Fantastic Participant Survey Results
Here are some fantastic numbers from our recent participant surveys. These responses are an aggregate of Outside In and Hillcrest participants. These impressive metrics show that we’re on the right path.
1. This workshop helped me feel more confident to speak in front of other people.
2. I learned that being “fit and well” can improve most situations.
3. I felt safe to perform the games and was able to suspend judgement of myself and others.
4. If given the chance, I would participate in more workshops like this.
Nicholas Kessler
Education Director, Super Project Lab
SPL and Outside In’s Guerilla Theater!
Sunday, July 11th, 7:00 PM (Doors at 6:30 PM)
Super Project Lab and Outside In’s Guerilla Theater Project
Please join Super Project Lab and Outside In’s – Guerilla Theater Project for a fabulous night of camaraderie and courage! This show features participants from a class that SPL has been teaching at Outside In. The students will perform an opening set for SPL’s professional improv performers. It’s a great opportunity for us to showcase the work we are doing in our community and celebrate the hard work and courage of the kids from Guerilla Theater.
Super Project Lab performers will include Shelley Darcy and Matt Tabora-Roberts with special guests Nicholas Kessler, Daryl Olson, Heberto Espinosa and Ritah Parrish!
7:00 PM
The Brody Theater
16 NW Broadway, Portland, OR 503.224.2227
Directions to the Theater
Tickets $10.00 ($7.00 for students) – Purchase tickets at the door or online
Buy Tickets Here!
SPL Receives Grant From MCCC!
Congratulations SPL! Our first grant has been awarded by the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition!
Super Project Lab received notification on June 25th that we are the recipient of a $1500 grant awarded by the MCCC.
This grant will provide funding for a six-week workshop that proved highly successful last April with the Guerrilla Theater Project, Outside In’s in-house cultural group that uses art to inspire Portland’s homeless youth. SPL will teach a two-hour improv theater class once a week for five weeks. Two instructors will use the ten hours of class time to teach basic improv games that promote self-confidence, listening, teamwork, positive attitude and trust. On the sixth week of the workshop, the participants will perform on stage in front of a live audience alongside the professional improvisers that make up Super Project Lab’s performance ensemble.
This program was a big success in its pilot phase. Outside In’s Nili Yosha comments, “The program has been extremely successful. The youth looked forward to the weekly sessions which provided a positive and stable energetic outlet and the opportunity, at the end of the unit, to showcase their skills to the community.”
In its notification letter MCCC said, “We received 84 applications for Cultural Participation Grants. Each proposal was evaluated on the basis of the criteria outlined in the CCP guidelines. We believe the proposals selected for funding, including yours, meet the criteria very well.”
SPL will begin the program in September 2010.
Shelley Darcy
Executive Director, Super Project Lab
‘Outside In’ Presents ‘Guerrilla Theatre’
Sunday, April 25th: Spring Cleaning
Super Project Lab presents ‘Spring Cleaning’!
The show begins with a special opening performance of Guerrilla Theatre, a youth art group from Outside In. Don’t miss it!
Help inspire the evening’s improv and support the valuable work of Goodwill Industries at the same time. Bring an under-used object or article of clothing to the show; after the show we’ll donate your item to Goodwill.
Special guests: Shelley McLendon and Nicholas Kessler of the The Liberators.
Announcing Two New Pilot Programs!
Super Project Lab is happy to announce that is has two new partners in 2010. On March 21st we will begin a six week improv program with Outside In’s Guerilla Theater Project. Outside In is a social service agency dedicated to serving low-income adults and homeless youth. The Guerilla Theater Project is helping develop a team of peer educators who will raise AIDS and HIV awareness for youth on the streets of Portland. We will use the tools of improv theater to help equip these youth with the self-confidence they will need to accomplish this mission.
We have also signed on to run a four week pilot program with Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility in Salem. Hillcrest serves males, 12- 25 years old who are in custody of the Oregon Youth Authority. We have been asked to work in the intake program facility to help prepare the boys to work effectively in a group dynamic. We will use improv practices to help equip them with collaboration skills they will need to be successful at Hillcrest.
We will continue to forge new partnerships throughout the year and report back on our successes so keep checking in for updates!
Shelley Darcy
Executive Director
SPL Welcomes AIN to Portland
We’d like to extend a huge improv welcome to the attendees of the 2009 Applied Improv Network conference being held at McMenamins Edgefield.
We couldn’t be more pleased to have these attendees at our show on November 14th . They are an amazingly diverse group of people from all over the world who use improv in some capacity in their work and personal lives.
