MOVE ME SOUL
December 10, 2014
Published in partnership with
INTRODUCTION
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ine years ago, I told my graduate school professor that I wanted my work with youth to have meaning. My main goal was to expose inner-city youth to the arts. I wanted the arts to be the vehicle to awaken their genius. I wanted to share the benefits I gained as an inner-city teenage dancer. I wanted to find scholarships to dance schools so teens could be immersed in professional training. Every year, I wanted to take a bus load of teens to the theater to see Alvin Ailey, Dance Theater of Harlem, Muntu Dance Theatre, Najwa Dance Corps and others. I wanted to give them a platform that allowed them to perform, travel, tour and prepare for life after high school. I wanted to make this vision come to life by teaming up with my peers and industry professionals who could sustain and grow this vision. Nine years later my vision has become real. And these pages tell the story. Sincerely, Ayesha Jaco
Mary Thomas goes through warm ups with the rest of the Move Me Soul company. DAVID PIERINI/Staff Photographer
Empowering young people to discover hope and build self-worth through inspiring performance based arts and student athlete development in Chicago’s most challenged communities.
Empowering young people to discover hope and build self-worth through inspiring performance based arts and student athlete development in Chicago’s most challenged communities. For further For further information contact: Andrew Born at p3president@gmail.com information contact, Andrew Born at p3president@gmail.com. @P3performs
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MOVE ME SOUL
Friends of BJ and Tom Walker BJ and Tom Friends of BJ and Tom Walker
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Pyramid Players Productions continues to nurture our community
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Move Me Soul, then & now
MOVE ME SOUL
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Here’s how it all began 2007
2008
■ Ayesha Jaco offers a dance class as alternative to gym at Austin High School, under the After
■ Move Me Soul formed as a teen dance company, under the umbrella of Austin-based Pyramid Players Productions (P3), its marketing, fundraising and production support arm.
School Matters club model.
BY DEB QUANTOCK McCAREY
s a freshman in high school, Ayesha Jaco, the founding director of Move Me Soul (MMS), joined Gallery 37, an After School Matters dance apprenticeship for adolescents. In that seminal time, in a room full of dancers, and under the tutelage of the program’s dance mentors, she learned how to dance, and gracefully found her calling. That, plus a few other influential factors, including growing up with a Dad who was an accomplished African drummer, led Jaco to earn a Bachelor and Masters of Arts Management in Youth and Community Development from Columbia College Chicago. She eventually founded Move Me Soul, an After School Matters dance and life skills development apprenticeship program she based at Austin High School and performs throughout Chicago, as well as across the State of Illinois. “MMS shows that excellence exists, beyond all of the violence in Austin, beyond the low performing schools in this area, and everything negative anyone can point out,” says Jaco, a professor in the Sociology department at Northeastern University, and director of the Lupe Fiasco Foundation. “Our students are going to college and launching good careers. They are being exposed to other places, and representing the Austin community on a global level, by studying abroad and coming back to share their experiences with their peers. This program shines brightly and has a lot of positivity because through it we are affecting lives in Austin through our arts and life skills programming.”
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
2009 ■ Area nonprofits collaborate with MMS to augment dance instruction with the provision of youth development workshops.
■ Yolanda Pittman Maloney joins program, and MMS becomes an After School Matters Dance Apprentice program providing stipends to 30 teens, and its first Winter and Spring dance concerts are staged in the auditorium of Austin High School.
■ The first prestigious nod arrives when MMS is selected to perform at After School Matters CityWide Showcase at the Chicago Theatre
scholarship to Lincoln University.
■ City Wide Tour is added to its performance schedule, and that year MMS performs at IAPHERD National Conference, St. Charles, IL. By Summer, the dance program grows to 60 teens, and becomes an After School Matters Advanced Apprenticeship. Adding to its diversity, 10 Young men join the roster.
6 PM, December 19: Public is invited to attend “None Greater than Love” in the Dr. Martin Luther King Auditorium at Austin High School, 231 N. Pine, Chicago.
Fiasco Foundation’s Off The Block Global Exchange program, which paired Austin teens with teens in South Korea.
■ Instructor Diana Muhammad joins staff.
■ MMS upgrades sound and lighting so the spaces in Austin would be more acoustically ready for MMS.
■ Jaco offers first Summer Intensive for 15 Austin Teens and first
■ Jessica Morrissette joins the teaching staff.
August: MMS performs for South African Women’s Day, participates in Bud Billiken Parade and in September, took the stage for 1st Annual AAHH Fest at Union Park 2014.
■ Steve Cobb and Chavunduka are honored as Community Artists Recipients at the Winter Concert.
June: Ensemble performs for South African Youth Day.
