Artist as Citizen
Waterwell Education was a premier training ground for New York City’s young theater artists, innovators, and leaders.
Our training addressed the student-artist holistically and challenged students to develop both as interpreter and creator. Our programs, which emphasized rigor, curiosity, and generosity, have produced artists working on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in film and television today.
The Core Values Of Waterwell Education Programs Are The 4 E’s
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To create a space where each student can grow in their artistic development based on their individual access needs. As faculty, equity, at times, may mean providing individualized support catered to the needs of each student. Recognizing that treating all things equally, is not the same as giving each student the opportunity to succeed. As students, equity manifests as approaching your peers and community members with respect, understanding, and kindness.
Initiatives to build the principles of anti-racism into the structure of our organization are in our budget every year, and we are committed to creating a more anti-racist organization by incorporating feedback from our community partners, audiences, and artists. For more information on Waterwell’s organization-wide commitments to anti-racism, click here.
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The personal mission to achieve and perform at your highest level of capability. This mission must be present in all spaces and within all groups to be achieved in whole, as excellence must be pervasive in your personal practice at all times. As faculty, we view excellence not as a fixed point, but as a process of continual growth. As students, we ask you to continually be the best version of yourself, which can and will, change over time.
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As students and faculty, we will create theater that is socially, politically, and culturally relevant to the communities we exist within, intersect with, and are adjacent to. This is our audience, and the dialogue we engage in with them is an essential part of the theater making process.
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In everything we do, we will strive to work from a place of compassion – actively respecting ourselves, our fellow artists, our faculty, our space and our work. As students and faculty, this shared sense of respect will allow the classroom to become a place of community, where everyone feels safe and supported. This strong sense of community is essential to artistic development.
Artist as Citizen
“Artist as Citizen” is the term for Waterwell’s focus on civic-minded arts practice and we invited students in our community to explore how their theater training related to their engagement with larger issues facing society. As artists, we encouraged students to strive towards empathy and excellence through storytelling and creative expression. As citizens, we encouraged students to embody equity and engagement as they explored and created art that could be both a reflection of society and a tool to change it. Artist as Citizen represents the integration of these values to ensure that theater education is a gratifying journey of personal enlargement, community building, and artistic growth.
There are several questions at the core of our Artist as Citizen curriculum: How can students use their artistry to engage with the world around them? How can we look at the world around us and really see it openly and with empathy? What is the role of theater in society? How can my art be used as a vehicle for change? The Artist as Citizen Curriculum was created to make students think about their role as an artist in community and the ability to use theater to create change.
