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Program Spotlight: “The Crack in Everything”

November 15, 2024 By Cindy Sherwood

 

Arts for Learning storyteller Robin Vivian says she was skimming her daughter’s PTA newsletter recently when her jaw dropped.

“If I were in a car, it’d be like the brakes going [SCREECH]!  I thought, that’s incredible because I have literally spent the last year creating this show that’s about accepting imperfection and the concept of looking at it in a different way.”

Robin was reacting to this year’s theme for Reflections, “Accepting Imperfection.”  Reflections is a National PTA-sponsored program. Each year more than 300,000 pre-K through 12th grade students make original works of art in response to a student-created theme.

Robin’s program for Arts for Learning Virginia is called The Crack in Everything. The title comes from a line in a Leonard Cohen song: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

“[Hearing that line] immediately reminded me of one of the first stories I ever learned called The Cracked Pot,” Robin says. The story, which Robin tells in her program, illustrates the beauty that can be found in imperfection, a Japanese concept called “wabi-sabi.” Sharing three multicultural tales and one personal one, Robin uses the wabi-sabi elements of imperfection, impermanence, and incomplete to help students reframe themselves and their experiences.

Robin’s role as the mom to a daughter in elementary school influenced how she developed her program—from her daughter’s distress about needing a tutor to the amount of time that age group spends on social media, including watching YouTube videos where they see others with seemingly perfect lives.

“I imagine that it would be very easy to watch that and say, ‘Hmm, my life doesn’t look like that, my photos don’t look like that. There must be something wrong with me,’” Robin says. “If they don’t have an outlet to talk to someone about it then they start to make their own narrative and that narrative can very easily go to ‘I’m not enough’ or self-blame or ‘my family’s not enough’ or ‘I’m different,’ which can equal ‘I’m bad’ or ‘I’m not enough.’”

Robin uses the story of The Stonecutter to address that negative narrative. By the end of the story, the stonecutter realizes he had everything he needed, from the very beginning, to be content.

Whatever you have right now, you focus on what you have instead of what you don’t. That’s happiness. You don’t need anything else. So that’s the part of wabi-sabi that’s incomplete.”

The Crack in Everything is highly interactive.  In one portion, for example, students come onto stage to act out a scene and in another they call out guesses related to a “mystery box” Robin brings out—what do its contents of a chocolate chip cookie, Popsicle, Slinky, and Silly Putty have in

common?  (Think about it and find out if your guess is correct at the end of this story!)

Along with some humorous moments, the program has a part that’s both difficult to hear and that almost everyone can relate to. It’s Robin’s own story from fourth grade when she desperately wanted a best friend—plus a 90’s-era “best friend charm” to display to her peers—and wound up being rejected in a cruel way.  But in the program, Robin shows that the story doesn’t end there. Although she never did become friends with that particular girl, years later in college she met a young woman, Fayth, similar to herself (“very goofy and a lot, just like me.”) Robin had told Fayth her painful story from fourth grade. And on Robin’s 20th birthday, Fayth surprised her with a best friend charm. They remain best friends today, along with A4L teaching artist April Uhrin.

It’s a lovely twist to the story, demonstrating the ever-changing aspect of life, or the wabi-sabi idea of impermanence.

But the story doesn’t end there either.

“When my daughter was in first grade, kids came to her and said she shouldn’t talk to this other little girl because that little girl was weird. And she was struggling with that,” Robin says. “So I told her the story that I just told you. And I watched it transform her. She realized that if she would do that, it would be very similar to what those girls did to me. And that’s hurtful. And I watched her become a kid who cares about other people and she learned compassion. And so that story went on. And she was nice to that little girl.”

That right there is part of the story. The story is the wabi-sabi. That’s the beauty. We all experience things that are painful. We all go through things. Everything ends from time to time. But when we share that experience of someone else hurting, magic happens because we realize that we’re not alone. We have each other. And there’s nothing actually wrong with us. It’s just part of life.”

