Children learn from the pros at Youth Arts Center
A young actor takes a leap. A teenage guitarist finds her voice. There are the rooms where it happens.
Each week, more than 2,700 children pour into the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center for First Stage and Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra classes, rehearsals and performances. ❚ Jointly created by First Stage and MYSO, the youth arts center at 325 W. Walnut St. has been an incubator of child creativity since 2005. African American Children’s Theatre, Danceworks, Festival City Symphony and Milwaukee Children’s Choir also use the center for programs. ❚ Milwaukeeans see the public faces of the founding groups in First Stage performances at the Marcus Center or at MYSO’s annual Playathon at Bayshore Town Center. But whether rehearsing for a future show or simply learning how to carry their instruments safely, students build those artistic muscles at the youth arts center. ❚ On a recent Wednesday, photographer Michael Sears and I sampled the action.
The beginner’s orchestra
During a Progressions concert, conductor Mary Pat Michels calls Reece Davis forward for a bass solo.
With calm dignity, the fourth-grader from Golda Meir School proceeds to the spot, carrying an instrument taller than he is.
“Walking with the bass is like half the job of playing the bass,” Michels said. While some audience members chuckle, Michels means it.
In the Progressions string orchestra, made up largely of third- and fourthgraders who live in or attend school in Milwaukee, students learn how to be musicians. About 95% are children of color. Their families pay only $50 a year for private and group instruction, with MYSO fundraising covering the rest of the annual $3,000 cost.
On this morning, some 70 students have been released from the 23 different schools they attend to play a concert for their peers: buses of students from Cass Street and Clara Mohammed schools, who listen attentively enough to put some adults to shame. Progressions violist Ameerah Davis gets a shout-out and applause, because she attends Clara Mohammed.
Selections are short and simple, including the “Joy” theme from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The Progressions third-graders had never touched these instruments before the beginning of this school year.
Narrator and MYSO community liaison Kate Goerdt fields questions from the student audience, with Michels calling on her young musicians to provide answers.
What that’s blue thing on the back of the violins? it’s a sponge that helps support the instrument in the right posture.
How long did it take to practice all of the songs? “It took us 1 year and 8 months to practice all of the songs,” says cellist Simone Ribares of St. Marcus Lutheran School.
And that double bass that Reece Davisbrought forward for a solo?
You can’t carry it by the neck, another student explains.
If your arms are long enough, you carry it by holding both C bouts at the indented waist of the instrument. If your arms are shorter, you hold one C bout and wrap your other arm around the neck, holding it close like it was a baby.
Making bold choices
Everybody in a First Stage Theater Academy classroom wears the T-shirt: students, teachers, interns, even a visiting photographer.
“Life Skills Through Stage Skills,” the front proclaims. The back of the T-shirt declares those skills in the form of affirmations, including “I conquer my fears!” and “I am not afraid to lead!”
In the youth arts center’s Lorraine Hansberry Studio, teaching artist Samantha Montgomery and fellow teacher Kavon (KJ) Cortez-Jones engage students from Golda Meir elementary school in warmup activities, including a fiendish tongue-twister: “I saw a saw that could outsaw any saw I ever saw.”
They’re going to perform “Lunch Money,” a scene in which a classroom bully is interrogated about stealing.
In the Shakespeare Studio, teacher Jo Gray lobs imaginary jumping beans into the mouths of children from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. Gray and fellow teacher Mary Jo Perez redirect rambunctious and wandering energy back to the game at hand. These children, after all, have already spent a whole day in school.
On a boombox, Gray puts on Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” before leading her youth in a game called “Stage Directions.” As the students move around, they also learn what instructions such as “stage right” mean (to the actors’ right).
In these scene-study classes, students develop the actor’s tools of voice, body and imagination, said associate academy director Brenna Kempf.
First Stage encourages academy teachers to use material from the professional company’s season, so Gray’s MLK group works on a scene from “Judy Moody & Stink: The Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Treasure Hunt,” First Stage’s May production. Academy students who see it will know the lines and can “compare and contrast what the blocking was like when they worked on it,” Kempf said.
