With the end of March we saw Chicago thaw out a bit as Winter Part II ended and Spring Part II began.  March also signaled the end of the quarter for our students, it is hard to believe we only have one quarter left in the school year.  Time flies when you're having fun!  Everyone is back, and ready to go after Spring Break.  Our school is ready to go into full Spring Showcase Preparation Mode.  Let's check in with our classes to see what everyone accomplished last month!

Our students dove deep into Pixel Art this month, using one of our favorite programs, Aseprite.  Aseprite is an industry standard Pixel Art program that is used in Illustration, Animation, and Gaming Design.  Students learned to break objects down to their most basic, recognizable forms through minimization exercises and prompts.  We completed our annual "Cozy Comfy Place" project once students were better used to the program.  Students were asked to design their ideal Cozy, Comfy Place in Aseprite.  The results had us all wishing we could visit these places in real life!  We also use Pixel Art and Aseprite as a jumping off point for first year students for Animation!  Students worked hard to create their first animations in Aseprite, a simple but essential Idle Sprite Animation!

So far so good. Our students continue to be productive with our sketchbook project. This week we are adding paper making to our repertoire. Who knew dryer lint could be upcycled or recycled into art. We have been looking at many fantastic examples of homemade paper. The inspiration is endless. Everyone is eager to try their hand at working with clay. We are also beginning to explore ideas for that as well.

March went by really quickly for us in culinary! We had a few Chopped Challenges that made us think outside the box when it came to cooking rice and scrambled eggs! What we mainly worked on, however, is our final showcase projects. This year, we are making exhibits based on recipes that mean something to us. The chefs have been working hard. They have planned the menu, penned the grocery lists, tested and created a recipe page and video. For the next few months, we will be learning each other's recipes.Something we are very excited to do!

In Dance class our students worked hard on some Group Choreography!

This last month, students have been working hard and creating the very first pieces for their sustained investigations.  It's been amazing watching this process begin, and we look forward to seeing more and even better art get made.  Here are some previews of the variety of work getting made, but stay tuned for more!

The Deep Dish Festival was such a fruitful experience! Our students received really positive feedback and they got to attend informative masterclasses and a very fun concert. We hope to showcase some of the Deep Dish student performances in our Spring Showcase, so be on the lookout for that. Looking forward we have lots of new projects in the works!Our students are getting ready to submit their compositions for the amazing Art On The Mart! Their projects consist of recording a solo piece that will accompany a projection of visual arts made by other CPS students. The “stage” where our students’ original music will be played is the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago. What an amazing opportunity!

This month we screened our long take films and watched some famous long takes in the works of Alfonso Cuaron, Alfred Hitchcock & Martin Scorsese.  We continued our film journey; working on the fundamentals of lighting.  We looked at exposure, practical lighting & 2-point lighting.  We also screened several film clips analyzing lighting to better understand its effects in a scene.  We practiced some lighting techniques in class and independently and watched “Poltergeist” for good measure.  As we approached the spring break respite, we began discussing pre-production planning with blocking, storyboards and screenwriting.  We screened “Miss Juneteenth” and had our first of several industry professionals come speak to our class; Director and teacher, Mr. Vincent Singleton.  We also learned that one of our very own students, Ms. Rachel Bowman, is selected to have her work shown at the Chicago International Film Festival this year as part of the CineYouth selection.  We could not be more proud and excited.  April is going to be an exciting month!

Photos below are of of Director Vincent Singleton; Vincent Singleton explaining overhead diagrams for planning a film shoot.

March FLEW by for the Theatre class. We tried our hand at play-writing working with a Pegasus Theatre Chicago’s teaching artist Jose Nateras, a professional playwright, college professor, screenwriter, and actor who lives in Los Angeles. Using the six pillars of play-writing -- character, dialogue, conflict, setting, plot, and theme -- Jose walked the students through each pillar using well-known stories from Disney to Horror films as well as students’ work. The assignment was to write a ten-minute play, about ten pages. Some of our students wrote scripts that are over thirty pages.

