CTC's Neighborhood Bridges Crossing Bridges Festival Starts Tonight

Children's Theatre Company (CTC) presents the Crossing Bridges Festival, the culminating event of CTC's signature education program Neighborhood Bridges on May 3, 8, 9 and 16, 2017. This festival consists of students in 27 classrooms from 12 elementary schools performing captivating stories that have been written solely by the students. Students choose a traditional story from the Bridges curriculum, analyze it and then reimagine the story through their own perspective. They then create their own costumes and scenery that are unique to this interpretation of the story. The main goal is to motivate students to become the narrators of their own lives.

Neighborhood Bridges is a nationally recognized, 27-week intensive program that teaches students critical literacy skills by teaching them to question power and assumptions in text, embrace complex thinking and multiple perspectives, solve problems as a community and transform dominant narratives.

"Neighborhood Bridges is really about the kids feeling and finding agency," explains Neighborhood Bridges Program Director and teaching artist Maria Asp. "Once they figure out they have the power to change the story and make it their own, then all the kids in the class explode with ideas. The idea that you can change something and make your own gets inside them. Then, when the students get to step onto the big, main CTC stage and watch their idea play out in real time, they come away from the experience empowered and transformed, possibly for the first time in their lives."

Neighborhood Bridges' Crossing Bridges Festival runs May 3, 8, 9, and 16 at 6pm on the UnitedHealth Group Stage. Performances are free and open to the public to attend. The program and festival are supported by the Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi Foundation for Children, 3M Foundation, Carlson Family Foundation, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, and the Joseph C. and Lillian A. Duke Foundation.

Children's Theatre Company (CTC) is the nation's largest and most acclaimed theatre for multigenerational audiences. It creates theatre experiences that educate, challenge, and inspire for more than 300,000 people annually. CTC is the only theatre focused on young audiences to win the coveted Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre and is the only theatre in Minnesota to receive three Tony nominations (for its production of A Year with Frog and Toad). CTC is committed to producing world class productions at the highest level and to developing new works, more than 200 to date, dramatically changing the canon of work for young audiences.

CTC's engagement and learning programs annually serve more than 85,000 students ages 2-18 through Theatre Arts Training, student matinees, Bridges, and early childhood arts education programs that bring students to the theatre and bring teaching artists into the classroom. The ACT One program is CTC's comprehensive platform for access, diversity and inclusion in our audiences, programs, staff, and board that strives to ensure the theatre is a home for all people, all families, reflective of our community. www.childrenstheatre.org