By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Cassidy Russell, center back, leads an improv exercise with students at Keet Gooshi Heen Elementary School Wednesday. Russell, who works for Chicago’s Second City, is in town for two weeks under the Alaska State Council on the Arts’ Artists in the Schools program, through the Sitka Fine Arts Camp. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
Seated in a circle on the floor, third graders played a collaborative game of memory and improvisation. Their instructor, Chicago-based comedian and improv artist Cassidy Russell, told the group to assemble a list of things they would need for a hypothetical trip to Pennsylvania. Among more sensible items such as clothes, the elementary schoolers also packed a mansion, a monkey and a monkey-shaped spaceship.
The exercise in chaotic creativity was more than a simple game, however. It was a part of a statewide arts program.
Russell, who has been involved with the Sitka Fine Arts Camp for years, is one of two artists in Sitka this month as part of the Artists in Schools program. During a residency, artists are expected to “provide arts experiences and training for students, teachers, and the greater community… (and) augment the arts curriculum,” the Alaska State Council on the Arts says online.
Russell told the Sentinel she hopes kids will learn valuable social skills from her lessons.
“In these classes, I’m thinking a lot about cooperation, group work,” she said after the class. “So as you just saw with them telling a story together, a lot about focus and listening. Today, we’ve played a couple memory games, or guessing games, where it’s really important that they actually hear what the other person says.”
A highlight of teaching improv to kids, she added, is the chance to see them “totally open up. Obviously there are kids who are already excited, who are going to keep being excited. But you also see kids who normally don’t participate. When you give them the chance to just be goofy, they start participating and they don’t realize they’re learning.”
SFAC and the Sitka School District have worked together to assemble artists to teach in local schools this year, and Russell, who teaches improv summers at the arts camp, was contacted.
“They wanted me to come back to work with some kids this winter. And I think third graders got hit pretty hard with COVID stuff because they missed kindergarten, first grade, kind of. And then obviously with last year, their second grade wasn’t super normal,” Russell said. “So we thought that would be a good age to just get a little extra attention. And I’ve worked with kids forever but elementary schoolers are really good at improv, because they’re so open and expressive and willing to be silly.”
One of the students in Thursday’s class was Isla Hackett, 8. She participated in a session in which she and a partner told a joint story. The prompt called for them to travel to the moon, but wackiness ensued.
“We actually didn’t go to the moon… We were going to the moon and then the moon exploded and we went back to Earth, but we had such momentum that we bounced off the Earth to Jupiter and there was a portal that went to a different moon,” Isla said. She enjoys Russell’s instruction and is eager to learn new improv and creative thinking games from the professional comedian.
Liam Carlton, 9, excelled in the memory-based game that generated an eclectic equipment list for a trip to Pennsylvania. He hopes to have a chance to replay another improv game in Russell’s next class.
“Someone chooses a topic and you have to pick something off that topic,” he said.
Russell’s time as an Artist in Schools runs through Jan. 20 and she is slated to perform in an SFAC production today and Saturday.
The other Artist in the Schools program underway this week was at Pacific High School. There, a small cadre of students tried their hand at digital design and screen printing under the instruction of Los Angeles-based printmaker and illustrator Elizabeth Jean Younce.
High schoolers decorated T-shirts with group and individual designs.
“The ultimate goal of the project was to get them to learn to screen print. And in order to do that, we went through three different steps and so I wanted them to not only learn to screen print, but have them screen print their own designs. And so they started off drawing digitally… Each student got to design something individually as well – smaller. And so we’re going to print individual designs on the front of each shirt. The idea is that as a student at PHS, you’re part of this bigger community, but obviously you’re also an individual.”
The three large designs that emblazoned the backs of the shirts were a waterfall, a Tlingit form line drawing of a person, and a platypus wearing a top hat.
Like Russell, Younce’s Sitka connection stems from the Fine Arts Camp, where she teaches digital painting. With her master’s degree in printmaking, she focuses on stone lithography, an art form that uses irreplaceable, Bavarian limestone blocks to make prints.
Her work can be found at https://www.mustardbeetle.com/ and http://www.elizabethjeanyounce.com/. In her personal art, Younce draws from natural themes and sources.
“I’m really interested in the ways that illustration and printmaking can serve as a communicative tool to describe our relationship with science and nature, and how art can serve as a vector to communicate science and nature,” she said.
Pacific High sophomore Rita Christianson has studied under Younce at SFAC and was eager for the chance to do so again during the school year.
“It was really nice to be able to see her again and refresh what I had learned… I had never gotten to do screen printing or any vinyl work, because her class… yes, it’s digital art but then we used it and applied it to cutting out vinyl… and we screen printed pieces,” Christianson said.
She designed the top-hatted platypus that adorns the back of a third of the t-shirts. The artistic freedom Younce provides, Christianson said, is a high point of the class.
“I really like the ability to have uniqueness and personal touches within the overall class, because it’s not just a free-for-all; it’s an art class where we’re all doing something, not an art class where we’re all doing the (same) painting.”
She chose a platypus because of its uniqueness.
“We did not want to do something that was just the school’s mascot, and so we were trying to think of funky animals… It’s just such a weird animal – and PHS takes a lot of the kids who the ‘normal’ school environment doesn’t quite work as well with,” she said.
As Younce recalled, the platypus design came about in an iterative process.
“When Rita showed her platypus, everyone was like, ‘We actually want to see a top hat on it.’ And so she was like, ‘I’ll make the changes, and I’ll come back with my final design.’ So there you go: platypus with a top hat,” the lithographer said.
When their designs came to life after a digital-to-vinyl-to-ink process, Younce said, the students were ecstatic.
“Every single student in here was holding up the posters and was just squealing with joy. That was the most exciting moment so far. And you could really feel how visceral the energy in here was. Just amazing,” Younce said.
She hopes the early introduction to printmaking sparks artistic interest in the students. Thursday was Younce’s last day at Pacific High, though she plans to return and teach at the Fine Arts Camp this summer.
Grant money from the Alaska State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation funds the program. More information is available at https://arts.alaska.gov/artists-in-schools#ais.
