Comparative Arts Training in Richmond's Inner City

At East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, in a San Francisco Bay Area neighborhood known as the Iron Triangle and distinguished primarily for its chronic poverty and violence, young artists — discover how training in the arts can and does illuminate their fullest capacity as human beings.

Founded in 1968, the mission of the Center focuses on creating opportunities for artistic excellence, personal growth and open communication for youth from diverse backgrounds, and nurturing culturally distinctive performing arts as tools for civic engagement, social justice and change.

A central question driving East Bay Center’s practice has been: “What does it take to nurture excellent and engaged young performing artists?” Closely related questions in our journey have included:

The Center is especially concerned with youth growing up in communities such as our own — a long-standing 50-year-old urban ghetto — where the intense distractions of contemporary society are ever more complex. At the same time, we understand that all youth today, in one way or another, face this complexity. Putting our questions then into a larger context, we might ask: “What does it take for a young person in America today to realize artistic depth and societal engagement?"

Arguably, the single greatest achievement of the Center has been that over the past decade we have continued to steadfastly refine and evolve our core work — in spite of chronic neighborhood poverty and violence, tremendous swings of income, large-scale producing projects, challenges of partnerships with an overstretched public-school district and local social-service agencies, a major facility project, and repeated attempts to connect to more wealthy neighbors, just a few miles away in other parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Now approaching its fourth year of pilot implementation, East Bay Center’s Artist Diploma Initiative has distilled our response to the questions posed above into an evolving program that enables us — within our means — to reach and train the “at-risk” urban youth that so many institutions of artistic purpose are striving to reach. It’s important to say that, even though the vast majority of our students are in free or scholarship programs, the Diploma Program (which is entirely subsidized) is not just for families experiencing economic hardship, but also for any youth who wishes to make the special commitment to a rigorous program of depth and breadth.

Targeting 60 middle- and high-school students out of our roughly 1,600 program participants annually, the Artists Diploma Program nurtures youth who may or may not have had intensive training from early childhood. By year-end, each student of the Diploma Program completes the following number of structured classroom and rehearsal hours for each of the curriculum areas, depending on their level in the program: Repertoire technique and performance training: 150 - 200 hours; cross-cultural/cross-disciplinary experience (comparative study); 150+ hours, civic/community engagement: 40-100 hours.

By the end of four years, a full graduate of the Artist Diploma Program completes as many as 2,000 hours in year-round individual lessons and group classes, project learning, student mentoring projects, full-time five-week cross-cultural summer intensives, recitals and public performances.

These performances are realized in one of nine active Center resident companies whose work explores Instrumental Jazz Music, Acting Writing/Directing of Original and World Repertoire Theater, Contemporary Urban Dance, Classical Anlo-Ewe (West African) Music and Dance, Regional Mexican Son, Instrumental Chamber Music, African American Vocal Traditions, Laotian/Mien Ceremonial Performance Arts, and Independent Filmmaking. (The specific art forms, above, in which we maintain core instruction and performance, were chosen over several decades with a number of criteria in mind: First, that there was a spectrum of forms representing organic interest in our community, interest among youth and widespread practice in society. Next, that every form possessed clear canons exemplifying a range of human skills and distinctive traditional training methodologies. Also of importance to the Center was access to authentic mater artists capable of transmitting and translating the theory, techniques and meaning of the repertoire.)

Perhaps the most opaque of our program components however, is what we call comparative (or integrated) study. In this paper I will introduce the environment of our work, the genesis of our program approach and a basic outline of comparative study, and will invite readers to consider their own interests and explorations of the practice.

Over these past 40 years, in the heart of Richmond, California, more than 50,000 student artists — from all walks of life — have shared a home where they have found within themselves the means to develop skills that enable them to think, lead and contribute to the world around them.

East Bay Center for the Performing Arts is a place of discovery. Here our student artists —through the breadth, depth and passion of experiencing classical master works and cutting-edge forms from around the world — come to know the world’s great performance traditions, the beauty of their neighbors, a calling in life and the life of the mind, in addition to the spark of young imagination.

