FY23 School of Design and Construction

Jul 17

Written By Ben Houghton

FAST FACTS

School Name: Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction

Location: Manhattan, NY

Programs: Theater, Dance

Participants: 21

Duration: 4 hrs/week, in school & after school, year-long

Teaching Artists: Juanita Castro-Ochoa, ChuChi Samuel

Partnered with BAE since: 2019

REVENUE & EXPENSES

Programming was made possible thanks to support from the NYC Department of Education (DOE), Anna and Stephen T. Kellen Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York City Department of Education, Sing for Hope, Tiger Baron Foundation, Music Man Foundation, LesPaul Foundation, Surdna Foundation, and individual BAE donors.

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS (click on the photos to learn more)

VIDEO COMING SOON
VIDEO COMING SOON
VIDEO COMING SOON

In Broadway for Arts Education’s (BAE) fourth year of programming at the Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction (SDC), we continued our successful after school theater programming, introduced a new after school dance program, and were able to extend both programs into the last period of the day (crew).

After observing behaviors in the classroom, speaking with SDC staff and co-teachers, and reviewing responses from enrollees gathered through surveys, journaling, and conversations, BAE teaching artists Juanita Castro-Ochoa and ChuChi Samuel set two simple goals for the year:

Create performance opportunities with real audiences
Connect with and give back to the local community

Teaching Artists got to work crafting a year-long scope of lessons and activities to get their students ready to achieve these goals. Public performances, especially of original and/or vulnerable works, require students to build a high propensity for risk-taking. Many students expressed being shy, scared of public speaking, or having low confidence, so lesson plans were crafted to help students with little to no performance experience to “Live in the Orange,” a BAE mantra that helps students define, respect, and challenge their boundaries.

In response to students expressing that they didn’t have a place to fit in or belong, lesson plans were crafted to help students matriculate into the group and build strong community bonds through asset-mapping, an activity where students identify what they love about themselves, what they hope other people notice about them, how their assets fit into the greater community, and how they can advocate to have those assets be seen, heard, and utilized.

After months of consistent community-building, social and emotional skill-building, and technical skills-building in dance/theater, participants were ready for a Spring full of exciting performances and activities including:

A field trip to see KPOP on Broadway where they met and made friends students from other BAE programs around the city
An Art Share performance at Lincoln Center where students performed personal monologues
A Story Treatments project developed by Juanita and Ms. Nina to hone students’ storytelling, critical thinking, and sequence formation skills. The final project was presented in an off-Broadway theater in collaboration with local elementary schoolers who were mentored by club members. They even got to perform each other’s original pieces.
A dance performance for a schoolwide assembly honoring the loss of a student, processing grief through dance and using movement as a healing agent.

In FY24, BAE hopes to continue to offer more opportunities for participants to perform, including producing a school play in the Spring, coordinating and participating in more school assemblies and pep rallies, and continuing to be a safe, healing, experimental, and visionary presence at the School of Design and Construction for students to belong, gain confidence, and experience the transformative power of the performing arts.