East Bay Center for the Performing Arts
 Mien priest and artist, Yoon Saelee, with apprentice performing Orn-cho, an ancient Mien ceremony |
Thirty-one years later, their dream has come to full life in the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts. Now one of the oldest, largest, and best-known community-based minority cultural centers in the country, the East Bay Center offers thousands of children and young adults rigorous, sequential training in traditional and contemporary - as well as rare and non-commercial - art forms and regular opportunities to perform in community festivals, in-house productions, and life-cycle rituals. Young people learn to play steel drums or classical guitar, study ballet or the huapango dance repertoire, write plays, produce dramatic and documentary films, tell folk tales, or participate in Laotian Family New Year celebrations, ancestral Ghanaian festivals or traditional rural Mexican fandangos.
Home to 10 culturally specific resident companies and 20 master artists who work on a continuing basis with young people, the Center employs in total an artistic faculty of 70, serving 2,000 young people a year in long-term, sequential classes operating at a 15,000 square-foot main site and in 15-20 public schools and neighborhood sites. Many participants go on to advanced-level classes; some attend the Center's Intensive Summer Institute, a five-week immersion in comparative study, integrating cross-cultural and multidisciplinary training and human perception. A number become teachers, interns, and mentors themselves.
The Center's commitment to the cultural and artistic life of the community is exemplified in its 40-some collectively driven, original theater and film works; in its work with adolescents caught up in the justice system; in its collaboration with group homes, homeless shelters, and other youth-centered programs. By linking personal motivation with artistic programs that enhance young people's ability to engage with their environment, the Center encourages them to imaginatively transform it.
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Bay Center for the Performing Arts 339 11th Street Richmond, CA 94801 Phone: 510-234-5624 Fax: 510-234-8206 E-Mail: jordan@eastbaycenter.org URL: www.eastbaycenter.org Focus: Dance, Film, Music, Theater, Videography, Comparative Study Program Number Participating: 2000 Ages: 3-21 Annual Budget: $1,098,000 "The arts are a celebration of human beings behaving well. When you bring students back again and again and again to the practice, you see them grow and develop." Jordan Simmons Artistic Director, East Bay Center for the performing Arts |