Back from Detroit!

Wow!...

What an experience we had sharing the Arts with Detroit Youth! I've been back now for a couple days and have only recently been able to piece together some of the amazing experiences shared with my fellow Juilliardians during this trip.

I was one of a group of four students part of Detroit Arts Immersion 2009. It's the beginning of an ongoing program that we hope to build upon every year to impact the youth of Detroit. Our target focus was a group of young men and women at Holy Cross Day Treatment Center. We taught 6-10 girls in the morning for 2 hours and then in the afternoon 6-10 boys, all ranging from 13-18. Our goal with both groups was to allow them to create their own final performance using elements of music, dance and drama which we as students all represented. Nate and myself are both actors, and then Allie who plays the flute was our musical contingent. Finally, Bree (the organizer of the program) is a dancer. With specialized group exercises, we found ways to open up the students as we found the most difficult thing to gain before collaboration was their trust. Fortunately, there were days of hope where some student would really be excited by what we were teaching. And if you were lucky, you would see them laugh or smile...free in that moment to be the child that many of them had never had the chance to be.

While we played movement and creative exploration games with the kids, I found one of their biggest challenges was focus and patience. I'm definitely a generation older than all of these kids, and what has become very clear to me is that children seem to be losing the ability to focus. Not to take too much of a turn here, but while working with these kids I found myself saddened by the thought that most of them are probably used to spending a lot of time watching t.v. or playing online...they are a part of this "instant gratification/constant stimuli" generation of youth that has lost touch with human contact and what it means to trust someone. Also, this demographic of youth had had some very difficult childhood experiences. Many of them were headed to or on their way from juvenile hall. Lots of them had mothers that had them at 14 or 15 with no resources , and a surprisingly high number of them were severely medicated. Many of these medicated kids could barely focus their eyes , much less stay awake during class. the medication was often for depression or anxiety, but in my mind, I was so concerned with their past and the thought they most of them had no one who cared for them. They were just tossed aside into this facility and offered no hope for their future,. And sadly the medication wasn't helping, it only made matters worse...deadening their spirits making them seem like walking child zombies. Heartbreaking.

To see these children and to know what they had experienced, especially the young girls it made me that much happier when they did choose to engage! It was amazing to see them fight past the anger, hurt, or even the medication to put their all in to an exercise or game. And often at the end of the day, one of the students would be surprised to hear that we were returning the very next day to continue working with them.

At the end of the week, the girls did their own sharing of work that we'd learned over the course of the week together. The boys were a bit more shy, but I'd still say that we made big strides with both groups. So much so, that by the end of the week, some of them wanted to give us their numbers and to be sure to stay in touch. It was really beautiful to see them all really come full circle in so many ways.

It's truly amazing to see how Art really can change lives. I believe what were able to give those students at Holy Cross was something they could believe in when others may have let them down. At Juilliard we speak so much about Artists as Citizens, as Leaders, as people who can affect change in the community around them. That week I knew, as well as the rest of my group, what it meant to change lives, even in the smallest of ways!