A NEW GENERATION TAKES THE TORCH

by Laura Gale, Lift Every Voice Program Director

The theatre can be a meeting place for all generations and for people from all walks of life. But many young people today, particularly young people from underprivileged backgrounds, don't feel connected to the theatre and don't feel it has anything to say about their experiences of life. For the theatre to flourish tomorrow, we need to transform it today, paving the way for a new and revitalized theatre that reaches out to young people beyond the arts community and engages a new audience. It is today's generation of emerging theatre professionals that must take on this responsibility in order to expand and reinvent the theatre audience and to ultimately ensure the continued life of our art form.

In February 2004, a group of early career theatre professionals stepped up to take the torch, launching Lift Every Voice, an innovative new arts education program committed to using theatre to reach out to New York City's young people. Lift Every Voice works with arts organizations and public high schools to offer underprivileged New York teens the opportunity to collaborate with theatre professionals to write, direct and perform an evening of short plays about their lives and experiences. This unforgettable and empowering experience provides the at-risk high school students who participate with a personal connection to and sense of affiliation with the theatre and enables them to envision themselves, perhaps for the first time, as capable of bright and successful futures.

The Lift Every Voice process is based on the format used for 24-hour play festivals: Participating students and staff members submit five-minute plays on an assigned topic, our Reading Committee then selects ten plays that are rehearsed during an exciting and intensive one day workshop and are performed at an Off-Broadway theatre that same evening.

The program produces extraordinary results for several reasons. Because the performance workshop, which can stand on its own or serve as the culminating event for a longer-term Lift Every Voice theatre training program, takes place over the course of a single day, 100% of the students who begin the process complete it. As a result, each and every participant is provided with rapid access to an experience of completion, success and empowerment. Because the students are truly challenged by the seemingly impossible task of preparing ten plays for performance in a single day, the fact that they ultimately achieve this goal provides them with a profound sense of accomplishment and dignity, which awakens them to their own potential. This extraordinary transformation is witnessed by the audience, the students' family, friends and community members who have attended the performance, allowing the experience to have a lasting impact in the students' lives and communities.

Another unique component of the process is that Lift Every Voice staff members collaborate directly with the students. Performance events include plays written by both students and staff. Each student director is paired with an assistant director from the staff and each play's cast combines both student and professional (staff) actors.  This intergenerational collaboration is one of the keys to the program's success, as it allows students to work hand in hand with adult theatre professionals, who approach them as equal creative partners.

Proceeds from each Lift Every Voice performance are donated to a charitable organization selected by the student participants prior to the event. Free Arts for Abused Children, The Ronald McDonald House, The Children's Hope Foundation and Greenwich House are some of the wonderful organizations that have been recipients of the thousands of dollars our students have raised and donated during recent programs.

The impact of the Lift Every Voice experience on both students and staff members is clear. Students develop communication and leadership skills and dramatically enhance their confidence and creative self-expression. They transcend what they believe to be their limitations and gain increased self-respect, courage and ambition. They find themselves willing to take greater risks and willing to strive for success. In short, they dare to dream.

 The impact on the emerging professional actors, directors, playwrights and theatre educators who serve as Lift Every Voice staff members is equally powerful. To offer up one's skills and talents in order to empower another is a great act of service and requires setting aside the ego entirely. Lift Every Voice is a process-based program and trains staff members to focus on providing students with an experience of success, rather than focusing on their own desire to create a sleek and impressive theatrical product. Because of this approach and these unique demands, Lift Every Voice trains theatre artists in leadership and humility and reawakens them to the inspiring, rejuvenating and transformative power of theatre.

Lift Every Voice is run by New York Theatre Experiment (NYTE), a company founded in 2004 to establish a creative home for emerging leaders in the American theatre. We at NYTE are proud to take the torch and to do our part to ensure that the theatre will flourish under our generation's leadership. We recognize the need to cultivate tomorrow's theatre audience and will continue to use theatre to inspire and reach out to young people. Additionally, we will produce and create professional work that speaks to the human experience, rather than to members of only one age group or socio-economic background, demonstrating that theatre continues to hold an important place in our society and offers a powerful venue for social, cultural and emotional exchange.