Through the active creation of original music, film, theater, dance and self-determined community projects, we emphasize the cause of social justice, the hard work needed to prepare, the skills to create and the courage to perform.

For many, East Bay Center is one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s foremost schools for minority performance skills, and home to nine culturally specific Resident Companies whose work reaches 35,000 to 40,000 low-income, inner-city families annually through our Call and Response program. We have a professional artist faculty of 58 part-time employees engaging 1,600 students a week in long-term sequential training classes and 25-35 productions a year. We produce programs directly related to our instructional program — often unduplicated anywhere in the U.S. When we staged “Kusum Africa” (part of our African Choreographer’s Forum) at U.C. Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall to critical acclaim, we also integrated a dozen teen and young-adult African-American students. In “Luz de Tradicion: Culturas de Mexico, California Encuentro del Son,” we bring Center students, Mexican and Californian artists together for unique collaborations exploring the diverse practice of Son, a distinctive traditional Mexican music, dance and literary genre, combining elements of improvisation and storytelling. In the Encuentro’s statewide tour of “La Tercera Raice,” we celebrated the true story of Arcardio Hidalgo, a soldier and revolutionary troubadour of Afro-Cuban descent, widely considered one of the seminal son jarocho figures of the 20th Century. Other commissioned works, like “Portrait of a Girl From Nowhere” and “Deai,” have traveled to the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Lincoln Arts Center and the Women’s World Conference in Beijing. At our on-campus Iron Triangle Theater or at a local high-school gymnasium, one might see visiting Tenek elders and local immigrant Mexican children and families in a 2,000-year-old Corn/Creation Ceremony; a Mien Wedding Celebration, or a presentation of “Walkin’ Talkin’ Bill Hawkins” by Allen Taylor, a solo theater piece exploring issues relating to the father/son relationship and what it means to be a man in our society, particularly in African-American culture.

At the same time, East Bay Center’s creative programming has been inseparable from issues of local community life and a mission commitment to strengthen young artists’ frequent concerns for social justice. Under the guidance of fine mentor artists, teen and young-adult program participants have written and produced films about their fears in traveling from one Richmond neighborhood to another and their vision for a safer, more just environment (“Safe Harbors,” “Unincorporated” and “Neighborhood Dilemmas,” 1987-91), docudramas about teen pregnancy (“Something to Think About,” 1994), documentaries about African-American women with HIV/AIDS (“Reflections Unseen,” 2003), MTV-style music videos about industrial toxins in downtown Richmond’s Iron Triangle neighborhood (“Listen,” 1991), and short dramas pointing out that “dangers to the young include more than just bullets” (“Long Odds —Where can I find an apple in Richmond?” 2007). Students have also created and produced scores of live performance works: a musical-theater script composed of teen writings about the challenges of family life and growing up in Richmond (“Visions of Life,” 2005), a play written by incarcerated youth about growing up (“Group Home,” 1987), and dance-theater works written by biracial children about their lives (“I am a Tan Sunset, You are a Yellow Moon,” 1996) and a spoken-word jazz suite on the occasion of burying a local park’s tragic past, “Like Peace from the Park to the Street,” 2007). Our latest endeavor is timeofchange.org, a Web site being developed by teens, chronicling their journey of youth from different neighborhoods to their sacrifices in training for the arts. Exploring the relationship of personal to societal benefit, this site will provide resources for colleagues and youth across the country through the direct sharing of experience. In the long term, the intention is to build a wisely scaled site with support of and interactive outreach to a wide range of art and social-justice programs throughout the U.S.

In addition to telling the stories of the people of Richmond, East Bay Center connects young artists to the community through partnerships with a spectrum of other grassroots organizations working on local issues. Current local partnerships in which Diploma Students take part include:

The Building Blocks for Kids Coalition, now in its third year — a local Richmond association of 26 agencies aimed at enhancing quality of life and providing social service and educational advancement in the Iron Triangle Neighborhood by replicating principles and strategies of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), in cooperation with HCZ. Involvement includes the saturation of a ten-block area in the Center’s neighborhood, enhanced summer youth activities and new AmeriCorps workers at the Center. Diploma Students are involved as youth mentors and instructors at Peres Elementary School.

