NEA: According to Aaron Jungels, co-artistic director of Everett: Company, Stage and School, a 1996 study showed that more than two-thirds of the population has experienced an adverse childhood experience, with 20 percent having experienced three or more of these traumatic events. For many young people, those incidents result in post-traumatic stress. Everett, which has served the Providence, Rhode Island community for more than 30 years by providing free access to performing arts training, received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in the latest round of funding to support the creation and production of Good Grief, a multidisciplinary theater piece created to help participating artists and audiences heal from PTSD.
2 comments:
This is such a great organization with an equally great name addressing an important cause. Not only does it raise awareness and acceptance of post traumatic stress disorder, but it also addresses and attempts to fix the school to prison pipeline that is seen so much in low income neighborhoods. I did not realize PTSD could be such a large factor in this. I am glad that performance can help people heal from PTSD. I hope that through performance young people will be less likely to drop out and become part of that prison pipeline statistic. I think it is super important that people realize that trauma is not just about being involved in combat. I do not believe anyone is aware of how expansive the definition is and how common it is. Hopefully these kinds of organizations can help mitigate that and reduce stigma and discrimination towards those groups.
I hope to eventually work in theatre that is as inspiring as the work done by Everett: Company, Stage, and School. They do research into PTSD in their local communities, looking particularly at the youth and how it plays out in education systems. They bring in therapists with thoughtful strategies to make the devising process one of healing rather than potentially triggering for their company members who have experienced trauma. They provide free access to the arts in an area where the arts are not being supported in schools and other programs. They grapple with these challenging and heavy topics, not to profit from them or exploit these “hot” issues, but to show how they manifest in real life, through people who have experienced them firsthand, for an audience that will understand the issue intimately. They are truly improving the community and celebrating the power of togetherness through imagination and dialogue, and in my mind, that is the best that theatre can hope to be.
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