Robin is a professional storyteller, actor, and educator who’s based in Northern Virginia. If you’d like to book Robin for your school, library, theater, or community center, contact Katie Driskill, School and Community Relationships Coordinator, at 757-961-3737 or scheduling@Arts4LearningVA.org.

The answer to what a chocolate chip cookie, Popsicle, Slinky, and Silly Putty have in common is that they were all created by mistake—from imperfection comes beauty! As Robin puts it, who wants to live in a world without chocolate chip cookies?

Filed Under: Artist Spotlight, Program Spotlight Tagged With: impermanence, PTA, Reflections, Robin Vivian, storyteller, storytelling, teaching artist, wabi-sabi

(Almost) Full Circle: Dylan Pritchett Returns to the Hennage Stage at Colonial Williamsburg

May 30, 2024 By Cindy Sherwood

Of the thousands—or more likely tens of thousands—of times Dylan Pritchett has performed as a professional storyteller, his upcoming program at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg is sure to be among the most meaningful. A native of Williamsburg, Dylan returns to the Hennage Stage on June 13, decades after he helped develop and perform Colonial Williamsburg’s first programming focused on African American history.

“What we started could be looked at as the root for all of the fruit that has come forward.”

As Dylan puts it, he’s only had one employer in his life—Colonial Williamsburg, where he started as a member of the Fife and Drum Corps at age 13 and continued past high school and during summers while off from Hampton University. He then accepted a full-time administrative job at Fife and Drum, while continuing to instruct Corps members.

But in 1984, a new phase of Dylan’s career began when his position transitioned to a role in CW’s first African American programming department as an Interpretive Program Specialist. His duties were broader than the title implies. In addition to performing programs at the Hennage and in other places at Colonial Williamsburg—telling stories that illuminated the lives of enslaved children and adults—Dylan wrote programming and supervised other staff members of the African American department.

During his time performing on the Hennage Stage and elsewhere around Colonial Williamsburg, Dylan grew as a storyteller.

“The Hennage gave me a platform to try out new stories… it gave me an audience, it gave me practice to hone my storytelling skills.”

Around that time, Colonial Williamsburg began outreach programs to schools. That’s when Dylan saw an opportunity and began exploring his next career move. After taking a leave of absence for a year to make sure he could support his family, Dylan became a professional storyteller in 1990, performing in more than 100 schools per year, including in areas of rural Virginia.

“It was a time when that was a novelty. For assemblies you had the clown that comes in for the kids and you got the magician and puppeteer. And here’s this guy who tells African American stories. It’s like, wow. And to be real honest, I went into a lot of places where I was probably the only Black performer they had ever seen, of any genre. That meant a lot.”

A later partnership with the Kennedy Center took him all over the country, using his storytelling techniques to do workshops and performances to train educators. And his storytelling was again a novelty in many places. He recalls visiting New Castle, Wyoming—”three hours from nowhere”—and the educator liaison telling him, “These people have never seen a Black person in person. I said, ‘Whaaaaat?’ He said, ‘Yeah, they’ve seen Black people on TV, but they’ve never seen a Black person in person.’”

When Dylan joined Young Audiences/Arts for Learning Virginia, he was able to cut down on travel and perform primarily in Hampton Roads. He remains one of A4L’s most booked artists. Last year, he was also among a select group of artists to become credentialed as a teaching artist for A4L’s new affiliation as Coastal Virginia Wolf Trap.

Thinking about his upcoming program at the Hennage brings back some powerful memories for Dylan. He recalls performing at a festival where he and other storytellers split their program between the Williamsburg Theater and the Hennage Auditorium. It was the first time he’d ever done a program at the theater, a place where both he and his father had worked.

“My father was a custodian at the Williamsburg Theater who passed away in 1977 after I had just graduated from high school,” Dylan says. “I mentioned on the stage that my father was a custodian there, that I was an usher and had spent a lot time at the theater when we showed movies, and that was a moment. And going back to the Hennage is probably such a moment.”

