Thursday, January 28, 2010

The Best Art

Carla Ching navigates through life in New York City as a playwright and teaching artist. On her blog, Minutiae and Flux, she shares about her life in art, and I'm so glad she does.

For example, in a recent post about a residency she did around the Broadway musical Fela!, Ms. Ching reveals that she made a personal discovery about her work as a teaching artist as it relates to time.

Lacking enough time to craft a proper culmination, she pushed forward anyway, scaffolding a lesson that was challenging, but ultimately successful--resulting in student work she describes as "dense, rich and dangerous."

In an excerpt below, Ms. Ching sums up what we supposedly know as a teaching community, but may fail to put into practice when we are stressing out about time management issues:

"... it reminded me, art can be made. It can be made quickly with decent scaffolding. And most importantly, the best art is made when it comes out of what the young people have to say. This sounds obvious. But I think that we forget this all the time. I have to remember this and make it the root of what I do."

Read the entire article, after the jump.

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