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Award-winning theatre department promotes
community-based events
In recognition of its extraordinary achievement in changing the community through art, Whitworth Theatre was recently named the recipient of the 2006 City of Spokane Bold Strokes Award. The Spokane Arts Commission presented the award as part of the city's celebration of National Arts and Humanities Month.
In fall 2007 the department will begin offering a community-based theatre track to its majors. The track will prepare theatre students to promote social action and to use techniques and skills they learn within their major to cultivate dialogue around social-justice issues in their communities. The course requirements include Performance and Social Change, Biblical Theme of Shalom, Community Arts in Practice, Arts Administration, and three additional advisor-approved credits in community-based theatre.
"We didn't make the track a minor, because we didn't want to give it secondary status among the work that's being done in the department," says Instructor of Theatre Brooke Kiener, '99. "We consider community-based theatre as important as other work that students and faculty are doing."
This January, Kiener's Community Arts in Practice class helped students from Havermale High School write their own short plays. Before the Whitworth students visited Havermale, an alternative secondary school in Spokane, they discussed the consequences of poverty, what it means to be an at-risk teen, and mentor relationships. At the end of the term, the Whitworth students performed staged readings of the plays for the studentwriters at the Museum of Arts & Culture, and were later asked to perform the plays at the high school's awards ceremony.
The 2006 Whitworth Writing Rally also expanded into another dimension as Kiener worked with Erica Uyehara, '04, to conduct a special workshop for sixth-grade students, who wrote a ballet. Ballet Spokane then chose music and choreographed a production of the children's work, Dreams!. The performance explored classic dream images and the comical ways in which people interpret them.
This spring, the Acting I class participated in a service-learning project at Mead Middle School. For the project, eighth-graders wrote descriptive monologues, which the Whitworth students performed before a Mead studentbody assembly. The project, which Theatre Professor Rick Hornor, '70, began last year, was so well-received at Mead in 2006 that faculty and students alike requested that Whitworth do the project again.
Addressing the new programs and their impact upon individuals as well as upon the Whitworth and Spokane communities, Kiener says, "In theatre, you have to assume a role and step into the character's shoes. If you are living truthfully in those circumstances, you can't remain unchanged. You can't walk away from that experience and be the person you were before."
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