If this weren’t enough, we also had three students make it to the City-wide finals of the National August Wilson Monologue Competition. There were sixteen students from across the city and region in the finals and we represented almost 20% of them. Congratulations to Donald Pieters (repping Kenwood where he did the bulk of his coaching), Laylah Freeman, and Patrianna Scales!! Great job! 
Finally, we celebrated our quality work with a virtual field trip to see Christina Anderson’s How to Catch Creation at Goodman Theatre. We needed that spring break rest!

February went by quicker than we expected at Advanced Arts.  A month filled with snow and freezing temperatures meant our young artists and instructors were able to stay cozy indoors and concentrate on their craft.  Let's check in with our classes to see what everyone accomplished last month!

The class has a great time working with Ms. Emily and the Animation Students on the collaborative Zines unit. The diversion from our usual routine has made the students more open and aware of what goes on in other classes and students enjoyed interaction with students from other classes in critiques. We are still putting the finishing touches on the Zine, “Tales from the Times of Covid” by recording a live reading. We are also in the process of dove-tailing the project with our second of the semester, “The Artists Sketchbook”. Using a sketchbook each student will collect ideas, drawings, writings and collage, conventional and unconventional, into their sketchbook to make a unique record of this time and experience in their lives.

This month we worked hard on our Zine unit collaboration with Creative Arts & Ceramics, Animation and Photography. Students enjoyed working with other AAP classes and teens. While drawing is not our first skill, you wouldn’t know it. We have such a talented group of kiddos!

As our month winded down, we started back to business as usual---exploring flavor profiles, tastes and we are warming up with a few cooking challenges. We also had a guest from Lettuce Entertain You, Monique Hunt, who was a breath of fresh air!

Our prep for Showcase begins this month as we start our personal recipe projects. We cannot wait until Spring!

Education leader Sir Ken Robinson, one of the most popular TED speakers of all time, asked the question, “Do schools kill creativity?”. His speech has been referenced by students and teachers alike.  This month, AAP Dance Department is celebrating CPS and their understandings of the importance of arts in education throughout our communities both nationally and globally.  The department is putting together a video entitled “Imagine if…”

Examples include:
Imagine if creativity was as important as literacy in schools.
Imagine if we recognized that intelligence is multifaceted.
Imagine if we were brave enough to take risks and make mistakes in our learning.

The dance department will be part of this global conversation by continuing to celebrate Sir Ken Robinson’s legacy, while inspiring others to realize the value of arts.

As the second semester begins, and the tone of the class shifts from foundational work to individual studies, we have the class recreate and redefine an older piece that they created in the past, when they were less practiced at their craft.  These "reframed" pieces can really help show an artist just how far they've come in just a few months.

From there, we have each student start to plan for their sustained investigative work.  One advantage that we've found in the time of remote learning, is that a Pintrest wall can serve as a mood board/ or aesthetic collection, which can reflect an interest in a particular style and subject for each individual artist.  From there, we instructors show similar work, talk about techniques illustrated in those collections, and most fun of all, fleshing out ideas with each artist.  Stay tuned for what comes next!

Our Rock Stars wrapped up small ensemble projects with some amazing original projects and a blazing cover of a saucy Spanish rock tune. They used newly acquired skills in digital studio music to record their independent parts and engineered them together in a Digital Audio Workstation.

Their work will have been adjudicated by Industry Professionals at Columbia College’s Annual Deep Dish Music Festival, where they will participate in workshops ranging from audition practices to improvisation to a performance by Chicago’s very own award winning guitarist, Isaiah Sharkey. We’re well into our songwriting journey as we prepare for upcoming composition exhibitions, which lead to our ultimate gig: the Spring Showcase.

With several months of knowledge behind us, music theory students have been able to take the skills they have learned and start to create longer compositions on their own.  We used our knowledge of musical form and musical modes to create modal works of length.  Students presented their own songs for the class to analyze and discuss.  

As February is Black History Month, we also spent time
studying Jazz History, the 12 bar blues, and how African-Americans created an entirely new style of music that changed the course of music history.  We enjoyed listening to early jazz music and all of the music that came after.

