Dear Friends of Epic,
What is Epic Theatre Ensemble doing, in this state of quarantine, to continue to reach the young people we’re committed to serving and empower their joy, curiosity, collaboration, creativity, and courage?
You, as a friend of Epic, are a trusted ally in our mission to level the artistic, social-emotional, and economic playing field for the thousands of young people we serve every year. And while we certainly don’t have all the answers to where we as a community go from here, we are actively exploring, partnering, pivoting, re-imagining, and transforming the way we work to meet both the opportunities and the threats that this crisis is creating. Epic’s greatest strength is the endless creativity of our artists coupled with their commitment to joyful justice; but a close second is the support of our friends, and we want to invite you to join us on this journey.
We have identified four strategic focal points for our work in the short-term:
1) Continue to work directly with our REMIX participants on both their artistic and social emotional growth, including college access work with our juniors. Online rehearsals for REMIX have launched for all 4 shows and around 100 students and 55 hours of online rehearsal are scheduled through April 20.
2) Partner with our schools and teachers to transform our artist residencies to align with online instruction, bringing high levels of student engagement to what can otherwise be pretty dry instruction. This has been going surprisingly well; Melissa, Jim, and Ron all begin co-teaching online residencies with partner teachers at Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts, Bronx HS for Writing and Communication Arts, and Bronx Lab High School.
3) Continue the work of Epic NEXT in bringing a youth-led message of educational justice to our communities. This is of course our trickiest center, as it really does center entirely on the live experience. 12 shows have already been canceled over the next two weeks, and another 34 are in jeopardy. We are working with our partners and allies at the NYC Department of Education to explore ways Epic NEXT’s youth artists can continue to act as leaders and inspirations in an online format.
4) Empower Epic’s entire broader community – including our teaching artists, mentors, and even alums – to work with us to stay engaged, active, and contributing to forward progress, including paying our artists to record performances of literary passages to spark engagement, conduct one-on-one mentorship meetings with students for college access work, and attend REMIX rehearsals to run breakout rooms on Zoom.
We invite you to join us – come to an online REMIX rehearsal or watch professional actors perform a scene for students; just let us know you want to see what we’re doing and we’ll find a way to include you.
Change is difficult, but for Epic right now, to reach our students, it is absolutely necessary. Losing the live, experiential engagement of audiences, both on stage and in classes, is very tough on all of us at Epic, and we look forward to a return to that reality. But in the meantime, we’re working on strategies that keep us delivering our core values to some of the neediest folks in NYC, with the true hope that some of these adaptations will prove to make us stronger and more capable of reaching more young people in the future.
If you have any questions, or want to help Epic in any way, please contact the Co-Founders:
Ron Russell (RonRussell@EpicTheatreEnsemble.org)
Melissa Friedman (Melissa@EpicTheatreEnsemble.org)
James Wallert (Jim@EpicTheatreEnsemble.org)
Thanks always for your incredible support of Epic and the constituents we serve.