San Diego School Children Are Learning Some Lessons About the Arts

Bringing the excitement of live opera performance into the classroom is a little like trying to give the full flavor of a circus with only a pair of clowns and a bag of peanuts.

Scaling down this extravagant, sophisticated art form, yet retaining its essence, is the primary challenge to stage director and actor, William Roesch.

Roesch, San Diego Opera’s education director, wants to erase the usual operatic stereotypes.

“With young people, you’ve got to banish the image of opera as a fat lady wearing horns and carrying a spear,” he said. “You need to capture the imagination of the kids on a visual level, I think, even more than on an auditory level.

Capturing the imagination and interest of children is a challenge facing not just the opera, but most San Diego arts institutions.

Museums, dance companies, theaters and the San Diego Symphony promote the arts through a varied array of educational programs specially designed for school children. Here is a look at some of these programs.

Theater

This fall as students sit at their desks, sharpening their pencils, at least eight theater companies will follow right behind them, sharpening a variety of plays, musicals, revues and workshops. Whether they’re dealing with the holiday season or the coming Old Globe season, touring shows are a growing business with long, as well as short-term goals.

The La Jolla Playhouse is the latest company to join the school touring show ranks with “Silent Edward,” the American premiere of a one-act musical with book, music and lyrics by the Playhouse’s artistic director, Des McAnuff.

First written in 1973, this story of a boy and girl who fight to save a historic ferryboat was inspired by a ferry that McAnuff used to ride when he was a child. While that particular ferry was never in danger, McAnuff recalls his concern about the rapid growth that closed ferries all over southern Toronto where he grew up. It’s a concern he believes that students in rapidly developing city of San Diego will understand.

The musical, designed for grades 2-8, will be followed by a discussion of the Coronado Ferry and other aspects of San Diego history.

The Old Globe offers two touring shows. From November to April, the theater features a program tied into its winter shows. Two to four actor-teachers from the Young Globe company give students a 45-minute preview of a current Old Globe show in the classroom.

The students also get tickets to the show preceded by a 45-minute tour of the design facilities at the theater and a post-performance discussion with the actors.

The Globe switches to “Shakespeare From Page to Stage,” a guide to the theater’s summer Shakespeare offerings, from the beginning of April to mid-June.

As Diane Sinor, the Globe’s education director, put it, “We want to make not only new audiences, but better audiences, people who are really present in the theater.”

The Lamb’s Players Theatre has been doing a variety of touring shows for most of the 17 years of its existence. But it is only in the last two years that the focus shifted to substance abuse. To obtain the Southwest rights to “Say No, Max” and “I Am the Brother of Dragons,” both developed by the St. Francis Medical Center in Pittsburgh with Saltworks Theatre Co., they had to agree that anyone with any direct contact with the productions gets at least 40 hours of pharmacology and family counseling.

The Lamb’s Players five-member touring group did their training at the Scripps Memorial McDonald Center.

“It’s been an education for us,” said Lamb’s Players veteran Deborah Gilmour Smyth, who oversees the project.

Art

While art appreciation courses have all but vanished from many official curriculums, institutions and individual artists strive to keep their craft before children.

The largest mural in the city (more than 5,000 square feet) is now in progress at Balboa Elementary School under the direction of muralist Victor Ochoa, an “artist in the schools” funded by the California Arts Council and the San Diego City Schools.

Ochoa, who is also working on a mural at Sherman Elementary, said the projects relate to the “community murals” made informally in the 1960s. Themes for the murals in the schools come directly from the community and from students. The students, who have done about 50% of the painting, “incorporate their feelings and thoughts into the murals,” the muralist said.

Ochoa also develops different hands-on projects monthly to teach students about particular historical events. In January, he plans to mount an exchange exhibition of paintings by San Diego and Tijuana students with the border as the theme.

The San Diego Museum of Art’s outreach program for students prepares fifth- and sixth-grade students for a museum visit through a slide presentation. The 30-minute presentations relate to works in the museum collection.

The Museum of Photographic Arts’ school program expands this two-part scheme to include a third dimension, in which the children create art themselves.

After a docent’s slide presentation the class is given a tour of the museum and a talk on the elements of composition and form.

These concepts are discussed not only to enhance understanding of the works on exhibit, but also “to help students make better photographs, more than just snapshots,” said Education Coordinator Jean Wilder.

Students are assigned to shoot a roll of black-and-white or color film during the next two weeks. At the end of the period, Wilder visits the classroom and gives personal critiques of the students’ work.

