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Dear Parents and Family- Performing Arts Workshop (the Workshop) is thrilled to have worked with your child this school year. In Spring 2006, the Workshop received an After-school for All (AFA) Award to provide quality arts education at after-school sites in the Bayview/Hunter’s Point and Visitacion Valley neighborhoods. Since then, the Workshop has been fortunate to evolve their partnerships with four great after-school programs:
This year, we were able to increase our efforts and added a fifth site to include Paul Revere Elementary After-School. Who is the Workshop? What is After-school for All? What does this mean for my child? We are very excited and proud to highlight the unique and rich experiences that your child has been a part of through images and descriptions of this year’s residencies, and samples of written pieces by current participants. We welcome you to visit your child during their workshops to witness these unique learning moments first-hand and we hope you continue to celebrate your child’s amazing talents and accomplishments with us. Sincerely, Mariel G. dela Paz
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Spoken Word & Digital Music Production at Bayview/Hunter’s Point YMCA & Visitacion Valley Community Beacon with Delmance “Ras Mo” Moses “It is very encouraging to see leadership arise from the process as students who are more advanced in using the recording software, assist and teach others.”
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Hip-Hop Dance at Bayview/Hunter’s Point YMCA I currently teach Hip-Hop dance twice a week with the young women’s group, Just 4 Girls at the YMCA. Through a brief warm-up, the students explore stretching, isolations, syncopation, physical coordination, and breathing exercises. After warm-up, the students move on to learn choreography. This year, we have been focusing on Hip-Hop dancing with influences from jazz, African, and Modern Dance. In addition to learning choreography I bring into class, students are required to contribute, as well as teach their own choreography to their peers. Students who have been fully engaged in the class have demonstrated great focus, energy, adept physicality, and consistent input.
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Kung Fu at ER Taylor Elementary After-School & 
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Song, Percussion & Dance at Visitacion Valley Boys & Girls Club
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Increase The Peace yada yea this is Young Lik, it’s about stopping the violence increasing the peace throw your T’s and hands up high in the air |
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After-School for All is made possible by the following partners. For more information, please contact the Workshop.
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Ras Mo currently teaches spoken word and digital music production to middle school aged students at Visitacion Valley Community Beacon Center and also with the young men’s group (the Fellas) at Bayview/Hunter’s Point YMCA. Ras Mo’s focus at each of these sites involves an introduction to electronic recording and instrumental composition through the popular computer software, Garage Band. As students lay out their own beats, they become more comfortable with the engineering behind music production. Ras Mo encourages students to choose topics that they are interested in (a theme), to write lyrics based on that chosen theme. and to create their own music to accompany those lyrics. In other words, students learn storytelling through song. The final stage of the class is a professional recording session of students’ own in a studio. The session will be produced in a CD compilation including individual and collaborative pieces from both After School sites. 
This year at E.R. Taylor and Paul Revere After-School, wehave been vigorously unfolding the traditional Northern Shaolin routine known as “springy legs”. Each class consists of warm-up, basic stances, and playing instruments for each other for the routines that they have learned. As the students have gathered experience in this Chinese art form, they are challenged to go beyond what they believe they can do, changing the very foundation of their individual physicality, coordination, presence, and gain a broader vision of what it means to be human. 
“It is integral to my teaching philosophy that youth be willing to experience the dance, song as well as rhythm of the drum, in order for them to be able to make a clear connection between varied community members’ roles in the production of music and musical experiences.” – Tata Salah Kongo
At Visitacion Valley Boys & Girls Club, students are learning to recognize their own creativity and how it can play a specific role within a community in the production of music. Students have been learning rhythm through song, percussion, and dance at the Visitacion Valley. It has truly been a creative process. Each lesson continuously builds upon previously learned techniques. Initially, without the use of instruments, students learned clapping techniques and song influenced by Kikongo, Kiswahili, Spanish and English to express rhythms. With the introduction of children’s drums, Visitacion Valley participants have been able to differentiate between basic drumming techniques and combine them to engage in rhythm exercises and creative improvisation. Their most recent endeavor has been the beautiful integration of movement to accompany the rhythms they produce through percussion and song. 
