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| Recent and Current Projects |
Since receiving our non-for-profit status, we have spent time building and nurturing our connections with the
elders, both at Albany Senior Center and the Hattie Carthan Community.
We have become members of Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre's Artists Building Community collaborative and begun work on collecting and interpreting a
community's reaction to the changes brought on by gentrification in Central Brooklyn. Our goal with this work is to eventually create a performance
piece that represents the views of those who are experiencing these changes first hand, giving an outlet to their thoughts, feelings and concerns.
Visit our Intergenerational Panels and our Informational Videos
Our oral history project, "Preserving the Past; Exploring the Future: an intergenerational oral history project" begun during the winter of 2006 has
become the focus of our six-week summer program. We see this work as a community and relationship building activity; an opportunity for youth and
elders to hear each other's stories and to develop an artistic expression of the common themes and emotions that tie our myriad lives and diverse
experiences together.
We are seeking financial support to continue this work as we feel it is a deep well of inspiration and a vehicle for representing the voices of the
underrepresented.
Bailey's Café Intergenerational Oral History Project
Begun in January 2006, our Intergenerational Oral History Project is a work in progress, which we
see evolving over the next year. The full title of the project as originally conceived is: Preserving the Past: Exploring the Future: an
Intergenerational Oral History Project. The basic goals are to build community, build relationships and learn about the history of Central Brooklyn,
especially the neighborhoods of Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, where Bailey's does most of its work. This summer we ran a six-week program
which included ten young people ranging in age from fifteen to nineteen and the elders (about twenty-five participated during the summer) at the
Albany Senior Center. The summer program focused on the connections between the generations as we collected our own stories, the stories of the youth
and the elders looking for common threads.
We began the program by allowing each young person the opportunity to share intimately the important aspects of their life, using artifacts as props
for their story. Everyone had as much time as they needed as well as additional time for a Q & A. This enabled us, the core group of youth, and the
two adult supervisors-Stefanie Siegel, President of Bailey's and Kymbali Craig, Creative Director, to form a bond and gain a deeper understanding of
each person's personality quickly. The elders, on the other hand, were interviewed by the young people after we brainstormed some pivotal, open-ended
questions which would help focus their stories.
During this process of storytelling, the young people in particular were forced to a certain extent to take on some deep reflective work and to reveal
some aspects of their lives that were painful and not fully understood but a significant part of the self they were struggling to become. The elders'
stories in contrast were fuller (due obviously to their age and longevity) and more varied. This process underlined an important aspect of our
project-everyone's story matters in building the oral history-we all have something to learn and something to teach.
The youth received transportation, lunch and a weekly stipend. The young people took part in a number of workshops on health and nutrition at the
Hattie Carthan Community Garden, where Bailey's has a plot. We also exposed the youth and some of the elders to theatre events that were similar in
nature-directly and indirectly-to the concept we were moving toward for our final performance piece. The final performance was a collage of original
music and song; a video montage of the interviews and historical footage as well as original photographs from New Orleans as one of our youth was able
to spend a week early in July, where he continued to collect the stores of people he met while assisting with the clean up from Hurricane Katrina-an
experience he turned into a narrative which we in turn transformed into a theatre piece. The performance also included original poetry from both
youth and elders, a tribute to the power of family or lack there of and a talk show spoof called "New Skool, Old Skool"-which highlighted changes (and
connections) between the music, dance, fashion, and language of our differing generations.
The goal is to continue to expand and enhance this work, bringing in the voices of more youth and elders and strengthening the technical and artistic
aspects of the piece. The process of building the piece is as important as the performance. The youth gained new confidence, and a deeper
understanding of themselves, they learned to look at elders in a new light and to take on the challenge of sharing their thoughts and feelings through
their daily reflective writing assignments. Moreover we all had to learn how to be open to each other's viewpoints and to respect others' opinions
even if we didn't agree. Meanwhile, many of us were learning how to use improvisation and other acting techniques for the first time as well as
creating self-portraits, conducting interviews, writing music, poetry and lyrics. The elders took part in our rhythm circles, shared their views on
hip hop culture, and created their own self-portraits and poems. They learned to see young people in a new way: to see them as individuals not
stereotypes, worthy of their respect; further, that there is reciprocity to their relationship-each one teach one.
February 2007, Motherless/Fatherless
Child-based on the life of Ms. Dora Davis was performed at Abrons Art Center at Henry Street Settlement House,
opening for Progress Theater's Peaches. See attached news article. Under the direction of Kymbali Craig, our Creative Director, twelve young people
reenacted a small snippet of Ms. Dora's life growing up as a sharecropper's child in North Carolina. We went on to perform this work at the Jackie
Robinson Center in Harlem, the Albany Senior Center and Von King Park.
Spring 2007, Bearing Witness: Faces of War
through a collaboration with Elders Share the Arts, we piloted "Bearing Witness: Faces of War" a series of conversations where youth and
veterans had the opportunity to share their stories and assumptions about military life and war. This project later became part of our larger oral
history project, as the young people involved created, with the guidance of Kymbali Craig, a composite improvisational piece from the Vietnam Veterans
stories. By sharing their individual histories they created a shared history.
The oral history project remains a work in progress. We are pursing funding so that we can expand the connections and build deeper relationships
between the youth and elders, creating multimedia performances that share with our community that significance of this connection. Please support our
groundbreaking and compelling work.
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