Soundance: fostering the children of the Second City.

The psyche of New York City has long been spilt into two overbearing personalities. There is the city of glamour, which rushes impetuously to embrace art and culture, fashion and cuisine, architecture and design, all that is intoxicating to the mind and the spirit. Then, equally pronounced, there is the city of despair: the fetid subway stations, the crumbling tenements, the desperate human refuse of a faltering social community roving street after filthy street in search of survival. In the second city, violence, whether drug- or pverty-induced, has become a familiar feature of the landscape. For the most part, the eyes attuned to glamour successfully blind themselves to the distasteful facts of despair. But last winter a fifteen-year-old student at Junior High School 25 of the New York City oublic school system was stabbed to death by a classmate, and when childen fall prey to the destrctive forces of an environment beyond their control, it is impossible to look away.

Sandra Stratton, artistic director of Soundance, has made it her business to gaze, with eyes wide open, into the heart of the second city. As part of the community commitment of her organization, she has worked for six years with the adolescents of J.H.S. 25 and for two years before that with other groups of young people from the Lower East Side. Stratton's project began in 1984, when she decided to form her own repertory dance company. But very soon after, the parameters of the group began to expand, in part through some financial serendipity. The first grant for which Soundance was eligible came out of the Manhattan Community Arts Fund (MCAF). Stratton had set out to apply for money for her company's performances in an arts festival on Manhattan's Lower East Side, but MCAF specified that applicants take an active involvement in their community. To fulfill the MCAF requirement, Stratton decided she would recruit high school students from the area to participate in a dance workshop at the Third Street Music School Settlement, located in that neighborhood. Twelve students made up the first class in the fall of 1985.

After that, things began to fly. "That first movement and music workshop," recalls Stratton, "was successful more or less beyond anybody's imaginings. The whole Soundance company was involved in teaching, and the professionals and the kids performed together. It worked so well that the next year we applied for funding for just that and got it. And then we applied for Department of Youth Services money, and we got it." At that point the budget for the program increased significantly, and Stratton realized that her project had outgrown its home at the music school. On advice from the local community board, Stratton chose to move the workshop into an area junior high school--J.H.S. 25. This past year the Soundance project, a mixture of dance and drama instruction, included fifty kids ranging in age from eight to eighteen. The group met after school two times a week for seven months and presented the culminating performances at four public schools around the city and at a community festival at City Hall.

The workshop at J.H.S. 25 is not the only component of Soundance's Lower East Side arts-in-education campaign. The organization also conducts a dance and culture program for third graders at Public School 137 that meets during school hours and links dance with the children's existing social studies curriculum. What is left of Stratton's energy gets directed toward her own dance making for the professional company and toward putting together choreographers' showcases. In addition, the Soundance studio houses a variety of dance classes and workshops and provides low-cost, subsidized rehearsal and performance space for the dance community at large. and performance space for the dance community at large. "It's prety broad focus," Stratton readily offers, noting that "the good thing is that it allows us to work in several aspects of our field; the negative side is that that it's easy to get spread out and overwhelmed by the day-to-day organizational chores."

Soundance's mission--to facilitate the nexus between the community and the arts--comes from what Stratton sees as perhaps the original relationship between humanity and creative expression. "Sound and movement," she says "were ritual and communication, and the ciommunity owned them collectively. Now we go to see them presented onstage, but we need to remember that we own them, we all do." Today that connection is a weak one. The young people of the Lower East Side are unlikely ever to have attended a modern dance performance. Stratton explains that "they don't see that it has relevance, or they don't see that it comes from their lives until there's some kind of firsthand experience." And firsthand experiene is just what Soundance offer these kids--that and the chance to speak for and about themselves.

Every year Soundance devices a potential theme for the music and movement workshop at J.H.S. 25. The dance and theater teachers then take that working concept to the children and improvise around it, so that the content of the workshop reflects this collaboration. Stratton points out that such a process ensures that "we're almost always dealing with the life issues that they're dealing with. If it's not violence, it's sexuality or it's drug." Without a doubt, the children of the Lower East Side are children of the second city. "Eighty-five percent of the children who attend District One schools [including J.H.S. 25] come from families who receive some sort of public assistance. There are a lot of single-parent homes. There's a lot of teenage pregnancy. And drugs are a big, big problem. The drug industry employs a lot of the young people who grow up on the Lower East Side. Most of the kids we work with have an immediate family member who has been either mugged or shot." It's an environment that easily breeds fear, frustration, and anger. Stratton goes on to note that the stabbing at the junior high school reflects the predicament in which these children find themselves: "I talked with the kids about the problem they have in expressing anger. They don't know how to deal with their anger--and they're already angry over a whole lot of other things--so they take it out on each other."

As a form of psychological street smarts, the young people often develop a tough outter shell, and, Stratton confirms, "it's legitimate response to what's going on in the city." The theme of last year's workshop, "Masks," gave the students a chance to explore and convey the vulnerabilities trapped underneath that shell: insecurity, fear, loneliness, confusion--all the difficulties of adolescence compounded by the trauma of the second city. "Don't be fooled by me," read one line from the performance script, "at least by the face I wear." Between related dance numbers, other skits in the show dealt with homelessness and emotional conflict.

Though it was not presented at all the school performances, the kids did develop a scene about the murder that had taken place at their school. The Soundance staff used the issue of explosive violence as a forum for the exploration of strategies for conflict resolution. "We talked about when you get to that point when you see red and you really want to lash out, what can you do?" Straton remembers. "Why do you get to that point? Would you fight somebody because they insulted you? The last workshop we did was in the classroom with some of the kids who had known both boys, both the boy who passed away and the boy who was charged with the crime. And that was really a healing kind of experience, that they were able to talk about it and to talk about their feelings, and also to talk a little bit about what they see on the street."

With such rewarding achievements to her credit, Stratton allows herself to dream of what the future could hold for her organization. "I want it to grow," she maintain. "This past year we were funded only for seven months. You get to the end of the seven months, and you have a group of kids who still want to participate. We should be able to run a full program at least for the school year. And then it would also be nice to offer a separate summer program, because the kids have a lot more free time on their hands in the summer." But, of course, there is the issue of money. "There's definitely the need and the desire," she insists, "but there's not the funding." So when Stratton asked, after the students of J.H.S. 25 had finished a performance at a local elementary school, "How many of you will join our dance classes next year?" the sea of eagerly straining hands raised high in the air held a bittersweet truth.

With the help of Stratton's vision, the arts have surely found their way back to this community. Each year, during the Soundance workshop, a number of young people set out to learn how to work together and often, on the way, discover what it means to take responsibility for themselves. Through dancing and acting, they find their voices and begin to understand how to articulate their own concerns and those of their peers. In concluding the dramatic scene about their schoolmate's death, the performers in last year's workshop asked, "Who's going to stop the violence?" And then, in answer: "We are--and"--pointing at the crowd of childen in the audience--"you." Creative expression may yet transform the second city.