For 24 years, our Young Theaterworks program has served highest-risk and educationally underrepresented youth in L.A.-area public high schools with high impact, project-based learning that improves academic achievement and creative engagement. Strengthening students’ literacy practice, and collaboration and communication skills, our arts education programming also empowers them to become stewards of their community’s history.
Participating in our programs helps students:
Boost literacy and academic performance.
Increase creativity, communication and collaboration skills.
Integrate social skills with community-enhancing values.
“Young Theaterworks gives students the opportunity to use art as a tool of introspection for growth. As they engage in the process, they learn more about themselves and each other, which in turn then creates a more cohesive and safe classroom community. ”
SOCIAL JUSTICE RESIDENCY
Our intergenerational Social Justice Residency program is focused on social justice activism and systemic racism. During this 10-week in-class residency conducted by teaching artists, students interview community leaders of art and activism and write a script together in groups. Teaching artists lead them through the process of writing a play collaboratively and theatre tech professionals guide the students through using multimedia, such as music, to accent their storytelling. The students perform their short plays as a concert reading for an audience of their peers. For many, this is their first time performing in front of an audience.
This Fall, 9th grade students at Math, Science, and Technology Magnet Academy at Roosevelt High School interviewed four community leaders in social justice activism. The students used this experience as inspiration to collaboratively write plays based on the first-hand accounts of the community leaders. Seeds of Resistance 2025, a live fully-staged performance of these new plays will be shared with the public on February 6th, 2025 at the brand new Roosevelt Performing Arts Center.
Click the image below to RSVP for free.
Father Greg Boyle
Nobuko Miyamoto
Ruben Guevara
Victoria "Vickie" Castro
“The workshop made us open up to our thoughts and our dreams. It made me reflect and think about the person I am.”
Art of the Monologue
Our newest workshop continues to serve underrepresented youth by encouraging self-expression. This workshop conducted by teaching artists designed to have the same racial, ethnic, and economic make-up as the youth guides the students through writing and performing transformative personal stories. These monologues will be presented by students before a special morning matinee of Adobe Punk in March, 2025.
young theaterworks history
Click through the slideshow for a visual history of our Young Theaterworks program.
i: Witness, A Chicano Legacy Project play
Hundreds of East L.A. highest-risk students have been engaged through About…Productions’ Chicano Legacy Project. They’ve mined their community’s rich cultural and political history by interviewing significant Chicano elders, writing plays, and sharing the stage with professional actors to present their original work to their peers and the public. In 2017, these students had a brand-new opportunity to explore and share their Chicano Legacy and for the first time in the history of Young Theaterworks, created and co-produced a full production premiere of their original work, I:WITNESS!
This program is made possible by the generous support of our sponsors:
