“If America were deaf, we would still sing”
-Alain Locke
There are two pervasive themes that permeate all aspects of Youth Speaks & the Living Word Project artistic development culture.
> The first is a disciplined attention to “First Sound.”
When we describe ourselves as initiating movement from “the margin to the core,” we implicitly reveal an understanding of the silencing of our constituents, primarily the youth that we serve. Among our further institutional claims is that our belief in voice is founded upon a practice of finding, developing, publicly, presenting, and applying our constituents’ ideas. The notion of “first sound” relative to the pedagogical underpinnings of our development system indicates a projected adherence to the radical integrity of a participant’s moments of personal discovery through art.
Youth Speaks & the Living Word Project imposes vocabulary in workshop and rehearsal processes that stresses this belief (there are no wrong answers, your standard is yourself, etc.). We endeavor to instill a certain level of passion and commitment to the integrity and artistic hunger of this first utterance, or moment of realization, and challenge our constituents to maintain this commitment to first sound throughout their artistic development.
> The second core principle is “Urgency.”
Simply put, we ask our constituents if they are MOVED, politically, spiritually, intellectually, or physically by their own art, and if they INTEND to provoke an audience to movement in the same way. If our constituents do NOT seek to provoke out of an urgent need to develop understanding, then WE have failed in our practices.
These core principles presuppose a basic and efficient practice of conventional arts-education methodologies: editing, revision, rehearsal, repetition, and social, media, financial, environmental and cultural literacies.
As we deepen our constituents’ artistic skills through such methodologies, we simultaneously equip them with content to enhance their understanding of material continuum and the responsibility to “pay forward” their work, educationally and artistically, to future generations.