We are excited to be launching SPL’s education outreach program in front of an audience who really understands the value proposition of improv!
For more information on AIN and how to get involved please visit http://appliedimprov.ning.com/
School Founded by Blue Man Group
BLUE SCHOOL | THE BLUE MAN GROUP | blue paint | Matt Goldman
The ABCs of F-U-N
by Larry Dobrow
A school founded by the Blue Man Group turns learning into child’s play.
A PERFORMANCE BY THE BLUE MAN GROUP employs screens, projections, oddball props, and, most famously, buckets of blue paint. There are satiric commentaries on science and technology, always wordless and usually set to an irregular percussive heartbeat. Shaving cream and the remote propulsion thereof often figure prominently in the proceedings.
So it comes as a surprise to learn that the project currently capturing the group’s imagination has less to do with pulsating fractals and more to do with basic fractions. In September 2008, the three Blue Men — Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink — partnered with a trio of education and developmental experts to open Blue School, a New York charter school for 62 prekindergarten and kindergarten children located on the second floor of a new building in Manhattan’s East Village.
The school prioritizes student-led inquiry over rote learning, face-to-face conflict resolution over time-outs in the corner. Its lofty goal, as outlined in the school’s mission statement, is “to cultivate creative, joyful, and compassionate inquirers who use courageous and innovative thinking to build a harmonious and sustainable world.”
This may sound a touch hippie-dippy-ish to some, especially those weaned on neatly aligned rows of desks and reading/writing/arithmetic curricula. And it’s not like the Blue School comes cheap: A year’s tuition costs $27,300 for the elementary school, while the preschool program ranges from $4,200 to $14,700. But any and all skepticism about the school’s style melts away when you’re amid its gaggle of students, who on this bright Friday are knee-deep in some serious learning about pirates.
Today, the four-year-olds will learn how to sequence the letters of the alphabet through an endeavor involving treasure maps. All will create pirate ships of their own, including one with a wonderfully makeshift plank forged from a pair of chopsticks. Later, the ships will be waterproofed and then launched armada-style during what teacher Dina Hamaoui calls “a big yahoo in the park.”
In the afternoon, the students will log some restorative minutes in the therapeutic sand area. They’ll gab via the colored, illuminated speaking tubes that snake from one end of the building to the other along the ceiling. Perhaps they’ll do some yoga in the padded world o’ whimsy that is the Wonder Room, which boasts a small rock wall and the type of light-up floor commonly associated with discos. And they’ll do it all with a curious glint in their eyes that is rarely seen nowadays outside the presence of a Harry Potter tome or a Wii.
“It’s important to me that they learn the alphabet,” says Brad Choyt, the head of school. “But it’s just as important to me how they learn it.” (He says this, of course, as we sit on chairs sized for three-year-olds.)
The idea for the Blue School arose when Goldman, Stanton, and Wink began having kids of their own. While they weren’t actively displeased with the existing options for preschoolers, they weren’t blown away by them either. The problem, they thought, was that classroom strategies and curricula hadn’t kept up-to-date with recent learnings in everything from philosophy to neuroscience.
As Renee Rollieri, a Blue School cofounder, a visual artist and arts therapist, and the mom of a student, puts it, “We became parents and we saw what was out there, but nobody was paying enough attention to social and emotional learning. None of the schools prioritized the way people treat each other. Education, especially now, needs to be responsive to the culture we’re in.”
Goldman condenses the thinking behind the Blue School more succinctly, saying, “It was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea. What if school were fun?’ ”
THE BLUE SCHOOL started as a 12-child playgroup but morphed into something more formal once the founders realized that their creative/collaborative approach to learning resonated with both kids and their parents. They did, as Goldman admits, recognize that “perception could be a bit of an uphill battle” and that “some people are more comfortable with a certain model.” So in true Blue Man form — Goldman and his partners remain active students of everything from film to vaudeville — the founders set about refining their ideas with a number of education and child- development experts. The participation of and endorsements from individuals like creativity guru Sir Ken Robinson, psychologist Larry Cohen, and neuroscientist David Rock did much to quell any doubts. One school year in, the Blue School is an associate member of the National Association of Independent Schools.
Parents? Either they get it or they don’t. “If there are 60 people in the room when we give a talk, 20 tune out when we admit that our strategy isn’t to get their son or daughter into an Ivy League school,” Goldman cracks. Nonetheless, parents are encouraged to be active participants in most Blue School programming. “I know every name of every parent and sibling,” chirps teacher Mara Pauker proudly.
