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Grantee: Spokane Youth Ballet

Project Title: Peter and the Wolf: Bringing Dance to the Community of Spokane
Year awarded: 2019, Round 3

For nearly ten years, Spokane Youth Ballet (SYB) has provided performance opportunities to dance students in the Spokane area by producing professional-level ballets starring local dancers. With SAGA support, SYB will be expanding its mission of promoting the art of dance by taking ballet into local schools.

In addition to staging a performance of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” on January 11, 2020 at the Bing Crosby Theater, SYB will create an educational curriculum that uses “Peter and the Wolf” to teach elements of dance to local school children. Drawing from the Washington State Learning Standards adopted for the arts in 2017, this program will invite children to explore movement and its relationship to music in a structured environment. SYB performers will participate in this program by demonstrating aspects of the curriculum directly to students.

The school program will culminate in an abbreviated performance of “Peter and the Wolf” in which students from the schools will be invited to participate as minor characters. The program will finish with a response time in which students can ask questions of the dancers, and will in turn be asked questions that will connect the performance with the information they learned in the first part of the program.