In-School Performances
Bringing the Arts to the Students
Part of the Change for Kids mission is to expose our students to some of the city's most celebrated artists. By bringing performances to our schools we contribute to inspiring our students, teaching appreciation of the arts and building future performers and audience members.
Jazz @ Lincoln Center:
In 2001, CFK, in partnership with Jazz @ Lincoln Center, began providing educational musical performances to our students. In 2001-2002, Arturo Farrill and his Latin Jazz Quintet presented "Rhythm in Swing", illustrating how "swing", a concept central to jazz, is present in many types of music. Farrill and his band demonstrated how jazz serves as the roots for numerous musical genres. In 2002-2003, Mr. Farrill brought us "Arroz con Bebop", showing Latin music's role in helping to shape and influence jazz and vice versa. The feedback from students as well as administration has been astounding. J@LC has been so wonderful to us! This year and last, they have taken the students of P.S. 243, "Weeksville School" and P.S.154 "The Harriet Tubman Learning Center" to the Apollo Theatre for an encore performance led by Jazz @ Lincoln Center's founder, Wynton Marsalis
The Striking Viking Story Pirates:
For the past three years The Striking Viking Story Pirates (SVSP) and CFK have collaborated to bring literacy workshops and assembly performances to four under-resourced public schools in New York City. SVSP is a non-profit company that creates comic performances adapted from stories written by students. SVSP's workshops and shows aim to celebrate the words and ideas of young people and to promote literacy as a vital part of early childhood education. As the proud first major sponsor of The Story Pirates, CFK helped pilot many of the innovative educational techniques developed by SVSP. In the spring of 2007, the two groups reorganized their program to focus on a series of intensive writing workshops at PS 160 in Queens. The course gives students multiple opportunities to write in a playful environment, thereby building a love of language and communication, self-esteem, imaginative thinking, vocabulary skills, an understanding of narrative structure — and most importantly, it motivates students to keep writing long after the CFK and the Story Pirates have gone.