We are looking forward to perfecting our 4 Part Chorale composition skills and taking our first full practice exam in March!  Onwards and upwards!

The students have been exploring the foundations of narrative filmmaking.  We reviewed  shot sizes and camera movements and discussed breaking down a scene for point of view, and we explored how to make a scene visually appealing using motivated camera movements. Students watched and analized Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” and “Rope” to inform their own work on blocking, staging and camera movement.  The projects we have been working on have been really exciting and have included creating "animatics" (animated short films of their storyboards).   Students are currently completing a "long take" film that requires them to block camera and actors in a single long shot for an entire one page script.

A lot has happened since our last blog update in October.  We celebrated Thanksgiving, the Holiday Season, the New Year, and launched our Winter Showcase in partnership with The Design Museum of Chicago.  We also saw many of our Advanced Arts Seniors exhibit work in the All City Senior Portfolio Show, and even had two of our own Advanced Arts Students; Abby Moon-Sarudi of Animation & Sequential Arts, and Victoria Mac of Drawing & Painting help introduce the exhibition on Youtube Live.  After the Holiday Break, everyone hit the ground running to finish the second quarter of the year off on a high note!  Let's check in, and see what has happened in our classrooms this past month...

January has been a busy month for Animation & Sequential Arts.  First Year students have been working on world creation concept art, focusing specifically on background art.  First year students have been learning to create worlds that feel real, fleshed out, and lived in; while also learning illustrative techniques to utilize in Adobe Photoshop.  Second Year students have been working the entire month on a long term, large scale project to independently publish a large-scale Zine.  Each Zine will be at least 20 pages upon completion, and students were asked to focus on multi-frame page formatting.  The first year students are now finishing up their background art creations, and will be joining the second year students in learning about Zines and Mini-Comics.  Second year students will act as class leaders to help instructors teach the very physical concept of Zines remotely. 

The students in Advanced Culinary Arts continue to amaze us with not just their culinary skills, but with their creative talents, their care and integrity towards how they treat each other, their willingness to share, their ability to go with the flow, and their intense wisdom, for being so young.
This quarter, we eased back in and did a mix of creative culinary activities to spark new understandings of old culinary terminology and technique, as well as the introduction of a little more. We also explored topics in social justice in the food world and spent a few weeks really having great conversations about how the farming and food industry can do better, and what we can do.
We’ve also had a few “Chopped Challenges”, including a Ramen Challenge, a Historical Menu Challenge that a few teens brought to life, and an Eggcelent challenge using...you guessed it...eggs.
This class is an absolute pleasure to teach!

What began as a sprint has become a marathon of on-line teaching, blended with authentic learning and creativity from around the globe.  AAP Dance students are learning new technologies and connecting them with authentic learning through their recent creation: “Exquisite Corpse.” This was originally a pick-up game or practice where one person picks up where the previous one left off.
 
Inspired by filmmaker and dance professor Mitchell Rose, AAP’s dance students created their own version of, “Exquisite Corps”, where the dancers became contemporary choreographers, passing the dance along to each other.  Each dancer began their movement with an action or position that ended the previous dance.  The dances are just a few seconds in length and happen in different locations.  The editing and camera create a seamless connection between each choreographer.  The AAP Dance students, now choreographers, join a global group of revered choreographers who have been part of their own,“Exquisite Corps.”
 
Check out the final results here:

After a well needed Holiday Break, the Modern Band students returned and are ready to COMPOSE! Our class is going to participate in the Deep Dish Festival curated by the Columbia College of Chicago in which their works will be showcased and workshopped by professionals. Said festival is curated by the  Grammy-winning guitarist Isaiah Sharkey (John Mayer, D’Angelo, and Paul Simon). Our Modern Band students received professional recording equipment to be able to pursue their compositional projects for this Festival thanks to our AAP administrators Brian and Melisa! Their studio bundles included a microphone and an interface that you can see in the pictures below. We can’t wait to share with everyone all the creativity of our students! They are all hard at work writing lyrics, learning chords, coming up with beats, and practicing the parts to their very original songs. This unit segues into future composition and music tech units that will guide the students to our Spring Showcase and Original Music Exposition.

