Community

Arts Blitz

This multi-arts collaboration between Ballet Austin, Pollyanna Theatre Company, PHOENIX Center for Art & Soul, and the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum, provides free arts workshops for teachers and students, and interactive performances to school campuses. This season's collaboration is The Monologue Project. The goal of The Monologue Project is to strengthen our community by bringing together some of Austin’s most active arts organizations in a partnership with secondary schools to address the issues of on-campus bullying and intolerance.

The Monologue Project will use a multi-form residency format to gather the personal stories of a diverse group of fifth through ninth grade students from Austin and surrounding areas. Once complete, these stories will be compiled as a series of danced and spoken monologues that will be presented for middle school students in conjunction with literature and arts workshops. The entire process will be filmed and edited into a documentary.

The arts can be a powerful resource in character education by opening dialogue and affecting shifts in perspective. This project will provide a supportive environment in which students will be encouraged to celebrate the unique, honor diversity, seek common ground and initiate connections. The multi-arts nature of the curriculum combined with on-campus delivery ensures that both time and resources are maximized. Through lesson plans grounded in language arts objectives, students will participate in theater, visual arts and movement curriculum in the context of a single project.