CA.S.T.ing a Light on Talent
As play auditions got under way in Hillsboro, NH, the director asked Chelsy Starkweather,13, the first and youngest of the night’s auditions, to repeat her monologue, twice.
At first, she hid behind a baseball cap and sat on a chair, something most play directors would forbid. But Justin Scarelli, 22, who founded Community Arts as a Stage for Teens (C.A.S.T.), knew how to draw out Starkweather’s confidence.
She repeated her monologue, standing and one last time without her baseball cap. After her very last line on her third performance, Scarelli and Chelsy’s peers broke out in applause. The smile on Starkweather’s face proved that, at C.A.S.T., something special is happening.
“This is a great way to let kids have a chance to act and learn to direct because school drama programs can be limiting,” Tom Ellsworth, 17, the student Chair of C.A.S.T. said.
That something special was what Scarelli had in mind in the summer of 2004 after he helped direct a documentary about media literacy for Project Genesis, a nonprofit teen center and in Hillsboro. After spending the summer with the teens, he saw their creativity grow; he also noted that their desire to learn more about directing and the arts grew as the weeks went on. By the time the documentary was finished, Scarelli spoke with Deborah Whitaker-Duncklee, a youth counselor who runs Project Genesis, about the possibility of extending the summer media project throughout the year.
“During the summer everyone got to see creativity as something tangible,” Scarelli said. “We wanted to bring what we were doing into school drama programs.”
Scarelli and Whitaker-Duncklee found that schools were not receptive to their ideas, so they decided to start a program through Project Genesis. The only problem was money. After speaking with Peter Brigham, the director of youth services in Hillsboro, Scarelli put together a proposal for his program and began to search for funding.
“I didn’t have any [creative] guidance so I wanted to be able to give that to the kids,” Scarelli said. “But it’s very hard to get financial support.”
As of December 4, 2004, Brigham’s budget for youth services in 2005 is $60,000 with counseling services, or $40,000 without. That money is distributed throughout Hillsboro and nearby Deering, NH, for all youth-oriented programs and is used up rather quickly. While the budget does not assign a specific amount of money to each service provided, this budget ultimately needs outside assistance.
Claire suddenly rushes downstairs to the basement. She begins to look under the bed and feels a paper and grabs it and it reads:
Has the New York Times negatively stereotyped Arab Muslims for the past forty years? The goal of this research project is to reveal the negative stereotypes directed towards Arab Muslims in the New York Times. The critical focus of the research is the consistency of the negative stereotypes. The underlying focus is what theoretical and historical effects result from the negative stereotypes.
category ‘Arab–Middle Eastern–Muslim’ enemy and rendered persons associated with this category as embodying a ‘culture’ and/or ‘religion’ th...
Movies, one can argue, are one of America’s greatest pastimes. Unfortunately, after 9/11, films have become increasingly prejudiced against American Muslims. In movies Muslims are frequently portrayed negatively. According to James Emery, a professor of Anthropology, Hollywood profits off of “casting individuals associated with specific negative stereotypes”. This is due to the fact that viewers automatically link characters with their clichéd images (Emery). For Muslims, the clichéd image is of the violent fundamentalist, who carried out the terroristic attacks on 9/11. As a result, the main stereotypes involved in movies display Muslims as extremists, villains, thieves, and desert nomads. An example of a movie that has such a negative character role for Muslims in film is Disney’s cartoon Aladdin, depict...
The omnipresence of the American and European culture in the countries of the Middle East is a universally recognized phenomenon. The culture, thoughts and status quo of the people have been and continually are being changed and challenged due the mass spread of American goods and ideas. The American national culture largely revolves around the wants, needs and goals of the individual. As the one of the greatest superpowers of the time, its influence on the global community towards the focus on the individual is nothing short of inevitable. The movies, clothing and new age mentality of America are sending all people regardless of age, upbringing and locale, into a grand scale social transition. The Arabs and Muslims beliefs, traditions and entire state of being are no longer as they were 20 or 30 years ago. The women of the novels, Nadia, Fatima, Umm Saad, Maha, Asya, and Su’ad, each living in various Arab countries with unique situations of their own, all are united on the common ground of American introduced idea and concepts of individualism through such venues as feminism, capitalism, sexism and consumerism which adversely affect their society.
“Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass, or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky” (Quindlen 82). Anna Quindlen is an author of children’s books and is well known for her comments on contemporary life. In her work “Doing Nothing is Something”, Quindlen makes an observation about the lack of free time that children have in their lives. She begins with a comparison to her life as a child, explaining the boredom that she used to have during the summer. However, she continues with how children now are as overscheduled as their parents, which reduces the amount of time they have for creativity. Furthermore, she explains that this is because of the parents’ expectations for what their child will do in the future and what they could do if left alone. As a final point, she illustrates her belief that children can still have free time, despite the immense number of activities that can take place. Despite Quindlen’s point, she has missed the importance of children being able to find creativity in such a busy schedule.