A five-year HIV/Hepatitis/Substance Abuse Prevention/Expressive Arts Program (housed at East Bay Center) for formerly incarcerated individuals and their families in the Richmond area, most of whom are already involved in treatment, in partnership with New Connections (a regional drug rehabilitation program) and funded by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Diploma Students are currently acting as peer instructors to children in the program.

A joint endeavor with the new Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historic Park. The country’s first national “urban park” encompasses the Richmond waterfront and the historic downtown area where East Bay Center is located. This project includes written curriculum about Richmond’s wartime industrial history, the migration of African-American families from the south to work in Richmond’s shipyards, wartime and racial politics on the West Coast, as well as individual and family oral histories examining the legacy of what is now a 50-year ghetto (see related “Memories of Macdonald” info presented below). Diploma Students are involved in building a theatrical oral-history version of WWII workers’ stories. The Iron Triangle Legacy Project (with neighborhood Koshland Awardees from the San Francisco Foundation) is distributing mini-grants to youth and neighborhood residents towards the building of long-term civic unity in the Iron Triangle Neighborhood. This year, Diploma students will be involved again in interviewing and creating a second film documentary on local activists in and around the Iron Triangle.

Founded in 1968, the Center was created amidst riots and grief following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Like many community leaders, the five music teachers who established the Center in a rented Richmond church were searching for lasting and meaningful responses to deeply entrenched disparities in social justice and educa¬tional opportunity. Over the next half-dozen years, the Center expanded rapidly to more than 30 part-time teaching artists providing accessible music classes and workshops in piano, strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion centered in jazz and classical music.

By the mid 1970s, the East Bay Center greatly expanded the variety of art forms supported and taught, both in terms of disciplines (music, dance, theater, film/video) and cultural traditions (African, Mexican, South Asian, Latin American/Caribbean, North Indian, Urban/Hip Hop, Japanese), reflecting the expanding mix of new immigrant and ethnic cultures in our diverse community. At the same time, the Center became a gathering place for regionally, nationally and internationally renowned practitioners of these art forms — a place where artists could both develop their own working ensembles and pass on their expertise and traditions to new generations.

During the turbulent 1980s, as our neighborhood went through its local version of Prop. 13 (resulting in a massive reduction in property-tax revenues), the aftermath of CETA (a federal job-training program) funds vanishing, and a series of spectacular local police-brutality suits, the Center focused on its core values by intensifying its efforts to create new works with local youth that spoke to real-world issues and life experiences. Through numerous productions, we refined our ability to use theater and aesthetic film/video with young people, to mediate and transform their personal perspectives into artistic visions and to unite a diverse range of artistic, cultural and class experiences. To date, East Bay Center students and faculty have produced more than 60 original theater and film works, many of them bilingual, on topics ranging from cultural differences and stereotyping to date rape, gang violence, HIV-AIDS, healthy food and the history of WWII home-front workers.

In 1990, the Center began to work seriously on building a more intentional and unified core instructional program. One critical step, prepared during 1993 and 1994 and instituted in 1995, was to further that work by changing the status of each of our 60+ instructors from contractor to part-time permanent employee. Until that time, our faculty resembled that of many community art centers, in the sense that their relationship to the organization and its curriculum as a whole was modest. The changeover from contractor to employee allowed us to undertake new strategies, including in-depth peer training and assessment sessions. (This action was followed with the practical establishment of salaried faculty positions in core content areas: West African Music and Dance, Jazz Music, Mexican Son, Theater, Southeast Asian Dance, Chamber Music etc.)

Another major step at that time was to clearly articulate and then formally implement a definitive core curriculum in which comparative study had a central place: a curriculum embracing humanity — and human perception — as a unifying element, a concept our faculty, staff and families deemed relevant and necessary to the ongoing dialogue of artists who respond both to specific communities, repertoires and traditions, and to our complex, pluralistic society.