Students came back from our winter break and hit the ground running, creating some wonderful, sophisticated 4 part chorales.  We’ve dug deep into the rules of creating a captivating and interesting melody as well as the intricacies of harmonizing using alto, tenor, and bass.  We’ve also been spending more time training our ears!  Part of music theory is also aural skills, the ability to hear music and immediately dictate and analyze.  It’s a skill musicians practice their entire careers, but we are becoming more and more advanced by the day.  Through sight singing, melodic dictation, and harmonic dictation, advanced analysis of music is becoming easier each class. 

WE’RE BACK... And we are so happy to be back in class, everyone was super ready and excited to get back into talking about photography. We started the first week back into critique based on the Homage assignment we gave out during break. And the students did an excellent job of interpreting homage in their own way many of the students paid homage to family/important people in their life or a subject that means the world to them.It was beautiful hearing how this homage assignment meant to them and how personal it was. They each did and try so many things, like still life photography and a combination of portrait photography to illustrate an homage.

We returned from our much needed break to continue and complete the experimental film where we explored different themes developed from emotions.  Students shared footage they all shot individually into a crowdsourced project.  We developed editing skills including motion graphics effects and titles.  Students continue to work on expressionistic, layered soundscapes.  During our screenings, students worked on their critiquing skills.  We started our screenplay project where students are taking ideas from a log line through a treatment to a finished short narrative screenplay.  We are focusing on developing character using locations and finding dramatic moments.

In October Animation & Sequential Arts decided to continue the annual artistic tradition of Inktober.  Inktober is an annual month long celebration of ink based art in October.  Each day a new Inktober artistic prompt is shared, and artists create and share illustrations based off the prompt of the day.  This year the class decided it would be fun to create their own prompts, and renamed the event: "ANIMATION & SEQUENTIAL ARTOBER."  Students created prompts of their own such as Wings, Trap, Eyes, Falling, Ice Scream, and more!  Students even had weekend prompts to complete.  Over the month all students improved greatly in their line art, shading methods, compositions, and understanding of contrast. 

The class also dove deep into learning the methods of traditional figure drawing, and capped the month off by participating in our annual Multi-Day Figure Drawing Workshop.  This workshop is a tradition three years in the making collaboratively created and executed by our teachers Alex Goldin, Matt Bozik, and Emily Steffen.  Even though the workshop was virtual this year, it still utilized live models and brought Drawing & Painting and Animation & Sequential Arts students through "Figure Drawing Boot-camp." 

October has been crammed full of information, and students are hitting it out of the park!  Appropriate for the season, we’ve been learning about what makes a song sound “spooky”.  Every student transcribed a song in a major key, and used our knowledge of our three minor scales to put the song in it’s parallel minor!  It was awesome to hear each other’s work in class.  We also did our first 4 part compositions; writing music with a Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass line.  After working in groups to write our choral compositions, we made our own AUDIO RECORDING of each song, featuring the 2020 AP Music Theory Choir!  The final result was amazing! Can’t wait to try a more advanced version in November!

This month we worked on setting the table, learning about mise en place and our culinary students learned how to set themselves up for success in the kitchen. We also focused on a variety of careers in culinary arts. Just as the quarter ended, we also started delving into recipe reading... and we tested out some chocolate chip cookie making! After almost one full quarter of not cooking, we are so close, we can basically taste it! Next week, we will be combining forces with Green City Market and getting started on our showcase work!

We started the month of October by going over some theory concepts such as melody and intervals. The students really enjoyed working on the intervals part of these lectures and they even asked us if we could do extra interval practice. In the latter part of this month we really focused on practicing our parts for the recording that we are putting together. Right now, we are assembling a virtual recording of ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’ by Jet. This is a really fun song that the students loved to sing and play! While the students were working on learning this song, we did numerous workshops with them on how to practice, how to sing with proper technique as well as how to use recording equipment. Our project so far sounds really good! We can’t wait to share it with everyone once it’s ready!

