3 Ways Downtown Art Could Change Your Life

by Michela Garabedian, company member

Downtown Art’s influence on my life has been far-reaching and incredibly positive.

1) DTA has provided me with a creative outlet that I could not have found anywhere else—throughout my time at this theatre company, I have worked on stage, backstage, and have even written a short play to be performed in front of a real audience. Having this outlet has given me a chance to express myself in a unique and fun way. It has also given me a lot of confidence in my own creative voice.

2) DTA has provided me with the friendships and tools I need to flourish in the world of high school and beyond. I have learned to collaborate well with teens from all different backgrounds. Not only have I gained leadership and teamwork skills through this collaboration, but I have also made some of the best friends I’ve had and probably will ever have. Working with so many talented, kind, and passionate people inspires me to transcend the barriers of what I can accomplish every day.

3) Lastly, DTA has provided me with a community for life. I never really knew what a community was until I became a part of DTA. Now I know that a community is a place where, as cheesy as it sounds, you are the best 'you' you can be. When I am a part of DTA, I feel like a better person. Being part of a community like Downtown Art is rare and life changing!

3 Reasons I'm coming back to DTA

by Lena Feliciano Hansen (age 17)

1) A MOMENT TO BREATHE: Downtown Art, though a lot of work, is a place where I can put my stress from school and home aside. Here is where I can focus on something that I want to do and choose to put my time into. When I feel like I'm failing at everything else, I can come here and feel like I'm doing something right.

2) THE PEOPLE: I love everyone in DTA, I really do. It boosts me up to be around everyone. I trust everyone -- I don't have to worry about petty things that most people usually do when they're at school. We are all really supportive and we work to have everyone at their best. We are not about pulling people down and being on top. We truly work as a team.

3) TO ACT: I love to act! - and DTA has a great environment where I feel comfortable. I've grown a lot as a person, writer and actor here. Being on stage is my greatest fear, but it's also my greatest passion. I'm so thankful DTA's given me the chance to take on this paradox of mine and do what I love.

3 Ways 'The Writer's Project' made a Difference to My Writing

Alyssa Burgos is 18 and has written three plays over the past three years which have been workshopped and given staged readings through Downtown Art's Writer's Project.

I know you guys have heard this kind of thing before, so I’m going to make this as original as possible and interesting as I can. Okay? Okay. Here we go.

1. For starters, one big difference 'The Writers Project' made is that I have actual completed scripts. I have written a lot as a kid .. basically my whole life. I could complete short stories - no problem. Scripts I couldn’t. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because when you don’t have a deadline to pressure you to finish something, and you don’t have a deadline so deadly that if you don’t finish by then you will die (I tend to be very dramatic - I apologize), and you’re a procrastinator ... stuff just doesn’t get done.

But now I have three complete scripts, thanks to the Writer’s Project. And I have the ability to give myself a mental deadline, because I know that if I don’t finish the script I’m starting the damn thing won’t write itself and an amazing earth shattering idea just goes to waste in a file drawer.

2. I found out in the Writers Project that I’m a good comedic writer. Like, I can actually be funny and sorta witty. Who knew? I sure as hell didn’t. Lovely self discovery. So, yes, that made a difference because now I’m writing comedies.

3. Last, but not least, the third difference the project made... Confidence. Yeah, how original. Basically, when it comes down to it, when you’re doing something and you want to be good at it, and you can be good at it, its confidence that will put it over the top. (When I say this don’t get too confident so that you think you’re better than everyone else, even if it is true. No one likes an overly confident person. I think they would rather have a humble person than an overly confident, arrogant one instead.) But seriously, I did get more confidence in my writing. Not overly confident, mind you. Just a bit more than I was before. I mean, I still get nervous when someone first reads my writing. My hand or knee might shake a little bit and I’m mentally going crazy trying to figure out what I can do better, but, hey, that’s normal. (I hope. Well, at least that’s normal for me. It’s my normal.) Now if someone asks me if I can write, I’m no longer like all shy and saying “Yeah.... I guess I can.” Now I’m like “Yupp! I can write. It’s what I want to do.”

Oh, one thing that hasn’t changed…I don’t edit! I get someone to do it for me. (Oh, yeah, I got it like that. Okay, not really. My sister likes to do it for me. No, really. She does.)

- Alyssa

For more info on opportunities for teen playwrights at Downtown Art, go to www.downtownart.org

3 New Things I want to Try This Season

Ryan Gilliam is the Artistic/Executive Director of Downtown Art.

In the coming season, I want to take on:

1. Bringing together teen writers and composers to create new music theater in the ‘Eastside Stories' project. I am really psyched about this.

2. Finding new ways to work with staging and sound in ‘The Bowery Wars, Part II’. We've broken ground with our ways of connecting street performance and music. What new variations are possible?

3. Using technology and social media to support our projects. We’re going to have an Ipad in rehearsals, our blog is gathering steam, our Twitter followers are growing, and we're building a new Wordpress site for our Festival. Possibilities abound.

Ryan Gilliam, Artistic/Executive Director

Sharing the Streets

People stopped, watching, puzzled. 'What's happening?' they asked each other, looking at the silent, bowler-hatted actors, dancing somehow in unison. Then they'd start to notice that all the silent actors and the watchers that surrounded them had earphones. For them, this wasn't a silent mystery. This was a story - and the key to enter was the tiny mp3 players in their hands.