■ Performances staged at Kwanzaa at Chicago State University and Black Women’s Expo Gala.
March: Via a partnership with college enrichment programming, 10 graduating seniors take tours of Talledega College in Alabama, and MMS teens perform for Black Women’s Expo at McCormick Place.
■ MMS becomes an After School Matters Apprenticeship
MMS Summer Dance Concert is staged
2013
2012
■ The Alumni Company, now MMS 2, is Formed to create a year-round peerto-peer mentoring program, plus be a traveling performance dance troupe.
■ Career readiness and STD prevention workshops are added, and many teen dancers were selected to participate in Lupe
2010
2011 ■ First graduating ■ Total audiences class attends college numbers at annual ■ At its Spring concerts surpass 200. Concert, Lincoln University (MO) scouts MMS dancers, and MMS graduate, Shalonza Wickliffe, thanks in part to its college readiness component, receives a full dance
■ As the program grows to 45 teens, MMS produces and presents 2nd Annual Winter, Spring and Summer Concerts
■ Legacy of Oscar Brown Jr. is honored at Winter Concert.
February: Ten dancers perform for Jesse White Black History Celebration at the State of Illinois Building, and others are featured in Najwa Dance Corps Black History Month
Extravaganza at DuSable Museum.
■ Skill Up Chicago becomes a partner, and Lupe Fiasco Foundation’s study abroad efforts send two MMS dancers to Ghana, Africa.
January: MMS dance instructors co-facilitate in After School Matters Dance Winter Intensive with Hi Def Dance Ensemble at Roosevelt University.
DECEMBER 19, 2014 | 6:00 PM AUSTIN HIGH SCHOOL CAMPUS DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING AUDITORIUM 231 N. PINE CHICAGO, IL 60644
■ Performance at Community Forum at Center For Inner City Studies.
2014 ■ 600 audience members attend Winter, Spring and Summer shows.
■ Albert Williams, Artez Jackson and Rasheida Smith joins the teaching staff.
■ MMS becomes artists in residence at the Austin Resource Center, and two MMS Alumni members attend Children’s Defense Fund Conference in
Tennessee.
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What it takes P H OTO S BY DAV I D P I E R I N I
(Left) A dancer flies across the floor at Austin Town Hall. (Above) The group forms a circle and dancers take turns in the center. (Right) Bryonna Young says she wanted to stay away from drugs and violence and joined Move Me Soul because she wanted to be like the dancers. (Below) The company warms up at Austin Town Hall on a recent Saturday afternoon.
(Above) A lengthy warmup period gets the dancer ready for a rigorous rehearsal. The group forms a circle and dancers take turns in the center. (Right) Jonnerick Miller during a recent rehearsal at Austin High School. (Far right) Bryonna Young, 14, has been dancing with the group less than a year. (Below)
MOVE ME SOUL
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The men of Move Me Soul
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BY DEB QUANTOCK McCAREY
n mid-December, Brassel Jackson, 17, envisions that he will explode onto the auditorium stage at Austin High School in Chicago, feeling like a star, as he performs with his 50-member After School Matters apprenticeship dance and life skills development program, Move Me Soul (MMS). Jackson, one of six young men in the MMS dance performance group, auditioned for it as a high school freshman, hoping to bridge beyond hip hop, a dance he knew well. “I learned hip hop at age seven, but now in high school we are learning ballet, jazz, tap, African dance, some more hip hop, contemporary, etc.,” Jackson says. “Dancing is cleansing, both mentally and emotionally, because it helps me express myself, and lets me get my anger out.” Meanwhile, on a recent Saturday, sitting in a folding chair next to Jackson at Austin Town Hall, is Jonnerick Miller. The high school and program graduate is tapping his foot to the bed of background, on a break from his MMS rehearsal. Initially, with him being a reserved guy in the mostly female dance ensemble, participating in the after school dance program was a personal challenge that became transformative for him, in more ways than one. “I was kind of big, so lifting girls, that was hard for me. I still have a bit of a problem taking off my shirt and stuff, but I have taken off a lot of weight so far, and I can lift up girls now, even my dance instructor, and she is not light,” jokes Miller, a freshman at Kennedy King College in Chicago, where he is studying culinary arts and dance.
DAVID PIERINI/Staff Photographer
Brassel Jackson, one of six men dancing with Move Me Soul, describes dancing as “emotionally cleansing.” (Left) Vonzell Byrd is one of six male dancers in Move Me Soul. He hopes to dance professionally.
