High school students, parents, staff, college students, board members and special guests all enjoyed an amazing Saturday at BCAL.
It was the BCCP’s 3rd annual Open House. This year the goal was to have guests experience a typical BCAL Saturday. Six artists offered workshops ranging from electronic music to fashion to culinary arts to drawing, photography and product design. BCAL student ambassadors took guests on tours of the space, answered questions and talked about their experiences at BCAL and with BCCP in general.
Steve Ausbury, BCCP’s Program Director spoke eloquently about the philosophy and practice that drive the organization and result in teens feeling respected and heard in a supportive environment in which they can explore their interests and try their hand at a wide range of artistic endeavors.
Guests who had not been in the space since BCCP first took it over 5 years ago were amazed at the transformation from dreary old gymnasium to vibrant teen friendly arts and technology center.
The range of people who attended the Open House was as diverse as the workshops offered. They came from as far away as Larchmont,
Guests were heard to remark on the fact that so many students would choose to come to BCAL on such a beautiful spring day.
All in all it was an extremely successful experience for everyone involved.
A student focuses on her fashion project.
Fun in the illustration workshop
A self-portrait for the photography workshop.
Preparing spring rolls in the Cooking workshop.
This is the inaugural year for the program at the Erasmus campus. April Centrone, lead teaching instructor for the educational workshop program, hopes to build on the musical and cultural knowledge gained through this program by bringing the students and their parents to a world music concert following the last workshop.
The students sit in a semi-circle around the performers as Centrone introduces Bassam Saba, a musician originally from Lebanon, who begins to strum on the Oud, an instrument he describes as “the ancestor of the guitar”. The song he plays is an introduction to this week’s lesson, Music of the Arab World. Centrone joins him on the riq, a tambourine-like instrument, and it is not long before audience members begin to nod their heads in rhythm with the beat Centrone slaps out on the riq.
The whimsical beginning gives way to an hour and a half in which the cultural nuances of Arabic music are explored through a set of mini-lessons on universal musical concepts.
Centrone builds on the concept of rhythm, explored in a previous workshop, by having the audience stomp out rhythmic patterns common in Arabic music. Saba explains the role of the beat, likening musical rhythm to a “heartbeat”.
Saba continues with the concepts, playing songs to demonstrate ornamentation – in which musicians interpret a song by adding their own chords and notes -- and improvisation.
For the next section, Saba switches to a new instrument, a bamboo pipe resembling a flute called the nay, used by civilizations that date as far back as the ancient Egyptians. Saba recounts the legend of the nay, said to have been discovered by a young shepherd who heard music passing through reeds on a windy day.
Arabic music, Saba explains, is used to “paint a picture with song”. Songs are often associated to specific times of day or particular events. Angling the Nay, Saba breathes in and begins a song, lilting and carefree. He asks the audience what they imagined as they listened. “Feels like a celebration,” is one response.
This week students discovered music played on instruments with a long historical lineage, used to evoke a world of camel caravans crossing through a desert, of suns setting on wedding celebrations that extend long into the night, of songs in which every component has its own unique name and purpose in the place of the composition.
For some, this uncommon musical education has a practical purpose. Mohammad, 16, has attended all three workshops so far. A guitar player, he was originally drawn to the workshops for the opportunity they allow him to learn new musical styles. Today’s workshop has inspired him to learn more about the music of the Middle East so that he can incorporate it into his guitar playing.
While students may have never previously sat down and knowingly listened to a piece of Arabic music, the global intermixing of cultures ensured that it wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar experience. “I heard it [Arabic music] in movies and video games,” says Mohammad, “now I know where it comes from”.
For 10 years, the Independence Community Foundation has made donations to some of the most renown nonprofit organizations in New York. They work with institutions throughout the city, each with its own plans for community development. A grant from ICF can make all kinds of things possible, especially for young people: They can provide them with afterschool programs, give them information on colleges and universities, or even help them appreciate the arts.
