Category: - SPARE A DIME

After all.

4/20/2013

Spare A Dime completes its run with standing ovations every night.

The paradigm
of Spare A Dime
finds parallels of place and time,
the mystery
of history
repeating, and we hope you'll see
true Liberty
finds unity
of purpose in community.
Rise or fall, we'll always be
together, indivisibly.

A big shout out and our deepest gratitude to the fantastic cast, musicians, and crew of Spare A Dime, and to all of the project's community participants. You define the very essence of the power of art to transform lives. Thank you.

Spare A Dime's time is now!

4/17/2013

Song, story, and new media design came together seamlessly in our first performance.

Venissa Santi, in character as The Mother, sings Dimestore Lullaby.
Instagram image and set projection by Gerardo McGarity-Algrett; drawings by Steve Teare.

Khrista White and Victor Rodriguz in character as The Merchant and The Builder, sing Change in the Making.
Instagram image and set projection by Gerardo McGarity-Algrett; drawings by Steve Teare.

Calling all Bok alums!

4/17/2013

Spare A Dime provides a grand finale for Bok's New Deal deco grandeur.

Above: the Bok Tech Theater entrance, photo by Bradley Maule at Hidden City.

Spare A Dime's performances this weekend are a wonderful opportunity for the community at large to see Bok Tech High School and its glorious theater before the building is closed by the School District of Philadelphia in June. Hidden City is publishing a two-part article this week on Bok and the Spare A Dime project. You can read about Bok in Part 1 here and Spare A Dime in Part 2 here. It's also a special chance for all Bok alums in the area to visit the school as we celebrate its 75th anniversary and Works Progress Administration origins. Bok's culinary department is even cooking up some Depression-era recipes for our concession stand! Please join us! Your $10 ticket cost benefits COSACOSA's youth programs!

Tickets online: www.pifa.org/events/10
Tickets by phone: 215-893-1999
Tickets at the door, starting at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday this week: Bok Tech Theater, 8th and Mifflin Streets in South Philadelphia
For more information, please call COSACOSA at 215.385.2554
We look forward to singing for you!

Get your Spare A Dime tickets today!

4/10/2013

Click here to buy tickets – just $10 general admission!
Proceeds benefit COSACOSA's youth programs throughout the city!

Lights up! It's a Work in Progress!

4/9/2013

The historic Bok Tech Theater now is Spare A Dime's stage.

After nearly a year of planning, community interviews, writing, artwork creation, and music-making, the Spare A Dime cast and crew moved our set, gear, and rehearsals to the historic Bok Tech Theater today!

With the help of our amazing professional tech crew (thank you, George, Walter, Terry, Mike, and Rodney!) and dedicated Bok students working with COSACOSA and Bok staff, the Spare A Dime stage was set in perfect time for our singers and musicians to rehearse.

Please join us next week for our premiere performances –
Thursday, April 18 at 7:30 p.m. • Friday, April 19 at 7:30 p.m. • Saturday, April 20 at 7:30 p.m.

General admission is $10. Tickets may be purchases online at www.pifa.org/events/10 or by calling COSACOSA at 215.385.2554 We want you – to hear all about the WPA in song and to see this gorgeous WPA-built space!

Built in the Great Depression, Closed in the Great Recession.

3/9/2013

Spare A Dime performances mark a finale for the historic Bok Tech Theater.

It's now official.
Bok Tech is closing in June.

Bok Technical High School (our venue for Spare A Dime) rose during the Great Depression. On Thursday, amid the Great Recession, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission voted to close Bok Tech along with 22 other district schools. Read more about the history of Bok Tech and the issues surrounding its closing on our earlier blog posts here.

After 75 years of artful operation, Spare A Dime will be the last performances to occur Bok's marvelously New Deal deco theater. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Bok Tech Theater is a grand 1000-seat Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. How sad and ironic it is that a piece about the WPA will be the last to be hosted at the site.

Visit this hidden treasure while you can; tickets for Spare A Dime are available by clicking here or by calling COSACOSA at 215.385.2554.

Education builds our nation.

3/1/2013

COSACOSA's curriculum for Spare A Dime connects history with civic responsibility.

An integral part of Spare A Dime is focused on exploring the project's themes with city youth. As created by the COSACOSA education team featured in our posts this week, the Spare A Dime curriculum has three components, adaptable to all grade levels.

In the first section of the curriculum, students study the Great Depression, its causes, and its impact on the country -- interactively examining the era through the eyes of our Spare A Dime characters.

In the second phase of the curriculum, students learn about various New Deal programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Working in small groups, they even plan new civic art, music, theater, and writing projects in the spirit of the WPA's Federal Project Number One and create WPAesque posters for their initiatives.