While this is an after-school activity, not a professional company rehearsal, the exhortation Gray gives her MLK Elementary School students is similar to the one more experienced young actors will hear later that day. “Be very specific in your acting choices,” she tells them. “Be very bold, so the audience can see exactly what you’re doing.”
The character’s journey
An hour later, adult and youth actors in First Stage’s professional production of “Judy Moody and Stink” warm up in a rehearsal hall.
“This is the time when we put away all the things from our day,” says director Jeff Frank, leading them in movement and vocal exercises, including the wonderful “Topeka-Bodega-TopekaBodega.”
First Stage’s artistic director since 2003, Frank is conspicuously tall (6 feet 2.5 inches)and in charge but never imposing in working with young people.
Four adult actors and five pairs of children are in the room. Frank pays attention to everyone: a boy with a wordless role running back to his mark gets a high-five from the director. But in the rehearsal, Frank works the most with 11year-old Thatcher Jacobs, who plays Stink, younger brother of Judy Moody (Eloise Field).
“Her relationship with Stink is quintessential brother and sister,” Frank said in an interview before rehearsal. “Moments of real love and moments of real annoyance.”
Jacobs is already animated and expressive. Now Frank works with him to take the audience on the character’s journey, moment by moment. Reacting not because the script says so or the director says so, but because a believable character would react.
In this scene, the banged-up Stink tells his sister he needs “a wheelchair” and then, noticing an ice cream stand on the island where their family is vacationing, also says “some ice cream.”
Frank goes through that scene with Jacobs several times. “I need your discovery of the ice cream shop to be clean,” he tells the boy. In other words, moan about a wheelchair, then see the ice cream, then impulsively ask for it.
In this play, Judy and Stink compete with other teams of children to solve a pirate treasure hunt. They reach a moment when Stink, frightened by a sound, jumps into his sister’s arms, so Frank brings up actor Todd Denning, an experienced fight choreographer, to teach Jacobs and Field how to do this safely.
Denning breaks it down step by step for Jacobs and Field. In slow motion, Denning models the movements with Frank as his accomplice, though he points out that he won’t make Frank catch him – to humorous moans from some kids. They wanted to see that.
‘Fill up the room’
Jazz is an art of improvisation. So no one freaks out when a rush-hour snowstorm keeps half of the MYSO Template jazz sextet from making it to rehearsal.
Instructor Neil Davis, a guitarist by trade, sits in on upright bass with three teenagers who have made it in: electric guitarist Iris Ramirez, from Divine Savior Holy Angels High School; drummer Joe Lorenz, from Steffen Middle School in Mequon; and alto saxophonist Nick Kordysh, from Maple Dale School in Fox Point.
Davis doesn’t have to explain what a blue note is. These three can play their instruments. He’s working with them on an arrangement of the standard “All of Me” for a May 12 concert. “What would be fun in the concert is to turn this into a suite of sorts for everyone to have a feature,” he tells them.
To that end, he walks them, one segment at a time, through the structure he dreamed up while stuck in traffic, telling Kordysh when to solo and Lorenz when to enter the fray. Several times Davis sings a bit of the song to make his point.
Free association abounds. When Lorenz launches into a Latin pattern on drums, Davis lights up immediately. “I like that, that’s the beat from the song ‘El Toro’ (recorded) by Art Blakey,” he says to the drummer.
After Ramirez tells the instructor to wait a minute, Davis starts singing the Beatles’ “Wait,” accompanying himself on upright bass. Based on their lack of reaction, his pupils don’t appear to be Beatlemaniacs.
As they run through the music, Davis focuses on transitions from one segment to another. There’s a bit of technical instruction, as he talks playing and instructs them to go back to the fermata. But Davis doesn’t criticize choice of notes. He’s not out to nitpick, he’s here to promote boldness.
“Mistakes I can tolerate, we all can,” he tells the teenage musicians. “But panicking, it’s tough to fix. So just screw it up, loud.”
Coaching Ramirez, whose guitar has played a supporting role through much of the hour, Davis doubles down on that advice: “Fill up the room with sound. Play loud.”
Later, she solos crisply. Davis approves. “That was some soulful stuff.
“The more you commit to what you’re doing, the better.”