The BCCP does all of those. Helping students from eight different high school campuses isn’t always easy, but the BCCP now has the support it needs to continue. Its chief operating officer, Diane Reiser, announced that the IFC has donated $20,000 to the BCCP. “We’re very excited,” says Diane, “and we’re very grateful to them.”
ICF made their decision after visiting the Brooklyn College Art Lab in October. “They liked the atmosphere at BCAL,” says Diane. “They liked the program a lot.”
But most importantly, what everyone from ICF admired about BCAL was the role it plays in the community: “Mostly what they were excited about is that we work with students in Brooklyn.”
She hopes the grant can make the BCAL experience even richer for students and staff. It’s a big help, especially for site director Denise Paige. “We’re going to hire another fulltime person to work with Denise…some additional artists to work during the day,” says Diane.
Apart from their work with BCAL, ICF helps out a few other organizations on campus. “They help support the performing arts center at Brooklyn College,” Diane explains. “They are very well-known for funding things in Brooklyn.”
Organizations like BCAL are more important than ever, especially at a time when arts programs are fading in schools across America. Without the support of foundations like ICF, none of the things we have at BCAL would be possible. Fortunately for us, it doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere for a very long time.
To learn more about the Independence Community Foundation, visit ifcny.org
The Project Peace Video Club is one of the most popular programs on the Bushwick campus, and also one of its most personal. Through their online blog, students make their voices heard on the issues that affect them the most: When fellow student Jasmine Colon lost a friend to gang violence, she told them her story in an emotional interview.
It’s important for students to respond and deal with problems that matter to them, but it’s also important to learn from the stories of others. They took on one of the nation’s biggest problems last month, when they filmed a PSA about violence in juvenile detention facilities – a sad truth for young men and women behind bars. Minors in juvenile hall are in danger of abused and beaten…sometimes to death.
Many may feel it’s a lost cause, but it’s one that must be addressed. “We decided to come together as a group and make a PSA” says Clarisa James, who collaborates with students on various projects. “There was a sense of accomplishment – they used their skills towards something positive.”
But for all their skills and accomplishments, they knew they would need some help. They found it at Each One Teach One, a program to train youth to be come advocates for youth in juvenile detention centers.“Through their program, youths learn about the injustices in juvenile detention centers,” says Clarisa. “They became advocates for teenagers that can’t speak for themselves.”
They staged a mock press conference about a fictional attack in a correctional facility – a 14-year-old was killed when he got into a fight with another teenager. With better security, it might’ve been avoided.
They also simulated a protest rally in response to the teenager’s death. “It was very important for them,” says Clarisa, “because they were not aware of the bureaucracy in juvenile detention centers.”
Afterwards, some students got to say a few words about what they learned that day. Juasheena Gilot said that she was emotionally moved by everything she had seen: “Each One Teach One has taught me that I have a voice to speak up for those who can’t.” She was clearly proud of what they had accomplished.
To learn more about the Project Peace Video Club, visit bccp.wordpress.com
Where is it written that art can’t be fun? For everyone in the BCCP after-school program at Bushwick High School, art provides an outlet for creative expression: Some students might produce hip-hop jams on the computer, others might capture the rugged cityscape in a colorful drawing.
There’s a lot more to the program than that, though. Every weekday afternoon from 3 to 6, students come here to play games, study for tests and work on activities together. Everything here feels remarkable in its own unique way – it would be hard to think of another place where you can find teenagers listening to Jay-Z and debating over chess moves at the same time.
Ivan Katz, a percussionist who works in the music production lab, says that “the best way to teach yourself is to experiment and mess around.” Everyone here seems to think so: They’ve been using computers, keyboards and microphones all semester to record their own music. Using software programs like Reason, they can add eccentric sound effects to give their music more quality and depth.
Students like Ishmael Forde work hard on their music, but he says that coming here can “make the school a little more fun.”
After spending some time in the music production lab, students can try their hand at painting and sketching with Andres Martinez, a teaching artist whose fingers are usually dripping with paint.
“They’d never gone out and drawn from real life,” he says. “They’d never drawn another person, except maybe themselves in a mirror…I was able to teach them that, which I felt pretty good about.”