In the summer of 1995 we gave our comparative, multicultural and multidisciplinary approach to raising young artists a concrete timeline, structure and active recognition as we conducted our first annual Honors Summer Institute. Over time, the summer institute has helped us move toward a cohesive East Bay Center faculty working with a common purpose and a student body grounded by a shared and intensive summer training experience.

In the world of higher education, there has been considerable interest in applying the findings of cognitive science and neuroscience to the study of the arts. The catalogue descriptions of most arts-related college and university departments now make reference to cognition and perception as a matter of course. College campuses in this country and around the world have hosted conferences and symposia exploring these issues[1], and there are a growing number of institutes dedicated to specific areas of study in these fields[2]. The availability of printed material continued to expand in the form of books and articles[3] and journals[4]. It should be noted, however, that the great majority of the study relating to cognition or perception and the arts focuses on painting and sculpture, and to a somewhat lesser degree, music, with an almost exclusive emphasis on modalities of interpretation. It must be said, too, that much of what has been published to date is highly academic and theoretical in nature and is sometimes more concerned with scholarly debate than with practical applications. Surprisingly little has been done to address how our current understanding of perception and cognition might serve as an adjunct to the practice, and to instruction of art and art practices. In spite of the tacit recognition that how we see and understand an art form is a function of our perception — whether innate or learned, or a combination thereof, individual or cultural — the task of developing an instructional methodology that starts with the idea of developing an understanding and vocabulary of perceptual commonalities has proved daunting.

As early as 1994, in preparation for the first professional faculty training and exchange session at East Bay Center, we wrote:

Although only just beginning in colleges and universities, a core methodology that informs East Bay Center’s Diploma Program was off to a start — running parallel with the emerging work in neuroscience, cognition and perception and the desire to broaden our understanding of how the brain identifies and implements complex artistic tasks.

The recent and rapid growth in interest and information regarding human sensory perception, cognition and the development of the brain from birth through adulthood provides us with additional opportunities to build important new analytic tools and a vocabulary that will cross-pollinate practice and research in both science and art.

More to our strength, we were drawing on the first-hand experiences we had with each other in classes and rehearsals over many years time. In specific cases, we were also drawing from, and inspired directly by, the work of exceptional faculty artists from abroad, like CK Ladzekpo who, arriving in America in the 1970s from a post as director of the National Music and Dance Ensemble of Ghana at the University of Legon, was challenged to translate the foundations of West African polyrhythm for his students at East Bay Center (and U.C. Berkeley.) This framework is fully articulated in “Foundation Course in African Music” (© 1995 C. K. Ladzekpo, All Rights Reserved), and introduces as well the philosophical and contextual meanings of the Anlo Ewe approach to making music and living a fulfilling life. In another generative instance, guest artists like Shakuhachi master Masayuki Koga from Japan, shared decades of research and teaching experience in the areas of breath and kinesthetic awareness.

From that experiment in 1995, we worked on the creation of a framework to guide faculty in the way they designed and organized their summer course material as well as their year-round curriculum. Although there is not the time in this writing to go into the details of the framework or how it is applied, the following brief outline introduces the core content areas for grades 7-10. And while several of the curriculum sections share concepts with other exemplary curricula, it is in their combination with our own approach that we have found a particular flexibility to serve a broad range of student interest, capacity and aim.

Within the framework cited above, the students’ work includes — most critically — experiencing in some detail how artists in different disciplines acquire and train fundamental skills by learning short but carefully selected material from each of the canons represented, as well as through fundamental technique exercises, observance, note taking and discussion. These activities take place over an intensive five-week summer time period and, among other things, they establish a beginning interdisciplinary vocabulary and concepts that are age-appropriate. At the middle-school level, it is not generally useful for students to directly confront the theories of perception behind the framework, rather it is more important that the material be clear and interesting in itself. In the students’ words, we “break it down” for them — over and over until their own analytic powers are gradually strengthened. On the other hand, popular concepts such as muscle memory or physical phenomena such as persistence of vision are introduced in special workshops as well as in field trips to the exceptional science museum Exploratorium in San Francisco. At all levels, students are asked to express their understandings in the form of their own very brief compositions/choreographies/ scripts, etc., and to maintain a daily journal of notes and questions.

