One of the first things the students from Langley Fine Arts school showed the student teachers at Simon Fraser University was how to begin a performance when you don’t have a proper curtain to raise.
“One, two, three, curtain!” they said, all together.
Then the show, a mix of music, spoken word, dance and photography, began.
A young woman with a white flower in her hair that matched her outfit danced to an instrumental song.
The choreography featured strong, athletic movements.
Another student performed an original song on her guitar, in a clear, powerful voice that filled the low-ceilinged room.
Two trombone players apologized for their lack of rehearsal, then demonstrated how Bach sounds on that type of horn.
It was a little ragged at first, so they started over.
Two more students who learned to play the traditional upright acoustic bass went electric for an all-bass version of the Beatles song Come together.
More than a dozen students took the stage during the late afternoon performance in the faculty of education building at SFU’s Burnaby campus.
They joked about being “angsty” and “profound” but they were smiling as they said it.
Some are planning to become artists and performers when they graduate the Fort Langley school, some aren’t.
Their audience was a group of future art teachers and their instructors.
“I’m amazed at the raw talent,” one audience member said at the end.
The end-of-the-school-year summit of student artists and student teachers was part of RYME (Research for Youth, Music and Education), an SFU research project called Arts Matters.
The students were asked to research why the arts mattered to them, and prepare works of art to express their feelings.
The RYME project was created by Dr. Susan O’Neill (photo below), an associate professor at SFU who is researching way to involve young people more in music and the arts.
She hopes to get more schools involved in
RYME, including those that don’t have arts programs.
If music and the arts are to thrive, O’Neill said, young people must be encouraged to get involved, even if they aren’t going to be artists themselves.
“We really need to get the students really thinking about about why the arts matter,” she said.
“This is the next generation. They’re going to have children and they’re going to want the arts in their school [if RYME succeeds in raising their interest].”
The meeting of student artists and student art teachers is also designed to benefit the teachers, she added.
“It’s going to give them a different angle on why they’re there. They’re not just there to create performers or to give them skills but they’re really creating young people who are passionate about what they’re doing, who are interested in expressing themselves.
“I think it’s going to open up their minds to new learning opportunities.”
Society as a whole will benefit, she believes.