You can see Dylan on Thursday, June 13 at 5:30 pm inside the Hennage Auditorium at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. This is a free, family-friendly program underwritten by the Williamsburg Area Arts Commission, Virginia Commission for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts. No admission ticket is required for the museum.

“I’ve been thinking about what stories to tell and I think I’m going to do a little hodgepodge. A little bit of what I used to tell there and some stuff I never had.  It’s kind of like full circle, but I hope it doesn’t complete the circle because I want to be around to go back later on too.”

Filed Under: Artist Spotlight, Program Spotlight, Public Performance, Wolf Trap Teaching Artists Tagged With: African American history, Black history, Colonial Williamsburg, Dylan Pritchett, storyteller, storytelling

Arts for Learning Shares Stories of the African American Heritage Trail

November 24, 2021 By Cindy Sherwood

Screenshot from African American Heritage Trail video

Laced with compelling stories of the real-life triumphs and struggles of African-Americans, a new video produced by Arts for Learning (A4L) is set to debut in Norfolk Public Schools. The African American Heritage Trail highlights times of historical interest in the Lower Norfolk area, now part of modern-day Chesapeake, from the 1500s through the early 1900s.

Master storyteller Sheila Arnold, a longtime member of the Arts for Learning roster of professional artists, developed the program by researching the history of the area, writing the script, and working with an A4L production team to record the video. The project was underwritten by Bank of America.

Why did some African Americans fight for the British in the Revolutionary War? Why did slaves flee to the Great Dismal Swamp? And how did a unique ship design—and stripping down to her underwear—help one unforgettable slave escape to freedom? The answers are fascinating and can be found by watching the video, which includes stories related to the American Revolution, Underground Railroad, Civil War, and Reconstruction. The culturally responsive content is aligned with Virginia Standards of Learning for grade five.

Arnold, who goes by “Ms. Sheila” as a storyteller, believes the program is important even beyond telling stories of the African Americans who helped shape the history of the Tidewater area.

Bigger than that, it looks at a continuum, which is often not looked at in history, looking at what happens in a particular place over time.”

“Kids really don’t get a continuum, and that’s why they get confused and ask if Harriet Tubman knows Martin Luther King,” Arnold says. “I hope it will lead to teachers and students wanting to know what happened over time in their own areas and with other ethnic groups as well.”

For the 2021-2022 school year, NPS fifth grade teachers have exclusive access to the video, which is divided into five segments for easy classroom implementation. Teacher guides to facilitate discussion are included for each segment. A4L is providing the video at no charge to the thirty-one NPS elementary or combined elementary/middle schools, which have more than 2,100 fifth graders enrolled.

Arnold and the A4L staff designed the program in collaboration with Norfolk Public Schools’ history/social studies specialist Christopher Mathews, a former teacher of the year at Bay View Elementary School who is also on the A4L artist roster. The African American Heritage Trail features curricular connections to American history, character education, language arts, and reading.

Arts for Learning’s CEO, Christine Everly, calls Arnold’s program one of the best that the organization has ever offered. “We’re thrilled to offer stories few have ever heard before about the important contributions of African Americans with ties to our area. And we’re very grateful to our sponsor, Bank of America, for providing us the financial support to develop this important project.”

The Chesapeake Convention and Visitor’s Center has developed a driving tour and podcast along the African American Heritage Trail, as well as a brochure that describes the points of interest along the route. The Center is providing free brochures to all NPS students who view the video in their classes.

Watch the trailer of the video here:

https://arts4learningva.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Sheila-Arnold-The-African-American-Heritage-Trail-Trailer-3.mp4

 

 

Filed Under: Artist Spotlight, ArtsEd, Press Releases, Program Spotlight Tagged With: African American Heritage Trail, African American history, Black history, Civil War, history, Norfolk Public Schools, Revolutionary War, slavery, storyteller, storytelling, teachering artist, Virginia history

New Stories from a Favorite A4L Storyteller

November 10, 2020 By Cindy Sherwood

She’s back, and we couldn’t be happier. After a three-year tour in England, Arts for Learning storyteller Sarah Osburn Brady returned to Virginia in August, her art and her connections to the storytelling community deepened by the experience.

