All-Stars-Workshop

In the wiggle of the weekend -and the days off- i totaly forgot to mention the All-Stars-Workshop i attended as a visitor. As the Castillo theater claims to be a theater for the whole city, their main interest consists: to reach people who normaly would neither go and see a play, nor think about acting themselves. So the aim is to give the lower class kids of New York City a voice to talk about their lives. To reach those kids in the first place, the theater community goes into their Schools to have Talent Shows, but with one big diverence, everyone is the winner because everyone is talented. After that all of the kids get invited to join a All-Stars-Workshop at the Theater. This is what i attended. 120 lower class kids running about, screaming, fighting, wow exhausting. But eventually they split them into 10 groups. Actors from Youth on Stage where their directors for the day. The topic of this workshop was "A live changing experience". The groups weren´t created age wise, so accordingly, in each group where kids from the age of 5 upto teenagers of 19. The whole group talked about their live changing experience and created a little scene out of that, to peform on stage. Eventually watching those scenes brought back what nearly slipped my mind. Where do these kids come from? Death, shootings, prison, drugs, alcohol, not going to school and abusive language appeared in every single scene... i felt devastated.