Later that night still feeling uneasy, Janine, tries to think of how to tell her mother, Nancy of what just happened. All of a sudden she becomes distracted by water dripping in the next room.
When I visited, I witnessed the stage managers at the Cloud 9 rehearsal leading their first read-through rehearsal. Their stage managers were experienced, yet dedicated to learn everything. Tommy, their stage manager embodied everything I’ve been taught by my theatre mentors. I only needed to peek at his script, with its double-paged blocking printouts and color-coded page tabs to find what I could do better with my own. He was calm and proficient while assisting the director and other rehearsal guests.
As the curtain came down, the audience roared. The same little girl is now twenty years old. She gets out her cell phone and quickly sneaks a picture of the beautiful golden curtain. Captioning the photo as “the best spectacular on earth”, she posts it to Instagram and hits over one hundred “likes” within minutes. She walks outside and looks up at the marquee. With a smile on her face, she walks to the subway dreaming of the day she will be on that stage. This celebrated theatre has found a place in her heart, creating an eternal love for New York and an eternal love for the beautiful landmark that is Radio City Music Hall.
In the essay, the writer acknowledges the misunderstandings that come from media images by explaining the contrasts between these images and the teachings of the faith to support her claim that fear is the reason for this misconception. The conception that many people have of Muslims is that they are terrorists, anti-Semites, and fanatics. This conception exsists because television news and newspapers support that stereotype. The broadcast of such stereotypes encourages fear and accusations of the Islamic relegion's teachings. The writer explains that Islam teaches peace, tolerance, and equality. She further states that Muslims shown in the media have violated these teachings ...
Richard Stam argues that the study of racial issues in film has been bombarded by critics who reject certain films on the basis of misrepresentation. That is to say that stereotypes, sh...
...al initiatives and my goal is to establish an educational center that will focus on disadvantaged youth and their parents. I was the first in my family to attend college and I believe through helping others, they too can become “firsts.”
The rise of terrorism and extremism in the Middle East during the time this piece was composed prompted Mohi-Ud Din to engage in a passionate argument about how these terrorists have ruined the image of Muslims. He explicitly highlights the main points of his argument by using transitional words such as firstly, secondly, and thirdly. He initiates his argument by proposing that the media’s one-sided focus on Muslim extremists prevent the viewers from recognizing that the majority of Muslims are not violent. Next, he debunks the stereotypes Americans have about Muslims and then he shifts his concern to how America’s political and military actions have exploited Muslim countries. He concludes his argument by explaining why Islam is not a threat to
We live in an age and time where media influence is at its highest. The media has an impact on us as an audience through every possible medium including both television and print media. As scientists find and cure diseases, as America finds a new country to invade, as the European markets fluctuate, there has been one constant subject prevalent in the Western media- Islam. 1.6 billion people in the world are of the Muslim religion (Desilver 2013), making it the world’s second largest religion, second to Christianity. Even prior to the events of 9/11, the religion of Islam has been under scrutiny by the media. Edward Said, infamous for his works on Orientalism has greatly contributed to our understanding of the Western misunderstanding of the Eastern based religion. Said has defined Orientalism as the Western’s style of domination, reconstruction, and authority over the Orient (Said 1978: 3). Orientalism has observable effects in the most forms of media. As a result, and irrational fear of Islam and those that practice the religion began-Islamophobia. As defined by the International Civil Liberties Alliance, Islamophobia is “a term which is widely used by NGOs and frequently appears in the media, tends to denote fear, hatred or prejudice against Islam and Muslim” (ICLA 2013). This project will attempt to understand what the audience perception is about Islamophobia in the media. It will aim to uncover the ways in which television channels amplify common misperceptions about Islam. As a Muslim myself, this is an area that has always been of interest to me, and like many audiences I have been able to witness the dimensions of Islamophobia s depicted by the western media. After the events of September 2001, the fears of Islam and ...
Beghetto edited a collection of an essay that shared ideas on creative approaches to improving our schools in the book Nurturing Creativity in The Classroom. In one of the essay title Developing Creative Productivity in Young People Through the Pursuit of Ideal Acts of Learning by Joseph S. Renzulli and Catharina F. De Wet they explains how with the current education system students how very few chances to experience the world around them, and without this chance to see the world as a whole through the lens of their own interest they may never find their “calling”. Many schools attempt to create programs that can fulfill this need for real world experiences, an example of a program that focuses directly on students interest are enrichment clusters. Essentially in these enrichment clusters, students from different grades who share the similar interest come together once a week and work on produce a product or service that solve a real world problem. Now even with this students may not feel motivated to actually take this experience and benefit from it because the product may lack exposure to an audience of higher status if a student knew someone who they idealize was coming to see their creation they would but more attention to detail when finalizing their