Design for Sharing: 50 years of getting L.A. K-12 students in front of live performances
Design for Sharing (DFS) is the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA's free K-12 arts-education program. Since 1969, DFS has been making the performing arts at UCLA an accessible and inspirational part of children’s lives. DFS provides interactive and educational arts experiences for more than 10,000 students each year, offering special performances at UCLA, and arts residency programs in their own classrooms. To help teachers extend the impact of performance experiences and art-making activities, DFS also produces educational materials, discussion guides and links to artists and arts information.
"Around the same time NASA was preparing to launch humans to the moon, a pair of women philanthropists in Los Angeles were meeting in their living rooms to think about how to make sure more local kids could experience the power of the performing arts.
For more than 50 years Design for Sharing, the education arm of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, has provided Los Angeles K-12 students an opportunity to come to campus and experience professional performing arts. During the past decade, the program has formed a strong bond with the UCLA Community School in Koreatown. A recent project offered the school’s fifth graders a chance to flex their creative spirit through poetry, folklore and visual artmaking. They were Mimi Perloff and Blanche Witherspoon, whose passion and organizational prowess resulted in Design for Sharing the Arts at UCLA. Now known as Design for Sharing, the program has in its first half century served nearly half a million K-12 students, giving them the opportunity to participate in live performing arts events on campus and in their classrooms.
They arrive in buses from across the city. They fill Royce Hall with a boisterous energy to watch renowned musicians, dancers and theater makers from around the world. They come in smaller groups for more intimate performances and art-making workshops.
“They are welcomed into this space — most often Royce Hall — and you just see them react to the grandness of the space itself,” said Meryl Friedman, director of education and special Initiatives for UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, which oversees Design for Sharing. “And then they get to experience this art, which they also don't either know much about or have access to. And it frankly blows their minds. Every program, small or large, involves some kind of direct interaction with the artist so that they get to hear about their lives and their story and what they do every day and how they got to where they are.”
And kids learn to dream by experiencing art and hearing the stories of artists.
“I think that’s the hugest impact that we have of everything that we do, is that these students see firsthand what is possible,” Friedman said. “Not necessarily that they could be an artist or a dancer, but that with some hard work and some passionate belief in what they are passionate about, that they really could do anything.”
Over the last 10 years, Design for Sharing staff have been embedded as arts educators at the Robert F. Kennedy UCLA Community School in Koreatown. Every year they work with about 100 fourth- and fifth-graders on projects that include creative writing, movement and visual arts practices.
In honor of Design for Sharing’s 50th anniversary, which happened to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, DFS staff developed a program for that year’s community school project that culminated with the students attending a performance from theater maker and mime Andrew Dawson. His “Space Panorama,” is a reenactment of the mission from launch to landing told only through hand and face gestures."— Jessica Wolf, Mar. 30, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the UCLA Newsroom website.
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