Sarah and her family—daughters who are now eleven and eight and a pediatrician-husband whose transfer to Royal Air Force Lakenheath prompted the move to England—are now living in McLean, Virginia, forever changed by their time in the U.K. Sarah calls her three years there “a gift,” with highlights including being part of the Cambridge Storytellers group and “being able to travel and walk the landscape of so many stories, both historical and traditional, as well as literary stories.”

She believes her storytelling has changed, thanks to new insight she discovered while living abroad.

I think sometimes whenever we grow and change as people, it allows us to bring new things to our art form, and there’s something definitely that will make growth and change happen whenever you move to another country.”

Sarah first explored joining Young Audiences/Arts for Learning more than a decade ago while working as a professor of theater and communications at Hampton University. After the birth of her first child, she joined the roster, partnering with another acclaimed A4L storyteller, Sheila Arnold, with programs on the civil rights movement and two “women of freedom,” Harriet Tubman and Ellen Craft. Sarah also developed solo programs including Poetry and Jabberwockies, which celebrates the rhythm and rhyme of language through classic poems and nonsense words.

As both a performing artist and teaching artist, Sarah’s storytelling isn’t easy to characterize.

“I’m not a storyteller who tells just one type of stories. I tell historical, literary, and traditional stories, along with a smattering of personal stories and tall tales. I find that I do a lot of those different things. My style varies according to the story I’m telling, according to the needs of the program, according to the audience, all of those pieces.”

When she’s developing new programs, Sarah says there are some stories “that won’t let you go, that sit bubbling with you and then punch you in the shoulder until you let them out. Then there are other stories that, because we’re working artists, we get handed.” One of the stories she got “handed” in England was on Thomas Paine, the writer of Common Sense, after she was asked to create a special program about him for a festival. She wasn’t excited about it until she dug into months of research and discovered she found him “fascinating.”

Sarah tells stories related to Thomas Paine as part of a festival in Thetford, England.

“I often tell my husband that almost any subject, if you find the right way in, you can find that it’s fascinating,” Sarah says. “The first time I performed that program, there was a woman who came up to me and said, ‘I thought this was going to be boring, but you made it interesting.’ And that is part of my goal as a storyteller—to take whatever subject I’m telling stories about, whatever program I’m doing, and invite people in, even if they don’t think they’re going to be interested. It’s amazing to me how storytelling can help people be interested in ideas and clarify subjects that people thought they weren’t interested in or thought were confusing or thought were extra complex.”

Sarah previews a new choose-your-own adventure storytelling program on Zoom.

Being back at Arts for Learning in the middle of a pandemic means Sarah is developing programs that can work virtually. A new program, “More Than True: Folk and Fairy Tales with Character,” features a choose-your-own adventure approach that allows students to interact with her live and help decide character and plot details.

Sarah is also developing a new program focused on the stories of women who resisted tyranny during the world wars. We’ll share details soon!

Moving back to the United States during a pandemic hasn’t necessarily been easy for Sarah and her family, but she says there are good parts along with the difficult parts.

“One of the beautiful things is that Zoom and other platforms are allowing for there to be a comfort with and an ease of communication at a distance. So in some ways, it’s almost like we haven’t really moved because there’s regular contact with people in the UK and with the storytelling community there, so there are lots of good things.”

We’d call it 100 percent good for Arts for Learning to have Sarah back with us. Contact us at programs@Arts4LearningVA.org if you’re interested in booking one of Sarah’s programs, which you can explore by clicking here.  All are available in a virtual format.