Yesterday, on a cold cloudy Sunday, we finished a four week run of 'The Bowery Wars, Part 1.' After weeks of rehearsal and performance on the crowded LES streets and alleys, our company of young performers couldn't be thrown. On Saturday, it rained for 15 minutes - the audience all pulled out their umbrellas, but the company didn't blink. Their concentration in the face of all NY threw at them was fierce and unwavering. They had a job to do and they never let go of it.

Not in the face of a hundred obstacles: not in the packed density of a street festival, not when surrounded by a hundred Amish travellers, not in the face of a frightening bicycle accident, a giant poodle, a wedding celebration, or any of the hundreds of encounters they had with New York over the past two months. New York, was, in fact, part of their story. They displaced no one. Instead they collaborated with the life and people of the city in ways that impressed me deeply.

It's impossible to go through this creative process, which after all is inspired by the city, and not grow in appreciation for the abundance of life that crowds the streets. It was an experience we won't forget - to bring our story of the Bowery to mingle and merge with all the other stories the city gives birth to every moment of every day.

A Home in the Streets

Two years ago, faced with our company's pending 'homelessness', I was feeling pretty down.

Sometimes having a small theater company is a bit like what I imagine it must feel like to run a small farm. Time doesn't really build security. Experience doesn't guarantee survival. At any moment, for almost any reason, at the whim of the weather or the markets or some new and destructive bug... you're back to zero. And you have to build everything up again once more.

What helped me pull myself up with a mental image of some tough little bootstraps, was, as it often is, the young members of our company.

I am their leader. That is my job. I have a responsibility to them.

Was I going to mope around in front of them? Share my bout of hopelessness? Let my resentment at our fate infect us all? That's not leadership. It just isn't.

And so I turned my mind to trying to find where that elusive silver lining might lie. Yes, I wept a bit in the middle of the night, but I got up in the morning and firmly directed myself (I'm a director after all) to find a way out.

Slowly, step by step, my mind nudged forward. One half thought a day. Or a week.

"Well... we don't have a home. We're on the streets. Then... we will make the streets our home. We don't have a building... but we have a stake in a vacant lot. The streets.. the lot... We will do theater without having a theater. What will we make? What will we make?? .. We'll make theater about the streets themselves. About what they've witnessed, what they've lived through. About the ghosts, the remnants of history that still cling to them."

Last spring, this experiment launched with 'The Waistmakers' Opera'. I still feel a wave of queasiness at the risky nature of that venture. Although the company and the board stuck with me, cheerfully, most have privately told me they never thought it would work. But it did. It did. Powerfully. And through it, although this sounds kind of dramatic, at least in an artistic sense, we were reborn.

Two weeks from today, we will open 'The Bowery Wars, Part 1'. We will be on the streets again, interacting with new ghosts. We will be on the streets -- ghosts ourselves -- as we perform behind, between, amidst, without stopping the business of the city and its people. I have found a new set of roots. A new sense of kinship to those who came before.

Home, it seems, is not a place we're searching for. It doesn't lie at the end of an odyssey. Home comes to us. When we are willing to accept the place we're in, home arrives.

Romeo and Juliet - thinking about tragedy

I'm not much of a tragedy lover. First, tragedy upsets me. It even kind of scares me. And second, I'm always thinking about how there was a way out. How it didn't have to end up a tragedy. Of course I'm not talking about disaster tragedies or innocent victim tragedies. No, I mean classic tragedies. Like Romeo and Juliet. Where the mix of circumstances and character has an outcome that feels like fate.

The great majority of us - the really great majority of us - are survivors. We might become bitter, emotionally limited, survivors - but, still, we don't go under. We live out our lives and we want them to be long.

Romeo and Juliet could have made different choices. They could have practiced patience, they could have plotted more deviously, they could have taken the risk of telling the truth. Romeo could have decided not to kill Tybalt despite all his provocation. Juliet could have told her parents, "I can't marry Paris, I'm already married. Call the holy Father, he will confirm it." And if they threw her out on the street, she could have found sanctuary somewhere in the large clan of Capulets or with a friend of Romeo's or even with the holy Father himself until, between her love and herself, enough money had been raised for her to travel to Mantua and join him in his exile.

The point is, of course, they didn't do any of these things. Their minds were full of love and death. Their mantra was: if I am not with you, I will die. If I can't be with you, I will kill myself. Life apart from you is excruciating, unbearable, intolerable, and I refuse to live it. They were extremists. Complete extremists. In the most gorgeous way possible.

But perhaps that is one of the defining characteristics of youth. Gorgeous, romantic extremism. Which we must get over -- or perish. The world is a deadly place for that kind of romantic longing. The daily life pretty much conspires against it. Romeo and Juliet had a host of obstacles in life -- but even if they had parents saying, 'Um.. she's only thirteen. How about you date a while and maybe not get married the day after you meet her at a dance, hmm?" Would they have felt that was an unbearable reality as well, impossible to reconcile with love?

Older people hold young people back. All the time. The daily round wears down extreme devotion, takes the knife edge off romance, cools down obsession - and if it doesn't, then the lightning strikes. We must give up our overwhelming longing, our romantic singlemindedness, our refusal to compromise... or tragedy lurks in the wings, waiting for its moment.

And what of the other tragedy? The death of our youthful purity and devotion? The creation of rationality, compromise, patience, the muting of our desires? Is this not also something we weep for?

And so perhaps it is not possible to reconcile ourselves to the death of these young lovers. We cannot dismiss them even if we privately know that their beauty is mixed with foolishness. Because we also know that every time Romeo and Juliet die, the world becomes a bit smaller.