SF Mime Troupe Presents TNT Explosive Youth Theater 4/3, 4/4

The Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe's Youth Theater Project, in partnership with Brava Theater Academy, presents "T.N.T. - Explosive Youth Theater 2009". T.N.T. Youth Arts Festival has one main goal: to partner younger, less experienced actors and technicians with professional theater practitioners at both organizations. The collaboration creates powerful new theater pieces with an authentic youth voice. 

TNT Youth Arts Festival was developed to garner mentored relationships for participants that would go beyond the Festival and create a new inspired, eclectic generation of theater artists. The Youth Theater Project (YTP), now in its 13th year, is an eight-week long theatre workshop that challenges youth to look deep into the realities and possibilities of modern day life. The primary goal of YTP is to use theater as a means to artistically express the opinions of young people on topics that are relevant to their lives. The project promotes artistic expression, intellectual curiosity, and cross-cultural understanding as creative alternatives to drugs, gangs, prejudice, and hostility.

It is the hope that the YTP experience will increase self-confidence in participating youths and inspire them to continue using art as a means of personal and political expression. Utilizing improvisational and physical acting styles while focusing on themes generated by participants, the Youth Theater Project will culminate in the creation, development and performance of two new original one-act plays. The collaboration with the Brava Theater Academy brings together their
acting studio class and the SF Running Crew. The Brava Theater Academy acting studio
will perform the one-act play, Little Green Men, which is an excerpt of the 2006 Best of Fringe Winner Where the Sun Don't Shine, written by Peter Budinger and DC Scarpeli of Theater Tremedo. The performance will be presented at the Brava Theater, with
full technical support by the Brava Theater Academy's SF Running Crew.

The inspiring and enlightening performances by over 50 young people from throughout
the Bay Area will be performed Friday, April 3 at 7pm and Saturday, April 4 at 3p mat
Brava Theater Center (2781 24th Street, San Francisco). The performances are free and open to the public. For more information, the public may call 415-285-1717 or visit www.sfmt.org