In the third portion of our curriculum, students connect what they've learned with socioeconomic issues today, centering on definitions of freedom and justice, and the balance of each citizen's rights and responsibilities. As a final project, they design a dime to reflect their newly-minted ideas of liberty.

COSACOSA's Art and Education initiative, Art Smart, infuses hands-on art-making activities as an educational tool across the K-12 curriculum. Working with Philadelphia students and teachers both during and after school hours, the program enhances participants' literacy, math, science and social studies learning, as well as critical thinking abilities. If you are a teacher and would like to bring our Spare A Dime curriculum into your classroom and arrange a field trip to our performances, please contact us. We'd love to work with you!

G et your tickets now to see Spare A Dime at PIFA 13 -- and learn more about COSACOSA's ongoing initiatives at www.cosacosa.org!

Images (from top): Bok Tech students design new Liberty dimes; student-created WPA posters; COSACOSA teaching artists John Pickersgill and Sharnae Johnson discuss a student's WPA poster.

Spare A Dime illustrates the art of working together.

2/12/2013

Get to know the artistic team and our work in progress.

It's just a little over two months until the first Spare A Dime performance as part of the 2013 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts! Our musical talent, multimedia artists, technical crew, and classroom educators have all been working separately on the myriad of Spare A Dime "moving parts" for months. We're now integrating each team's work to create our production at Bok Tech Theater in April.

As we share our talents with the larger team, we'd like to share them on this blog, too. Over the next several weeks we'll be posting the bios of each of our team members, along with their reflections on the Spare A Dime project and its message(s).

Get to know our creative team in conversations with the audience after each performance, too!
Buy your Spare A Dime at PIFA 13 tickets today!

——————————————--

Top image: Spare A Dime vocalists Khrista White, Lourin Plant, and Julian Coleman at their first group rehearsal.
Bottom image: COSACOSA Program Manager Sharnae Mask and visual artist Steve Teare work with Bok Tech students.

Our performers are cast!

2/5/2013

Major vocal talent brings the Spare A Dime characters to life!

Spare A Dime musical talent (from left): Phyllis Chapell as The Farmer, Musical Coordinator Jay Fluellen, Khrista White as The Merchant, Julian Coleman as The Immigrant, Director/Composer Kimberly Niemela, Lourin Plant as The Veteran, Victor Rodriguez as The Builder, Production Coordinator Rodney Whittenberg. (Not pictured: Bill Gross as FDR and Venissa Santi as The Mother.)

Our first full read-through (or rather, sing-through) of Spare A Dime took place this past Sunday evening at the COSACOSA Studio in Manayunk. Our diverse group of professional performers had never met or sung together before. What a powerhouse group they proved to be! We'll be posting their bios and interviews with each of them in the coming weeks.

At the end of the month we'll be creating an official cast recording of Spare A Dime available on CD. Look for excerpts from the performances on this blog and on the COSACOSA website, www.cosacosa.org.

Meanwhile, profiles of the archetypal American characters of Spare A Dime continues tomorrow! And check out the PIFA blog about their visit to Bok Tech where COSACOSA visual artists are creating the Spare A Dime set!

Spare A Dime character profile: The Builder

2/1/2013

What do we need to build a foundation of hope?

In COSCOSA's Spare A Dime, the character of The Builder is an unemployed construction worker who finds a job with the WPA. Although the New Deal’s main aim was to raise millions out of poverty, many of its programs focused on upgrading the country's aged and failing infrastructure, as well. Unpaved roads, unstable bridges, and ancient sewage systems threatened the progress of the 20th century. FDR also wanted to conserve natural resources depleted by erosion and national parks threatened by deforestation.

WPA job programs focused on developing solutions to all these problems and more: thousands of new civic structures were built across the nation. New hospitals, airports, and schools (like Bok Tech, our performance venue for Spare A Dime) benefited the larger community, as well as the workers that the WPA employed to build them.

The Builder's story is based on a local history provided to us by a resident of White Horse Village senior living community. Her out-of-work father found a job with the WPA, learning the construction skills he used for the rest of his life to support himself and his family. The character's plight also resonates with many of the stories we've collected from unemployed workers in the Great Recession, in particular the tale of a contractor we met in Philadelphia's Roxborough neighborhood. He wondered where to find "just a bit of hope." In the first half of the song cycle, The Builder sings Foundation of Hope, asking just that question of the audience. After intermission, the character sings an affectionate duet, Change in the Making, with The Merchant, as described yesterday. Who or what is the object of his admiration? Come to PIFA 13 and find out!

Tomorrow's character post? The Veteran!

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