Wilder calls the approach “very effective.”

“When I go to the classrooms, the students seem really pleased with what they’ve done,” she said. “You can tell in their photographs that they’ve incorporated what we’ve talked about.”

Classical

Of all the arts groups, perhaps the opera has the most variety in its educational programs. Bill Roesch, the opera’s educational director, presides over a cadre of young opera professionals who take two slickly staged 50-minute programs into the elementary and high schools. Called the San Diego Opera Ensemble, this new program is general director Ian Campbell’s latest effort to boost the company’s educational outreach.

With new costumes and a set that folds down and fits into a single van, Roesch and his singers began playing “The Barber of Seville” in the schools late in September.

Condensing Rossini’s classic opera buffa into less than an hour forced Roesch to write some additional dialogue to fill in the missing plot developments, but he insisted that his singers keep the pace taut and snappy for the entire 50 minutes.

‘Flip Side of Donizetti’

Roesch’s alternate program, called “The Flip Side of Donizetti,” features staged scenes from three Donizetti comic operas. “Because we are doing Donizetti’s ‘L’elisir d’amore’ this season, I wanted a tie-in with larger opera program,” Roesch said. With a few subtle rearrangements, the “Barber” set serves for the Donizetti program.

While the program is aimed at students from fourth grade through high school, Campbell does not see opera education programs as a kind of audience recruitment.

“They are not aimed to create audiences,” he said. “We simply want to get rid of ignorance and let children make their own judgments.”

Other long-running opera educational projects include its student dress rehearsal program. Last week, some 1,300 students and more than 600 adult chaperones attended a complete performance of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” at Civic Theatre.

A more participatory activity is the company’s Hansel and Gretel program, a six-week residency of three opera professionals who help the students at a school to stage their own version of Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel.” A stage director and musical director coach the students, and a technical adviser helps the youngsters make their costumes and build a set.

This program’s major drawback is that it can only go to four schools a year because of its six-week duration. According to Roesch, the demand for this program is high, and he looks to double its outreach, adding next year one of Benjamin Britten’s children’s operas, “Noye’s Fludde” and “Let’s Make an Opera.”

After a year’s absence, the San Diego Symphony is starting up its educational programs slowly. Its Young People’s Concerts will not begin until February. Under the direction of musical adviser Fabio Mechetti, four performances of three different programs tailored to the attention span of fourth- to sixth-graders will be offered in Symphony Hall.

Always looking for a new angle on familiar material, the Feb. 3-4 concert will present Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” but without the usual narration. Each movements will be acted out by a touring mime company, according to symphony artistic adviser Edmundo del Campo. The March concert will present compositions inspired by mechanical devices, “Magnificent Compositions and Their Music Machines,” and the April program will be a Beethoven tribute.

Dance

While local dance aficionados often despair at the dearth of concerts on the home front, there is a beehive of activity in community outreach programs throughout the county.

Among the local troupes participating in educational programs are Three’s Company, California Ballet and Stage Seven Dance Theater.

Sushi Gallery shares its interdisciplinary arts with the schoolchildren, as does dancer/performance artist Sara Jo Berman, and dancer/choreographer Doreen Amelia. A growing number of independents are making their way into the schools, now that funding is being funneled into artists-in-residence programs and other educational projects.

Kay Wagner, program manager for Fine Arts in the San Diego public schools, opened the classroom doors in all 167 schools in the district to area artists. Through grants from the California Arts Council, COMBO, and her own arts budget, Wagner has exposed San Diego schoolchildren to everything from flamenco and African dance to puppetry and mime.

‘Eager to Share’

“Some of the schools were afraid to use artists,” Wagner acknowledged, “but we have never had anyone who didn’t want them back, once they had them in their school. And we find the local artists are eager to share.”

Three’s Company stages between 30 and 40 dance lecture/demonstrations per year. The modern dance troupe also makes its professional concerts available to schoolchildren. This year, the company will provide a free matinee performance during its regular run at the Mandell Weiss Center for Performing Arts, on Jan. 13.

The California Ballet Company’s younger dancers perform in schools, director Maxine Mahon said.

San Diego Dance Theater makes few appearances on the concert stage. But when the company does something special, the high school students of San Diego usually get to sample its wares.

Last year, when the troupe revived a classic choreographed by modern dance trailblazer, Charles Weidman, the piece was packaged and presented at several high schools.

San Diego free-lance writers Nancy Churnin, Leah Ollman, Kenneth Herman and Eileen Sondak contributed to this story.