Although everyone says they admire his artwork, Andres seems to admire theirs even more, and he encourages students here to find themselves. Was it Picasso who once said “I do not seek. I find”? Maybe he was onto something.
“It was difficult to get everything through customs,” says Thorsten Baensch of “Kitchen – La Cuisine Transportable,” a conceptual art project from Belgium. “We have almost 1,600 recipes now.”
Some of the recipes he and cofounder Christine Dupuis collect from people all over the world are pinned to the walls of a bizarre cardboard construction, a traveling kitchen they’ve taken everywhere from Manhattan to Munich. When they came to the Brooklyn College Art Lab in November, they made sure to save some room for new recipes. “They had a very nice setup,” said BCAL site coordinator Maresa Decena. “I’ve never seen anybody build a kitchen before.”
“We get simple recipes, we get elaborated recipes – it depends on the person,” says Thorsten. “In every country it’s different.”
Even the simple recipes have their own delightful mystique. When everyone at BCAL heard they were having soup for lunch, they probably expected something minor – peas and carrots or tomato. They were wrong: Thorsten was making squash soup, a foreign recipe he’d brought with him to America.
“Some of the students didn’t want to try it because they were wary of squash,” Maresa said, “but then they tried it – and they enjoyed it.”
Before long, Thorsten and Christine were serving a slew of curious teenagers, most of whom even came back afterwards for a snack at the dessert table.
Thorsten and Christine’s recipes are deliciously inventive: They turn their favorite foods into unique art, like a chain of bananas with numbers on them. Thorsten says that he and Christine try different ideas for almost every performance. “Once,” he remembered, “we did something with chocolate letters.” (Thorsten even pinned some of the letters to the wall so everyone could admire them, although he was nice enough to let people eat most of them afterwards.)
Since Thorsten and Christine created “Kitchen” in 2001, they’ve discovered enough recipes to fill five cookbooks, which were added to private libraries all over the world. They visited BCAL to get some ideas for the sixth, along with other local schools and galleries like the New York Public Library, New York University and the Goethe-Institut. They’re only going to a handful of places this fall (Malaysia and Singapore among them), but that should be enough to satisfy Thorsten: “Everybody has a recipe,” he says. “We almost use everything.”
Although everybody at BCAL had fun decorating the kitchen with drawings and pictures, Thorsten says the idea behind the project is to turn his recipes into a cultural experience: “It’s a social project, and exchange is at its center,” he says. “It’s the exchange that counts.”
To learn more about “Kitchen – La Cuisine Transportable,” visit www.kitchen-project.be/blog
BCCP has been buzzing this Spring with youth-oriented events galore. First, the Wingate Strings Project participated in the S.O.U.L. (String Outreach for Understanding and Learning) Strings Concert on Friday, April 27th. S.O.U.L. is comprised of 15 string teachers and 300 students from New York City public schools. Over 800 elementary school children attended the event. "This was the first time we've ever hosted something of this magnitude," said Dawn Nelson, Program Coordinator at Wingate Campus, who helped coordinate the event with Site Director Denise Paige, "Now we can create a program that is bigger and better for the future."
The next day BCAL hosted the T.A.S.C. (The After School Corporation) Youth Expo, which was organized by Allan Villavisar, Site Director of Bushwick Campus. The Expo was attended by students from all BCCP sites as well as MLK Jr. High School Campus, Monroe High School Campus, Flushing High School, and The Rennaissance Charter School. The six-hour event showcased student artwork, had 7 different workshops, ran a basketball tournament (halftime performances included), and provided lunch for all attendees. "I loved the opportunity to have all the boroughs represented in one place," said Villavisar, "all the kids had a great time and they were all asking when it was going to happen again."
The following weekend Denise Paige, Uni Lee and David Goodman worked together to put on a special BCAL Saturday for students and parents. Family Fun Day gave parents a chance to experience what their children do every weekends. In addition to the regularly scheduled workshops, there were special workshops for families to enjoy together. "I'm glad that students felt comfortable with bringing their families with them," said Lee, the BCAL Saturdays coordinator, "this sense of community is an extension of our mission."