December is Filled with Peace Plays
Neighborhood Bridges students will share messages of peace throughout the metro as they perform Peace Plays for their school communities and families.
Neighborhood Bridges is Children’s Theatre Company’s nationally recognized critical literacy program that embodies the mission and values to educate, challenge and inspire by empowering young people to become narrators of their own lives. Through storytelling, writing and acting students have been exploring and discussing the causes of war and imagining possibilities for peace through deep listening, respect, collaboration and understanding.
Core to the Bridges program is responding to the changing conditions of our world. This festival of student-created work began as a response to the tragedy of 9/11 as a way for students to actively participate in peace-inspiring justice and have been performed every year for the last 16 years.
By utilizing stories about war, conflict and peace, the initiative aims to empower students to understand the causes of war and to resolve conflicts. The goal is to develop the students’ self-confidence and thinking so that they will grasp why disputes arise and how they can resolve them in a peaceful and humane way. By using metaphors that can be applied to the conflicts surrounding their lives, teaching artists strive to open the eyes of the students to all the conditions that contribute to war and engender hope that they can play a role in creating a non-violent future.
24 public school classrooms from four school districts will share their original work on the topic of nonviolent conflict resolution — that’s over 600 students using their voices to spread the message of peace throughout their communities!
Below is a list of participating Neighborhood Bridges school sites. For more information on performance dates and times, please free to contact Tessa Flynn Henderson, Community Engagement Manager at Children’s Theatre Company (tflynn@childrenstheatre.org or (612) 872–5165).
Eastern Heights Elementary (St. Paul)
Evergreen Park World Cultures School (Brooklyn Center)
Garlough Environmental Magnet (West St. Paul)
Hillcrest Community School (Bloomington)
Jefferson Community School (Minneapolis)
Jenny Lind Elementary (Minneapolis)
Lincoln Elementary School for the Arts (Anoka)
Little Canada Elementary (Little Canada)
Lyndale Community School (Minneapolis)
Lucy Craft Laney School (Minneapolis)
Neighborhood Bridges is a nationally recognized literacy program using storytelling and creative drama to help children develop their critical literacy skills and to transform them into storytellers of their own lives. Neighborhood Bridges is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a national model for arts education. To learn how your school can get involved, visit this webpage.
