Your donation impacts Madison's educators, students and community.
In 2013, Madison joined the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Ensuring the Arts for Any Given Child network. Overture, with the City of Madison and Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD), is working to bridge the gap in arts education for students. To ensure arts education for all, we are training local artists to create and offer low-cost residencies in K-12 classes.
We can’t do it alone. Help us ensure the arts for all students! Every dollar you give now through May 31 will be matched by Overture’s Local Legends to encourage, engage, and entertain our community through the arts. Gifts will be matched* up to $500,000 total.
Remy “Gecko” Fernández-O’Brien, Associate Dance Lecturer at UW-Madison’s School of Education, is a Hip-Hop dance teacher with a community organizing background. He participated in Overture’s Teaching Artists Training program and commented that it was, “The single most important training that I have taken in my life.” He was given the tools to walk into classrooms with a packaged and professional curriculum, which in turn led him to his position at UW-Madison.
Remy has received awards for both choreography and freestyle battles, including a William Weston Fine Arts Award from Brown University for Outstanding Body of Work in Dance.
Remy currently co-directs Express Yourself! dance studio in Madison, and teaches residencies in schools about Hip-Hop culture, history, and dance. He is a founding co-director of Breakthrough, a teaching company for adults who want to become choreographers and dance teachers.
About Teaching Artists Training:
Following a year of strategic planning as part of Any Given Child Madison, a city-wide initiative aimed at ensuring equitable access to the arts for Madison K-8 students, we have found a need for more professional artists who are able to share their art form in an educational setting. To ensure we are meeting students’ needs, we need to align our educational goals and standards—and language.
Overture Center’s Teaching Artist Training program localizes the best of two national training programs offered through the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Lincoln Center Institute. Artists participate in a three-day seminar and then create and implement a residency with mentorship from Overture Center and other Teaching Artists. Not only does the training prepare artists to work with children, but they also become a part of the professional network of Overture Center Teaching Artists to share ideas and resources.
*To qualify, gifts may be made by individuals or businesses and designated to the Overture Annual Fund or in support of a community program. Performance or program sponsorships will not be counted toward the match.
The 2015-16 Teaching Artist Training program has been generously supported by A. Paul Jones Charitable Trust, Sandy and Jun Lee, The Evjue Foundation, charitable arm of The Capital Times, the Courtier Foundation, Inc., Altria, Madison-Kipp Corporation, and donors to Overture Center for the Arts.
