Sinclair360

While sold-out audiences for Wicked at the Benjamin & Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center watched the Wicked Witch rise into the sky on her broomstick, another audience down the hall watched Prince Charming and Cinderella navigate married life and a childhood Captain Hook go to therapy.

These mixed-up stories emerged from collaboration between Sinclair Community College and the Victoria Theatre Association (VTA), a nonprofit arts organization located in downtown Dayton. In recent years Sinclair and the VTA have forged a new relationship based on educational outreach, sharing resources to expose high school and Sinclair students to professional theatre experiences.

The Victoria Theatre puts on 300 performances a year and operates three arts venues: the 2,300-seat Schuster Center; the historic Victoria Theatre; and The Loft Theatre, home to The Human Race Theatre Company.

Since last year Sinclair's relationship with the VTA has grown from basic sponsorships and the occasional backstage tour to multi-week projects centered on national tours like Wicked and The Color Purple. With the Wicked project, high school students and a group of Sinclair Theatre majors did their own reimagining of classic fairy tales, in the same vein as Wicked, the popular Broadway musical that envisions the prequel to The Wizard of Oz. "These are partnerships that bring out the best of both organizations," said Rebecca Butler, senior director of marketing for Sinclair. "And it really is about asking, 'How do we further our mission in the classroom and in the community?'"

At the core of each project is a mentoring relationship between high school students and Sinclair students. The college students serve as mentors during sessions held at both the Schuster Center and Sinclair's campus. "This is a collaboration in the name of education," said Gina Neuerer, interim chair of Theatre and Dance.

The partnership began last year with "In the Footsteps of Celie," a project surrounding the national tour of The Color Purple. In that project 55 high school students from Dayton Public Schools worked with 55 area college students who served as their mentors. Using the book, film and musical versions of the story, students traced the steps of the central character, Celie, and learned through her journey. "I think that's when all of us realized this could be something really good," Neuerer said. "That was the real birth of doing bigger projects."

The Victoria Theatre staff was thrilled to see Sinclair's faculty and staff truly embrace the project, said Michael Roediger, marketing director of the VTA. The high school students were exposed not only to professional theatre, but also to college life, he said. "They saw it was a welcoming environment and that they can succeed."

With Wicked coming into town, the folks at Sinclair and the Victoria Theatre knew that they had a golden learning opportunity. With the success of "In the Footsteps of Celie" behind them, they couldn't let Wicked slip by without an educational tie-in. So they created "Changed for Good: A 10-Minute Play-Writing Workshop."

The workshop brought together local high school students with Sinclair Theatre students, to write and produce a play. Ninety high school students from six area schools traveled to Sinclair's downtown Dayton campus, for sessions held three Saturdays during winter quarter. They worked with their college mentors and attended a writing workshop taught by award-winning writer and director Nelson Sheeley, adjunct faculty of Theatre and Dance. Students broke into writing teams, to construct plays based on fairy tales. Sinclair students helped by performing the scripts during the development process, to let the writers hear their words aloud. The Sinclair students then produced six of the plays, serving as directors, designers and actors.

According to Sheeley, Theatre majors at Sinclair don't often get the opportunity to work with new material. "This was absolutely new virgin territory for everybody," he said. "If you have a seasoned playwright, generally the material is going to be a little easier to work with...but with high school kids, it's much harder." And because Sinclair doesn't consistently offer a directing course, the chance to direct a play was a rare treat for the students, Sheeley said. "It was like they each had their own theatre and they had a new play and they had to make it work."

The participants also got a chance to meet with Wicked cast members and talk with them about life on the road. And they scored free tickets to the production. "It was a very good learning experience," said Michael Zizert, a Sinclair Theatre major who worked on the project before graduating in March 2010. "I would have never been able to afford the tickets to go see Wicked, if it hadn't been for this program. It was nice to get some sort of payback and get to experience live theatre."

Neuerer believes it was also an exercise in self-discovery. The students started out shy, wondering just how they could help the high schoolers. But over the course of the project, they blossomed. "They were learning a great deal about themselves," she said.

Other collaborations are in the works. Sinclair and the VTA plan another high school-college student mentorship program in conjunction with The Lion King, which will be staged at the Schuster Center this summer. The Lion King project will be the longest yet, lasting September 2010 through June 2011. It will also include students from other Sinclair departments, such as English.

"For Sinclair I hope it does get bigger and better and we have more opportunities to collaborate," Butler said. "I think both of the organizations realize that we are about building the future of this region."

Education synergy

The synergies between Sinclair and the VTA are myriad. Sinclair provides the students, classroom space, computer labs, faculty and staff to help the association carry out its educational-outreach mission. And for Sinclair the benefits are equally enticing: exposure to professional theatre settings, along with access to Broadway-level performances and their actors and crews.

"Despite our own wonderful facilities, a college campus affords us individual classroom space for small-group and one-on-one types of work," said David Brush, manager of education and outreach for the Victoria Theatre. "This is something we simply cannot do on our own."

It also allows the Victoria Theatre to meet a major part of its mission: bringing the professional arts into the community. "For us it's been a great opportunity to partner with another wonderful downtown entity," said Roediger. "It's created an opportunity for us to reach a new audience and often younger people."

Those young people are important to Sinclair too. "The extent to which we can work with the high schools and the middle and elementary schools, to help them foster art education and foster creative thinking in those environments - then we have met our collective goal," Butler said.

The relationship has opened doors back and forth, Sheeley said. Brush is directing the musical Once On This Island at Sinclair next season. A Sinclair student is now apprenticing at the Victoria Theatre. "It's really useful and helpful to everybody," Sheeley said.

Downtown ambassadors

Sinclair and the VTA both care deeply about supporting a vibrant downtown. As two of the largest anchors in the downtown scene, both organizations have a stake in the success of the urban core.

"It's really exciting that the collaborations are bringing people downtown who realize there's a really nice arts community in downtown Dayton," Neuerer said. The high school students who come to the workshops come from as far north as Troy and as far south as Miamisburg. They are exposed to the Sinclair campus, the Victoria Theatre's venues and downtown Dayton.

"From a community viewpoint, the partnership promotes downtown Dayton in a positive way," Brush said, "and demonstrates Sinclair's connection to real-world employment and business."

By Tracy Staley

Tracy Staley is a Dayton-based writer whose work has appeared in the Dayton Business Journal, the Nashville Business Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader, among others.