DAVID PIERINI/Staff Photographer
Another MMS graduate, Vonzell Byrd, recalls how he started, too: He was a freshman basketball jock who joined MMS as a way to meet girls and be a better “b-boy,” which is a guy who in the streets does hip hop, he says. “When the male choreographers started coming on, for me it got really hard, and I found out what a male dancer’s responsibilities really were,” he says. “You need to be strong to lift girls and just learning how to be the lead. That was hard.” Now, age 19, dancer Byrd has taken flight.
“I really didn’t know what a masculine dancer was until I went to an Alvin Ailey [American Dance Troupe] and Najwa Dance Corps, and saw all these professional dance companies on MMS field trips,” says Byrd. “I saw these guys in tights who had this muscle type that was killing it, so Move Me Soul was teaching me all this stuff about dance including discipline.” For Miller, growing up in the Austin neighborhood wasn’t easy; finding a group of like-minded peers with whom he could learn how to
dance in a safe space, and just hang out before and afterwards, has been a positive part of his personal growth. Now, to this program he is giving back whenever he can. “I would hope that one day these guys will be in the position that I am, because I think youth programs such as this one gives young men, as well as me, an outlet so there is a future here,” says Artez Jackson, 34, an MMS instructor and choreographer. “For our dancers, this is home. We are family, and the doors are always open for them.”
A special thanks to Ruth Kimble!
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A collective impact for urban youth BY D E B Q U A N TO C K M c C A R E Y
S
even years ago, when Sharif Walker, a regional director with After School Matters, first observed Ayesha Jaco, the founding director of Move Me Soul (MMS), she was teaching a high school dance class that was an After School Matters club. It was an alternative to gym class at Austin High School in Chicago. Time and again what struck Walker was the verve and enthusiasm of Jaco’s beginning dancers, all who were required to be there to receive a gym credit to graduate high school. The next year, with the enthusiastic support of Walker, also the founder of the nonprofit P3 (Pyramid Productions Players), Jaco successfully transitioned her dance class into an After School Matters pre-apprentice dance and life skills development program called Move Me Soul. In 2008, P3 became its umbrella organization to provide marketing, fundraising and technical production support. As a subset, P3 also organized
DAVID PIERINI/Staff Photographer
Jaco, Move Me Soul’s founder, hopes exposure to dancing and the arts is as life changing for the young dancers, like Ashley Smith, center, as it was for her. itself as an incubator for other youth programs, including Urban Hardball, a baseball initiative, and S.T.A.R.S, an afterschool theater program for high school age youth. “Move Me Soul is a collective of independent instructors and artists who are contracting with After School Matters to provide stipends via artistic programming at Austin
High School, but we are still independent from that, with our own programming as well,” Jaco says. Their collective impact… Over time it has been Jaco and Walker’s shared aim to leverage the resources of a cross section of key stakeholders to maintain and extend their reach to urban youth through arts programming, primarily deliv-
ered through the lens of dance. In Summer 2015, on behalf of MMS, Walker says P3 will launch Move Me Too, a pilot dance program geared to elementary age children. The effort will be powered by Jaco’s cohort of MMS program graduates, who as college students and program mentors will carry on the legacy of MMS at community sites including Austin Community Resource Center, 501 N. Central Avenue in Chicago. “It will be where our high school students and our program alumnae come back to mentor elementary school kids in dance, but at the same time they will be giving them these foundational things that they have developed through the other relationships in our MMS model,” says Walker. “What we are doing with Move Me Too will be beyond the scope of After School Matters, and because of that it will need additional funding and support.” In Fall 2015, Walker’s hope is to begin working with the Chicago Public Schools’ The Creative Schools Initiative, to provide grant funded MMS after school dance and
A Leap into a Legacy ■ Read more about Move Me Soul
and its dancers ■ Watch video
LOG ON TO AUSTINWEEKLYNEWS.COM life skills development programming as an after school option in public elementary schools. “When you look at other communities that are doing well, they have strong arts, sports and youth programming,” says Walker, adding that P3, on behalf of MMS, is currently working with Austin Community Resource Center, the former YMCA of Austin, to create a community center for youth and working with the Chicago Park District to put together a larger and collaborative outdoor performance. “We have reached the point where MMS can say to the City of Chicago, listen, we have stuck with it. We have found that people like what we are doing, and now we are ready to get to the next level with it.”
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C o mi n g t o g e t h e r i s a b e g i n n i n g . K e e p in g t o g e t h e r i s progress. W o r k i ng t o g e t h e r i s s u c c e s s.
P3 congratulates Move Me Soul and thanks Ayesha Jaco, Rashieda Smith, Artez Jackson and Diana Muhammad Vernis Likes Keith Daniel Natasha Walker LeShele Silas-Armour
Pyramid Players Productions
Conrad Terry Joy Dickson Andrew Born
@P3performs