Park Avenue Armory’s Youth Corps summer semester ran from July 10th to August 17th. This semester, as with previous semesters, Youth Corps members like myself experimented with a range of artistic mediums, some of which were unfamiliar. In addition to this experimentation, Youth Corps also attended two residencies led by artists Helga Davis and Larry Jackson, were given multiple tours of the Armory, and attended trips to several sites. We visited Central Park to learn processional movement, the Poster House Museum to experience their Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party exhibit, and Brooklyn Bridge Park to view Nicholas Galanin’s “In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra” sculpture. Additionally, in the usual Youth Corps fashion, there were Front of House sessions outside of the regular weekday schedule for the Armory’s current exhibit, The Doctor, a play that provided inspiration for our closing Capstone Project, another staple of the program.
In contrast to past semesters, this semester’s capstone was developed sporadically throughout the entire five weeks of the program rather than after experimenting with each of the planned artistic media. Within the first two weeks of the program, we watched Robert Icke’s The Doctor, which provided the theme for our capstone: the relationship between faith and science. Our first step in developing our final capstone was to divide into small groups and create ‘mini’ capstones in which we could create anything we wanted, the only constraint was to relate it to the theme. The products presented by the groups were diverse in medium, ranging from immersive dance to comedic film. This first look into the capstone provided many new members of the Youth Corps with an understanding of the goal of the project. All subsequent planning was done as a whole, with ideas rapidly being thrown about, added to, and voted upon by everyone, giving everybody a chance to contribute their input.
While we continued to develop our ideas for the capstone, we would start off our mornings with the residencies previously mentioned. The first residency we attended for two weeks was steered by Helga Davis, a New York native multidisciplinary artist. Helga’s residency took many directions, a majority of which forced people to step outside of their comfort zones. From her residency we were able to learn taking up space, movement, and spoken word in performance. Following this, we had Larry Jackson’s residency where we learned how to consider audience experience when putting on a live performance and how to adapt to parameters like room size. Larry’s residency mimicked the process of constructing our regular capstone. For his residency we ended up making an interactive walk-through exhibition which featured acting, film, and showcases of artwork. We carried the teaching of both artists into the making of our capstone which ended up replicating many components from the work we created during the residencies.
We decided that the capstone would be a multidisciplinary performance with a focus on theater- including other art forms such as spoken word, illustration and crafting with paper, dance (a section which came from one of the small-scaled capstones), film, and sound. This piece titled “Ouroboros”, followed a protagonist diagnosed with a terminal illness who was conflicted about whether to adhere to religion or science when faced with death. To speak about my own experience this semester, working on the capstone project fostered creative processes and encouraged leadership abilities that I was otherwise hesitant to inhabit outside of this space. This semester gave me multiple ways to contribute, many of which were in the form of developing, sharing, and organizing ideas. I was encouraged to take on new positions which provided clarity to others and drove the “Audience Experience” aspect of the capstone at times when my participation was less idea-based.
In all, same as prior semesters, the summer semester was a wonderful program for those interested in diverse and creative artmaking or the technical and strategic planning put towards carrying out a creative project.