Early on in the development of the Summer Intensive, we saw the need to provide special training for our faculty. These artists were accomplished performers and instructors in a single discipline but, generally speaking, they had little formal training in comparative teaching and learning. We therefore established an intensive training period of three days to be conducted in the month immediately prior to the start of the summer session. As in the five-week student version, each participant engages in the core repertoire classes so as to develop a hands-on sense of the training examples and principles involved. In addition, we spend some time reviewing the principles, training goals and follow-up strategy used with the students during the rest of the academic year.

None of the above discussion of comparative study is to suggest that young students who desire to accomplish achievements in the performing arts at East Bay Center — or elsewhere — need necessarily jump into a whirlwind of simultaneous arts training experiences. The whole point of “comparative” or “interconnected” study at East Bay Center is that it is not exclusive; rather, it suggests that any individual will have a range of perceptual capacities — strengths and challenges, if you will — and that through extended and repeated periods of focused and excellent cross-training, they will come to better understand their true gifts, be inspired to follow them where they may lead. And more than likely, as a result, he/she will play the violin well (it could be Bach’s Concerto in D, or Sones from the Mexican Huasteca Potosina), honor the classical Anlo-Ewe dance Atamga with excellent movement and timing, know how to articulate Macbeth’s soliloquy, create jazz-dance combinations or arrange a variation for chamber orchestra based on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Further, she/he will possess a awakening understanding of the meaning of the works — as well as a curiosity about, and an organic sense of, how works are made by artists everywhere.

In time, this combination of practice we believe leads to a fuller understanding of human capacity itself.

From the state and national perspective, East Bay Center sits in the heart of one of the country’s most economically challenged, violent neighborhoods — an ethnically diverse community, rich in culture and heritage, but one that has suffered from general urban blight and economic depression since its industrial heyday as a WWII shipyard. Traditionally, roughly 88% of our students, families and audiences come from either low or very low-income backgrounds.

In recent years (2003/2004), both the West Contra Costa Unified School District and the City of Richmond made national news by virtue of their effectively bankrupt financial status. Just four years ago, the city of Richmond reduced 33% of its workforce and eliminated the last dollar of nonprofit funding. Many local schools are regularly threatened with closure for failing to meet either minimal national or state standards. Recently, Richmond was ranked the ninth most dangerous city in the country and the second most dangerous in California, based on 2006 FBI crime statistics.

Within the City of Richmond, the Iron Triangle District (the neighborhood in which East Bay Center is located) stands out as the epicenter of an epidemic of violence. With 27% of the city’s population, the Center’s neighborhood suffers 42% of the city’s violent crime. Tragically, the majority of homicides also occur in the Iron Triangle neighborhood only blocks form East Bay Center.

Comparative Study at the East Bay Center is still very much an evolving exercise. Since its formal beginnings in the form of the Intensive Study Institute and now, as a key element of the four year, year-round Artist Diploma Program, it has brought together different combinations of artists and students with diverse and divergent goals — some purely artistic, others engaged with issues of social change and social justice. We have recently conducted interviews with a number of individuals who have participated over the years in some stage of the program’s evolution in order to give a breadth of perspective about how the program and its goals are perceived. Some of the interviewees were artists who have been faculty members at the East Bay Center, some were administrators, and others were colleagues from other institutions whose participation was more at the level of professional development.

The results of these interviews reveal that implementation of comparative study at the East Bay Center has not been without its challenges. Some of the artists working at the Center, whether full-time staff or part-time adjunct instructors, have been slow to embrace to the idea of stepping outside of the familiar and engaging with experimental methods or have lacked sufficient orientation. At the core of this resistance is a problem that has been endemic to the full implementation of a comparative study program: the availability of sufficient funds and infrastructure to fully train and support faculty, as well as funds to provide the kinds of ideal individual wrap-around support to individual students. What was especially clear from the interviews conducted with individuals both from within the Center’s faculty and colleagues from other institutions was that the concept is not something that can be easily or casually adopted.

