This summer, Brookline youths Aubrey Johnson, Morgan Lemos and Imoh Udoh-Warren will serve as emissaries of the arts along with 13 other suburban and urban teens from greater Boston, as well as Roslindale, Revere and Kamakura, Japan.
For four weeks in July, Boston University’s Reach program will allow these students to experience the thrills and rigors of dance training and performing in an intergenerational company of dancers while bringing quality arts experiences to children in urban areas.
On Wednesday, July 17, at 7 p.m. (rain date: July 24), Reach’s intergenerational dance company will present a free 45-minute performance at the Bishop Allen Drive parking lot behind the Harvest Cooperative Market in Cambridge. The performance will showcase the diversity of the individual teen apprentices’ training as well as their ethnic and social backgrounds.
The Reach: Summer Outreach Dance/Teen Apprenticeship Dance Program has been providing inner-city and greater Boston youths with professional dance training and mentorship for the past 23 years. The teens selected for the program represent a number of greater Boston neighborhoods, with three dancers representing Brookline; Johnson, Lemos and Udoh-Warren all attend Brookline High School.
Reach’s 13- to 18-year-old teen apprentices are mentored by professional choreographers and college-age interns. This year’s professionals include Janelle Gilchrist, Frantz Louizia and Christina Piscitelli, along with two college interns, Hanna Stubblefield-Tave and Brian Washburn. Through two weeks of intense daily class and rehearsal with Reach staff, the teens prepare for the company’s summer tour. The tour, which begins July 15 and lasts two weeks, includes 11 performances and 30 workshops, serving more than 1,800 kids and adults at more than a dozen local camps and community centers in greater Boston.
Johnson will return to the Reach program for a second year. Last summer, the Brookline teen explained that the most rewarding part of going on tour was “seeing kids get excited about dance and wanting to try it themselves.”
The Reach program was founded 23 years ago by members of Dance Collective, a former contemporary dance troupe based in Boston. In 2006, Micki Taylor-Pinney, then artistic director of Dance Collective, moved the program to Boston University, where she is director of dance.
Reach is primarily funded by charitable grants and through private donations.
For more information, visit http://www.bu.edu/fitrec/programs/dance/reach/ or call 617-353-1597.