Community Projects
Strengthening our community through the arts.
Free Arts’ Professional Artist Series Creative Writing workshop
Utilizing teen boys from one of our partner facilities
ASU Gammage Cultural Participation Department partnered with Free Arts of Arizona to bring a creative writing workshop to ten underprivileged teen boys. The boys took part in the workshop led my Myrlin Hepworth, a talented spoken word artist, writer and poet, to explore identity, assimilation, defiance and discrimination. The workshop also included elements from the storyline of West Side Story, which the young men then attended at ASU Gammage thanks to the generosity of our Gammage VIP donors. Below are copies of the boys’ writing which explored these topics and their perspective of life in America.
Journey Home
Journey Home is an arts residency program designed to enable incarcerated women to discover a personal sense of constructive identity through performance, visual arts, creative writing and storytelling. Journey Home allows the women to develop tools and self-esteem that will help them make positive choices and encourage them to break the negative patterns that lead to incarceration. The program culminates in a performance where the women perform their own choreography, display their visual arts and creative writing projects and tell their stories to community members and prison administration. Journey Home is conducted by local theater/storytelling artist Fatimah Halim of Life Paradigms and administered in collaboration with ASU Gammage.
Journey Home in the News Excerpts from Journey Home Anthology
Art of Me
A partnership between ASU Gammage and Greater Phoenix Youth at Risk (PYAR), Art of Me is a series of visual and performing arts workshops that inspire self-esteem and confidence in participating youth. They become the composers of their own destinies and gain positive tools of expression to deter violence, substance abuse and gang-related behaviors.
New Carpa Theater
Since 2002, New Carpa Theater Co. (newcarpa.org) has connected diverse communities with Latino and multi-cultural experiences. ASU Gammage takes great pride in our relationship with New Carpa and its producing artistic director and playwright James E. Garcia. In 2006, ASU Gammage and Texas Performing Arts at UT-Austin co-produced Mr. Garcia's "Voices of Valor." ASU Gammage continues to support New Carpa’s creation of new theater works in various ways and shares the goal of creating understanding, interaction and partnership among communities Valleywide to help make the Phoenix Metropolitan area and Arizona a special place to live, work and experience unique and extraordinary performing arts.
International Rescue Committee (IRC)
Arizona is now home for thousands of refugees from around the world who have been uprooted from their homes and forced to flee from war or disaster. The International Rescue Committee is there to help as these families rebuild their lives and resettle in their new communities, striving to become self sufficient. ASU Gammage is partnering with the IRC to involve refugee youth in the arts, providing opportunities to explore theater, dance and music with ASU Gammage’s world-class artists.