Comparative Study emerged at the East Bay Center not as a full-blown theory with its methodologies and its goals fully in place but as an exploration, a determined response to a set of challenges, discoveries and opportunities. The Center began as, and continues to be, a community arts organization, with a mission that ascribes value to the expression of openness and mutual understanding through every medium available. In the early days at the Center, although artists were hired to teach classes and give lessons within their respective art forms, a natural exchange began to emerge, fostered by the mission-driven idea of bringing different populations together over common interests and values

While it has not been true for every student, it is our experience that the approach described above in our Diploma Program has yielded social, technical and creative benefits to both the advanced performer/creator and the youth explorer seeking to calibrate his/her place among many in an increasingly complex cultural society. In year after year of summer comparative study programs, we have had tremendous attendance, and in regular confidential interviews students cited the open, intensive and rich atmosphere of the program as vital to their finding themselves “at home,” and to establishing a vision of themselves as an artist. The result is a rich array of deeply complex and diverse alumni. Many of our students have gone on to found independent institutions and projects — from Andre River’s Poor Man Records in Richmond to Howard Wiley’s Angola (jazz music) Project and Gonzalo Rucobo’s Bay Area Peacekeepers. Others like Antoine Hunter, a deaf dancer, and Dolores Garcia, dancer/musician of traditional Mexican Son, have become performer/teachers at the Center itself, while Simmie Foster went to Yale and completed her Ph.D./M.D. in Medical Science (I hear she still plays Capoeira) and Richard Zhu, award-winning classical pianist, pursues music and business at U.C. Berkeley. Still others, like Redge Green, confined to a wheelchair since being shot at age seven, balance a movie and recording career with national youth empowerment and Ministry work, while Padre Masseo (formerly Robert Gonzales) is a Franciscan priest with a Web site. As to the conservatory style or planned outcome of every student — we frame few specifics. The Center is, after all, a place of intensive discovery, during a time of intensive change.

In future papers, we will discuss in greater detail some of the more technical aspects of how we break down repertoire episodes into the framework concepts and put forth a vocabulary that might be of interest to institutions with resources to directly investigate the ideas. For now, we hope the spirit of what we are working towards is of use to our colleagues.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephanie Woodson, Arizona State University.

Jordan Simmons has been the East Bay Center’s artistic director since 1985 and on the faculty since 1978. Simmons, a graduate of Reed College, has taught West African Music, Brazilian Dance and Percussion, European Classical and Jazz Piano, Composition, and Theory, in addition to writing, producing and directing a number of original works for both theater and film. (He is also a Richmond City native and began formal music instruction at East Bay Center in 1968 while attending JFK High School.)

[1] A Cognitive Science Conference on Perception, Consciousness and Art, for example, was held at the 'Vrije Universiteit Brussel', Brussels, Belgium May 17 to 19, 1999. The University of Glasgow’s Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience hosted a Graduate Interdisciplinary conference.

[2] The Department of Cognitive Studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure organizes online a series of workshops on Art and Cognition. The Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, a nonprofit 501 (c)(3) agency, was founded in 1995 to restore, maintain and improve people's physical, emotional and neurologic functioning through the systematic use of music. In 2002 they hosted a symposium Dialogues Across Disciplines: Cognitive Neuroscience and Music Processing in Human Function. The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego offers a Performing Arts program.

[3] For example: Gombricht, E.H., Julian Hochberg, Max Black. “Art, Perception and Reality.” Thalheimer Lectures. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972; Dilworth, John. The Double Content of Art, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005; Daniel N. Osherson, Stephen M. Kosslyn and John M. Hollerbach. Visual Cognition and Action. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990; Solso, Robert L. Cognition and the Visual Arts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

[4] Such journals are wide-ranging in their scope. Some examples are: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. American Psychological Association; Perception, a Pion production; “Controversies in Science and the Humanities: Art and the Brain.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6.6/7 (1999).

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Comparative Arts Training in Richmond's Inner City

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