Along those lines, the Blue School is all about involvement, especially when it comes to fostering students’ budding entrepreneurial instincts. “There was a sense when I was going to school in the ’60s that you could actually learn all of American history, but we can’t just teach kids facts anymore,” Goldman says. “The amount of information on this planet is doubling every two or three years. The best thing you can do is teach kids how to learn on their own about the things they want to learn.”
Choyt agrees. “Look at how the workforce is evolving — the jobs that our students will have, they don’t exist yet. They’ll be using technologies that don’t exist yet,” he explains. “What we want to do is give them the tools they’ll need. We want to install a love of learning and the ability to do collaborative problem solving.”
So while the children are treated to elements of a traditional curriculum, they also spend time adjusting their placements on the school’s feeling grid (as of 11:20 this morning, five identify themselves as happy, one as silly, and none as either angry or tired) and sorting out their set-tos on the peace bench (which came in handy in September, when school resumed and a few of the children were having transition issues).
Clearly a different set of rules is implemented here. If there’s a child-size desk in the building, it’s kept well hidden. Most visitors traipse to and fro without shoes. And while the Blue School displays its students’ handiwork as proudly as does any other school, it doesn’t hide the evidence when the finished product is slightly disturbing — like the contribution of Zachary, four, to the school’s “Dream Catcher” exhibit: “My family turned to blood.”
“If there’s a conflict, we don’t deny what’s going on,” says communication coordinator Ashley Hughes. “We give them the tools to deal with it. I’m not sure we give children enough credit for their ability to express how they’re feeling.”
The Blue School added a first-grade class in September, which jumped overall enrollment to 90, and hopes to expand by one grade per year. Rollieri wants to see the school move toward what she calls an “open-source” entity, one whose genetic code can be accessed and incorporated by public schools, charter schools, and anyone else.
The main challenge, predictably enough for an organization based in New York City, is real estate: Next year, some children will relocate to another building a few blocks away. Also, Goldman bemoans the school’s quick growth spurt, especially since he and the other founders had hoped to, in his words, “transcend the crazy anxiety” felt by NYC-area parents attempting to place their young children in the best possible institutions. “Sadly, we’ve become the thing we were rebelling against, with 200 kids for 15 open spaces,” he says.
At the same time, the 30-odd kids present on this April day seem genuinely thrilled with the process of learning. They might go home with dirt on their socks or traces of shaving cream on their shirts (yes, that Blue Man staple has found its way into the classroom). But there will almost certainly be smiles on their faces.
Welcome to our new Website!
SUPER PROJECT LAB LEARNING IS OFF AND RUNNING!
Super Project Lab hit the ground running in July 2009. Our first pilot project was a partnership with Girl Scouts of Oregon and SW Washington’s Girl Scouts Beyond Bars Program (http://www.girlscoutsosw.org/cms/programs/specialPrograms/gsbb.aspx ). Shelley Darcy, Executive Director of SPL Learning taught a two hour session at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville with ten female inmates and their daughters who ranged in age from five to fifteen years old. The program was designed use to improv theater tools to allow the mothers and daughters to interact in a new way under extremely stressful conditions. The results were beyond what we could have imagined. By the end of the session, the mothers and daughters were thoroughly enjoying the games and having fun and laughing together. “It was an incredibly rewarding experience and I can’t wait to go back,” said Shelley of her first project. GSBB has asked SPL Learning to come back for another session in October of 2009.
Our next endeavor is a partnership with the Boys and Girls Aid Pettygrove Residential Program which is a group home facility serving young women, 14-17 years of age in Oregon Youth Authority custody. This 5 week Communication training will start in September and run through October of 2009. The program director of Pettygrove is excited about the approach and thinks it will really resonate with the girls.
SPL Learning is also in talks with the program director of Beaumont SUN Community School to work with 7th and 8th graders around “Transitions”. This program is slated to start in the fall of 09. Stay tuned for more information.
We feel very lucky to have had such an immediate response to our programs and it goes to show that there is a real need out there for programs such as ours. In August 2009 we received our 501 (c) (3) status from the IRS making us an official tax exempt organization. We plan to start our fundraising efforts in October, 2009 with a goal of raising $10,000 by the end of the year. This money will go towards funding these pilot programs as well as getting our organization on its feet.
If you would like to find out more about Super Project Lab Learning programs or how you can help, please contact Shelley Darcy, Executive Director, (503) 750-5247.
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