YouthArts program is a diversion program. We take about eighteen kids and work with them for eight weeks, four hours a week, at the end of which time we put on a show. This show was written, and performed by the participants. The invited audience is composed of friends and families of the participants and also community leaders, politicians, and school administrators. The subject matter ranges from teen violence, to pregnancy, to alcoholism and drug abuse. There are also lighter scenes which show how the participants deal with chores or homework. This program costs about four thousand dollars. You may say that is a lot of money to spend on these kids. Let me run a few numbers past you. 70% of all the students that go through the program never go before the judge again. One more bit of math. If the same child commits a crime and is incarcerated, he costs the state $22,000.00 per year. So if we would do a little fancy multiplication, 18 kids times $22,000.00 per year equals $396,000.00. If this program saves 70, we are saving taxpayers $277,000.00. I would say that the arts are very cost effective. |
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Performances |
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Puck's Theatre and the Dance Academy of South Carolina worked together to create over 20 new works. Most of these works were with at-risk youth. We always offer reduced priced tickets to area schools and groups that work with at-risk youth. We also create productions that could easily tour to schools and community groups. One of these productions is called Memories of Children. This production deals with the experiences of Jews during the Holocaust. The inspiration for Memories of Children comes from the book I never saw another butterfly, a collection of poems and writings by children in concentration camps. The piece draws heavily from this book and others using the words of children to tell the story of the Holocaust. The play tells the story through movement, song, and the spoken word. The performers are ages 11 through 18. The play is broken down into five scenes; The Sabbath, The Armband, The Ghetto, The Camp, The Return. The Sabbath shows what life was like before Hitler's rise to power. The Armband introduces the audience some of the laws used to separate and ostracize the Jews. The Ghetto was used to completely isolate the Jews and put them all in one place where they could easily be deported to the death camps. In the Camps, the inmates were either gassed immediately or forced to perform slave labor until they died of exhaustion or malnutrition. The Return, shows what happened to some of the survivors of the Holocaust. Their lives were shattered, their homes destroyed, and many of their neighbors were unsympathetic to their experiences. This is an interactive theatre piece. The audience actually is taken through the experiences of many of the Holocaust's victims. They are given Jewish armbands and separated from the people they came with. They are brought into the ghettos and then put into a boxcar. Finally, they are separated into different groups at the death camps. 2/3 of all European Jewry were murdered during the Holocaust. At no other time in human history has there been an event that compares to this. With that said, we can find similarities with America and our world. America's treatment of it's native Americans was disgraceful. The expression, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," proves this point. To a lesser degree, the laws segregating Afro-Americans can be compared to the laws used against the German Jews. We have instances of genocide occurring daily in our world. The experience of the Holocaust teaches us many lessons about freedom, tolerance, and hatred. It teaches us a lot about ourselves. No one leaves unmoved from this production The piece was co-directed by Adam Weiner and Lesley Tunstall. Mr Weiner has written and directed many experimental, issue based works which have been performed in the U.S. and Europe. Lesley Tunstall has choreographed over 100 individual dances. Her work has been seen in England, Italy and America. She has choreographed The Nutcracker and other ballets for the Dance Academy of SC.
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Puck’s Theatre 329 Laurel Oak Street Hartsville, SC 29550 843-230-3273 adamw@pivotalstage.com |
