Imagine this. The story you see on the Schonberg Theater stage has been likened to a modern-day “Girl Meets Boy” fairy tale. The set is a mix of New York streetscape and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.
And the players are a mix too: professional dancers from Born Dancing and those with challenges from Students with Disabilities.
Born Dancing, one of the seven recipients of 2016 grants from the Emily List Fund for Performing Arts Therapy, provides quality dance instruction to students with disabilities and works with high poverty schools in the Bronx to produce original full-scale performances, according to founder Melissa van Wijk.
Emily’s grant will help mount the next performance — fueled by imagination and a commitment to inclusiveness — in February at the Schonberg in New York City.
Emily, an actor and dancer, lost her life to a rare pediatric cancer in 2011 at the age of 26. With the help of friends and family, we remember and honor her through this fund, which over the past five years has awarded 26 grants totaling more than $30,000.
The grants are awarded to those who are using the performing arts to help others who are disadvantaged — one dance, one play, one song at a time.
To mark the five-year anniversary of Emily’s Fund, we awarded seven grants this year: three for dance, three for theater and one for music.
The music grant went to Lorrie Kubicek, Emily’s music therapist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who bought a set of Tibetan singing bowls for use by MGH oncology patients.
Tibetan singing bowls have been used for centuries for meditation, deep relaxation, stress reduction and holistic healing. Having the bowls at MGH allows the therapists to bring moments of peace and joy to patients — “an incredible gift to the many people we serve each day,” Lorrie says.
The grant recipients for dance, in addition to Born Dancing, are Amherst Ballet Theatre Co. and FlynnArts Dancing for Parkinson’s.
Amherst Ballet received a grant to partner with the Springfield Boys & Girls Club to introduce ballet to an underserved, inner-city population.
Director Sueann Townsend said many children in Springfield count on the club to provide them with an environment conducive to extracurricular activities. The grant will help provide “a new and creative outlet for these youths,” Sueann says, “many of whom have no arts exposure.”
Emily was both a dancer and an instructor at Amherst Ballet, so it seems especially appropriate that one of her grants supports this work.
The grant to FlynnArts is the second from Emily’s Fund. Last year’s grant, according to Christina Weakland, Flynn Arts Director of Education, allowed the center to drop the fee for classes, and since then, “attendance has skyrocketed.”
In 2016-2017, the Flynn hopes to build on its success by doubling the number of classes offered, including some off-site at local senior centers. Classes are taught by Sara McMahon, a FlynnArts faculty member, performer and educator trained in the Dance for PD method.
Christina wrote last year: “Thanks to Emily for having cared about the kinds of things that still deeply matter to people. That she makes a difference even now must mean so much to you. It certainly does to us.”
The three theater grants, which speak to Emily’s love for the stage, went to old friends and new. The new recipient is “Shakespeare in Prison,” founded by Frannie Shepherd-Bates and under the auspices of the Detroit Public Theatre.
Emily acted and taught for years with Hampshire Shakespeare and its Young Company, and she was working in Winchester, England, to bring theater to those who were homeless and in prison when she fell ill.
For this project, women in the Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Michigan, choose one of Shakespeare’s plays, then work for nine months toward a fully staged performance for the prison community. Through the process, the women learn public speaking, teamwork and leadership skills, Frannie says, and they learn to trust.
After four years, she says, the recidivism rate for participants is 11 percent, compared to the national rate of 67 percent.
Old theater friends and grant recipients include Kimberly Khare, who received a grant for her “Theater Takeover!” project to bring theater workshops to Next Step’s 2016 summer “campferences” that serve young adults with life-threatening illnesses.
The grant will expand Kimberly’s “Expressive Arts Therapies Theater Team” to assess, design, implement and facilitate theater programming at the camps and through the next academic year, as well as to explore a relationship with Next Step’s Central Square, Boston, neighbor, “Improv Asylum.”
Next Step, Kimberly says, wants these young people “to have the resources they need to dream up, write down and act out a good, heart-filled, connected and confident life.” “They need a new definition of drama in their lives,” she says.
Finally, Sarah Bailey, director of education at Weathervane Playhouse, received her third grant to provide monthly “Imagine That” workshops for pediatric oncology patients and their caregivers at Akron Children’s Hospital. Emily’s grant will be used to expand this interactive theater and movement-based program, which is an alternative form of entertainment and healing.
“Thanks to your continued support, patients and their caregivers showed marked improvement in just 45 minutes of structured dramatic play,” Sarah says. “Children were able to be children — not just ‘sick.’”
Sarah first sought a grant to start the workshops in 2014 after one of Weathervane’s young actors was diagnosed with the same cancer Emily had, and she saw how effective theater was in helping him through his treatment. “I hope to do Emily proud,” Sarah says.
She and “Imagine That” always do. And so will they all.
Karen List is Emily’s mom and a professor in the Journalism Department at UMass. For more information, visit emilylistfund.com.