NJPAC Launches Virtual Arts Training, Unveils Online Season Of Award-winning Summer Camps

With its campus closed during the coronavirus pandemic, NJPAC, the state's anchor cultural institution, relaunched its arts training for elementary and high school students online, delivering virtual instruction to the students who usually fill the Arts Center each Saturday for lessons in acting, musical theater, hip hop, filmmaking and jazz.

Within a month after NJPAC closed its campus, all of the Arts Center's Saturday arts training sessions had resumed digitally, and are now being held via Zoom meetings and Google Classrooms. Some classes, including NJPAC's unique Hip Hop Intensive workshops, which teach students to write rap lyrics, dance, deejay and produce music, never missed a session.

With this transition to online arts learning in place, NJPAC now will also offer its summer performing arts camp -- named "Favorite Performing Arts Camp" by the JerseyArts.com's People's Choice Awards earlier this year -- as an online Virtual Summer Arts Camp program that spans almost all genres of the performing arts.

This four-week, at-home arts training experience for children ages 10 to 18 will offer students sessions in their choice of genre -- dance, musical theater, acting or hip hop arts and culture -- every morning, from 10AM to 12:30PM. Sessions in writing, movement, voice, costuming, and visual and graphic arts will be offered in the afternoons, from 1:30 to 3PM. These afternoon sessions are timed to allow students across the country, in multiple time zones, to take part in classes and collaborate together on performance projects.

Parents can register students for either morning or afternoon sessions for $50, or sign students up for an "All Access" pass, including both morning and afternoon sessions, for just $75. Registration for this camp is now open here.

The Arts Center's Geri Allen Jazz Camp, which annually welcomes young women from around the globe to Newark to hone their jazz performance skills, will also be held digitally. This remarkable summer camp, where young female musicians can be tutored by jazz greats like the camp's Artistic Director Regina Carter, will now be even more accessible to students who live far from NJPAC's campus. The camp will run July 6 through July 10, with daily 10AM to 3PM sessions, including ear training opportunities, technique and theory classes and virtual ensembles, as well as master classes led by artists including GRAMMY-nominated saxophonist and band leader Tia Fuller, legendary jazz vocalist and NEA Jazz Master Sheila Jordan, and WBGO host Sheila Anderson.

"We've been so encouraged by how enthusiastically our students are responding to online learning," says Jennifer Tsukayama, the Arts Center's Acting Vice President of Arts Education.

"On the weekend of Easter and Passover, we had about an 80% attendance rate in our Saturday classes, which just proves to me how much our students want this engagement, this opportunity to learn and to create. The arts are such an essential part of our humanity under normal circumstances, but now they are even more critical," she adds.

Approximately 140 students take part in the Arts Center's Spring weekend sessions. Resumption of NJPAC's arts training instruction was dependent on making sure both these students, and all the teaching artists who lead these classes, had access to the technology that would allow them to take part in online sessions. Now, NJPAC's day-long arts training sessions every Saturday are offered via elements that can be shared online via written materials, Vimeo demonstration videos, and live Zoom class meetings, into which students cycle in small groups. The Arts Center's long-running and acclaimed jazz program, Wells Fargo Jazz for Teens, has migrated instruction to Google Classrooms, which offers a range of formats in which teachers and students can interact. These students also receive one-on-one live video lessons through Google Meet. A similar range of technologies will be used to bring NJPAC's summer programs to students.

"A benefit of this crash course in bringing our classes online is that it forced us to evolve. We test piloted new approaches to the curriculum, teaching practices and artmaking. That gives us the potential to expand these classes and make them even more accessible to students" Tsukayama says.

"NJPAC's students are not only talented, but they thrive when given the opportunity to tell their own stories through dance, music and song," says John Schreiber, NJPAC's President and CEO.

"We knew we had to find a way to engage with them, and give them the chance to keep their work moving forward. Thanks to the devotion and persistence of our Art Education staff and all our teaching artists, we've overcome significant logistical hurdles to do just that," he adds.

NJPAC suspended performances on and off its campus on March 13, in response to city and state guidelines prohibiting large gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. The Arts Center is in plans to reopen its offices on June 29 and resume its in-person arts education and community engagement programs wherever possible then. Performances on its stages are currently slated to recommence on July 10, subject to guidance from federal, state and local officials.

For more information and updates about the Arts Center's response to the coronavirus pandemic, please visit NJPAC's website. NJPAC One Center Street
Newark, New Jersey 07102 www.njpac.org or 888.GO.NJPAC (888.466.5722)