No Update.

This month in photography has been super creatively active, when we assigned the creative self portrait assignment it gave the students an opportunity to explore to create innovative portraits as them as the subject. Yet again our students took this project in completely different ways and surprised us with the many conceptual and personal themes that they wanted to  explore. Though some students were hesitant at first and didn't know how to feel about the project, after reassurance from us to really express themselves however they want. They really took to this photo assignment and by the results that we have seen in critique, they had a lot of fun doing it. The themes that they explored Halloween (creepy/scary), displacement, and lost. So many  different topics they covered in this one assignment it was so much fun to see the rest of the class unpack their peers' work and give the feedback to continue their artistic journey.

In a virtual classroom where learning under quarantine is becoming the norm, AAP dancers have learned to study and celebrate dance as an art form by taking advantage of the world of dance around them.  Connecting the dance idioms of Spanish, Musical Theatre, Latin Jazz, Ballet and Modern has widened their perspectives and their opportunities.   
 
This month, dance students attended a master class sponsored by AMDA College and Conservatory of the Performing Arts  (NY/LA).  Nationally acclaimed performer, Chryssie Whitehead-Disbrow, created the master class for our dancers and taught them original choreography from, “A Chorus Line”, where Whitehead-Disbrow had played Cassie on Broadway.  

Right after she graduated from high school, Whitehead-Disbrow was hired as a dancer with Radio City Rockettes, in New York City.  With a career spanning over 20 years working in both Los Angeles and New York, she acted in over 13 television shows (Grey’s Anatomy, etc.) and films. Most notably she was known for a sweet romantic comedy with Raven Simone, “Revenge of the Bridesmaids”, and made Broadway debut in the revival of, “A CHORUS LINE.” Theatre roles include: Lola in DAMN YANKEES, Cassie in A CHORUS LINE, Kathy in COMPANY, and Bombalurina, in CATS.
 
Chryssie leads a creative, artistic life teaching across the globe and presently online, with her performing arts educational company, www.BroadwayArtsCommunity.com, which she co-founded with her best friend, Alexis Carra. She has directed and/or choreographed productions of CHICAGO, INTO THE WOODS, SHREK, GREASE and BEAUTY & THE BEAST. You can see her acting on the big screen next Christmas, in a small role in Steven Spielberg’s remake of, “WEST SIDE STORY!”  

The next master class was given by University of Illinois’ professor Anna Sapozhnikov. She taught students theatrical choreography from the musical, “Chicago.”  Sapozhnikov is a teacher, choreographer and performer with roots based in the Chicago.  Students asked pertinent questions about university life, hybrid learning and expectations.  

The master class assisted the dance students, who are currently working on their technique, artistry, and musicality, while celebrating their individual choreographic voices in preparation for this year’s AAP Winter Showcase.  Aside from physically demanding virtual rehearsals and learning choreography, students are keeping a positive attitude and looking forward to this year’s virtual premiere.  

This month the students are learning how to tell a story and how to get to the emotional center of the story.  Students wrote a personal story that had meaning for them and then they interviewed each other using that story as a jumping off point for that story.  They are now learning how to edit those stories using photos and other related objects to fully realize the theme and the meaning behind the stories.  Students are also learning how to improve their critiquing skills by watching clips and talking about why they are meaningful for them.

We started our Art & Activism unit by connecting our conversations about what we learned from listening to A Raisin in the Sun and life and career of Lorraine Hansberry. Each ensemble member has also chosen a monologue from A Raisin in the Sun to add to our repertoire. Check out some shots from us performing our monologues below. Since so much of our world is still very virtual, we also spent time practicing how to slate for an audition/perform our monologues “on camera.” We’re learning how to shift our visual focus and dive into our given circumstances. As we know the change of season is happening, each ensemble member also shared a song that brings them joy and explained what qualities in each song contributed to lifting our spirits. We were fortunate enough to watch the Goodman Theatre’s production of Death of Salesman by Arther Miller. UP NEXT: Animal Farm by George Orwell and Intro to Playwriting!