Filed Under: Artist Spotlight, Arts Integration, ArtsEd, Virtual Learning, Virtual programming Tagged With: 757 arts, 757 nonprofit, performing artist, Sarah Osburn Brady, storyteller, storytelling, teaching artist, virtual learning, virtual programming

Covid-19: Hard Times and Hope for Arts for Learning

April 22, 2020 By Cindy Sherwood

Virginia’s stay-at-home order has changed all of our lives, in many different ways. For Arts for Learning, the impact has been profound.

For students who love our programs, there’s great disappointment. Sixth-grader Myla Stith can’t play the violin this spring because the Strings Impact program was canceled. “I was hoping I could get really good. After all these years, I wanted to show what I could do, so I’m pretty sad about it.”

The Rhythm and Me adaptive dance program was cut short for kids like Naomi Morgan, a fourth-grader with autism spectrum disorder. “She was getting the dance steps down, she was having a ball, she was having fun,” says her mother, Monica Morgan. “It was sad it ended so abruptly because she was really getting into it.”

It’s hard times for many artists on our roster too. “As a fulltime storyteller, with my backup job being substitute teaching, I’m completely out of work at this point,” says Via Goode, A4L teaching artist. Via is one of 38 teaching artists on our roster who are losing more than $42,000 in income because of program cancellations that have affected more than 16,000 students and 2,800 educators.

Strings Impact
Rhythm & Me
Teaching Artist, Via Goode

As a nonprofit organization, Arts for Learning is hurting. We don’t receive money from programs when schools are shut down. And that means we’ve lost tens of thousands of dollars that we need to keep our nonprofit afloat—money that we use to pay our artists and staff, our rent and electric bill, and everything else that keeps our business running.

Our artists and our staff have stepped up to create Take 10, new digital programming for home-schooling students that’s both fun and educational. It’s also a way for us to offer small amounts of pay to our participating artists. But here’s the problem—we don’t receive any money for producing Take 10. Since it brings in zero revenue to Arts for Learning, we can’t keep on doing it without new funding.

That’s why we need YOUR help. We want to keep providing arts education to Virginia’s kids, but we can’t do it alone. Any amount helps—will you give $10 to Take Ten? Use this link—all donations are tax deductible.

Filed Under: ArtsEd Tagged With: 757 arts, 757 nonprofit, arts education, Arts for Learning, arts integration, arts programs, arts-in-education, autism spectrum disorder, Covid-19, creative learning, dance, digital arts, Hampton City Schools, home-schooling, music, Newport News Public Schools, nonprofit, Norfolk Public Schools, pandemic, Portsmouth Public Schools, Rhythm and Me, storyteller, Strings Impact, Take 10, Take Ten, teaching artists, Via Goode, violins, Virginia Beach City Public Schools, Virginia stay-at-home order, virtual learning

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Main Office
Arts for Learning
420 North Center Drive
Suite 239
Norfolk, Virginia 23502

Phone: 757-466-7555

Main Office

Arts for Learning
420 North Center Drive
Suite 239
Norfolk, Virginia 23502
Phone:
757-466-7555

Arts for Learning Virginia Names New CEO to Lead Arts-in-Education Nonprofit

The Board of Directors of Arts for Learning, the Virginia Affiliate of Young Audiences, voted at its annual meeting to name Anna Heywood Green as CEO of the organization. Heywood Green has served as Interim CEO since January 1, following the retirement of former CEO Christine Everly. Prior to January, Heywood Green worked as the organization’s […]

Join the A4L Mailing List!

Sign up to receive the latest news on arts integration from Arts for Learning! Thank you for supporting arts-in-education.

Select list(s) to subscribe to


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: Arts for Learning Virginia. You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact
At Arts for Learning Virginia, we’re proud to be part of the Virginia Commission for the Arts’ Passport Program. While Passport holders typically receive free admission and 50% off classes at participating organizations, all our programming is always free—no discount needed. To learn more about our public events, check out our calendar of events page here.

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