Every so often, among the crowds of UCLA students walking around
North Campus, children can be seen gathered in small groups
everywhere, complete with yellow school buses parked along the
sidewalk. These youth, who range from kindergartners to high school
seniors, are the main focus of the Design for Sharing program,
which is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.
“DFS gives kids throughout the city an opportunity to
attend live performing arts events that they otherwise probably
wouldn’t have the chance to see,” said Barbara Dobkin,
president of DFS.
The programs put on for the schoolchildren are usually
paralleled by the nighttime performances at Royce Hall, with many
of the artists who perform at UCLA Live events contracted by DFS
for daytime productions. The children are bused in from schools
throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District for the events,
which take place on weekday mornings. The next program, which takes
place on March 4, is a demonstration performance by Perla Batalla,
a vocalist who will appear that night with Los Lobos, a Mexican
garage rock band.
DFS has recently joined forces with students from the music
department who are interested in becoming music teachers to further
the educational aspect of the events.
One such student is Elizabeth Thompson, a fifth-year clarinet
performance and music education student.
“It’s a great opportunity to get teaching
experience. The students get pretty excited, and as you teach, they
get more and more involved,” Thompson said.
Music students make classroom visits a week before the event and
design their own presentations, researching the artist and creating
lesson plans.
“For my presentation on Stefon Harris, who does jazz
vibraphone, I broke my lesson into three parts ““ what the
vibraphone is, famous vibraphone players and basic jazz
characteristics,” Thompson said.
These visits are meant to give students a preview of what they
will see and incorporate the performances into the classroom. The
actual events are also designed to be interactive, with the
performers alternating between teaching about their art and
actually performing.
Christoph Bull is a regular in the DFS series and will be
showcasing the pipe organ in an event called “Organica”
on May 17. Bull will play a variety of pieces on the organ covering
a wide range of genres and will be accompanied by a painter, who
will paint to the music.
“The painter is the visual accompaniment, and his painting
will be inspired by the music. We’ve never done this before,
and hopefully it will be a way to make classical music more
contemporary and bring in new audiences,” Bull said.
In his morning DFS presentation, Bull and the artist will
perform some of the pieces from their evening concert and also
teach about the organ.
“I’ll show the sounds that the organ can make and
tell them about the composers. It’s still entertaining, like
the evening show, just more educational,” Bull said.
Bull put on a similar program last year (Organica has been an
ongoing series since 1999), except with computer-generated visuals
rather then a live painter.
“The kids treated me like a rock star,” Bull said.
“At times they were screaming so much I couldn’t play,
as if it was a rock concert.”
The aim of Bull’s presentation and the DFS program in
general is not only to educate and entertain students on a
particular subject, but also to send them a greater message.
“For these kids, to be invited onto the UCLA campus is a
huge thing,” Dobkin said. “I was talking to a principal
of one our schools and she was telling me that so much in these
kids’ lives are secondhand, second-rank and poor quality, and
this experience is such a change. They are invited to sit in this
beautiful theater and see these world-class performances, and by
bringing them onto campus, we’re saying to them, “˜You
belong here.'”