CONNECTED BY ARTS
Nonprofit brings together students in Connecticut and Nepal
TRUMBULL — Christmas celebrations in Nigeria last several weeks.
Beginning the days before Dec. 25 and continuing through the early part of January, stores and schools are closed as people return to their home villages to see family and celebrate the holiday in the country that is nearly half Christian.
So it was surprising for Teagan Spitzel’s mother to witness the dialed-down American version of Christmas festivities when, at 21, she moved from Nigeria to the United States.
“She said when she got here, she didn’t understand most of the holidays,” said Spitzel, a 12th-grader from Bridgeport, who attends the Regional Center for the Arts in Trumbull part time.
Halloween and the Fourth of July were also perplexing for Spitzel’s mother, as were American weddings. In Nigeria, it’s customary to have two marriage ceremonies, one for family, friends and co-workers, and another, more intimate, service for only immediate family members.
Spitzel discovered these dissimilarities while conducting oral histo- ry interviews with her mother as part of a project undertaken by Anthony DeQuattro’s Interdisciplinary Performance class at RCA, made up of 13 students from the school’s theater, music, dance and video production programs.
“The students have gone to relatives to ask them stories about their upbringing, their life when they were kids, how it’s changed, and then tried to focus on rituals or
traditions that exist in the family or within the culture and to get stories about them,” DeQuattro said.
The students at RCA were chosen to take part in the project by Creative Connections, an international cultural education nonprofit based in Norwalk that recently received a $60,000 State Department grant — awarded jointy to Creative Connections and the Mandala Theater in Kathmandu, Nepal — administered through the Vermont-based education nonprofit World Learning. Creative Creations was founded in 1992 and has worked with some 100,000 schoolchildren in 60 countries.
“The grant is for heritage preservation. They were trying to find organizations from the U.S. and overseas to preserve tangible or intangible heritage,” said Alan Steckler, founder of Creative Connections. “Tangible heritage could be buildings or architecture. Intangible heritage could be culture, customs, food, clothing.”
The grant will allow Connecticut students to collect and share their own oral histories this fall and, ultimately, connect with a group of Nepalese students from the Mandala Theater in Kathmandu.
Creative Connections was one of five American organizations to receive the grant. Students in both countries will find ways to artistically represent their histories. Those histories will then be shared in class, via video conference between Trumbull and Nepal, at four schools in each locale and, ultimately, in person, when three Connecticut students travel to Nepal in February 2018. A group of Nepalese students will, in turn, travel to Connecticut in April 2018.
“We love when young people learn about their own culture, feel empowered by it, and want to share it,” Steckler said.
Each student in DeQuattro’s class will use their particular expertise in presenting their oral histories.
“When we go to dramatize, they’re going to use their own discipline,” DeQuattro said.
Spitzel is in the school’s music program, and will be performing a song celebrat- ing family, which she said is a major part of her mother’s Nigerian culture.
Fernanda Schuina, a junior from Bridgeport, also decided to interview her mother about her home country, Brazil, where much of her extended family still lives.
Schuina said she spoke to her mother about Carnival, the festival that precedes lent, in her native Rio de Janeiro, her schooling and her childhood friends.
“I’m a film student, so I was thinking about making a collage kind of movie that involves a lot of my culture, a lot of photos and home videos from my mom when she was younger in Brazil,” Schuina said.
Schuina and Spitzel both said they’ve enjoyed learning more about their own heritage and the family histories of their classmates.
“We’re trying to figure out why these traditions are important. We’re starting to crack the surface,” DeQuattro said. “What I’ve noticed so far is when the kids are presenting the oral histories, they really light up. You can tell that they’re really energized by hearing about the lives of their parents and grandparents.”