Workshops & Youth

Studio Workshops

Four times a year the company offers workshops in the Oakland studio for beginners and intermediate/advances students. These workshops offer training in safety, use of equipment, vertical and aerial dance techniques on hard walls, trampoline walls and in the air as well as climbing choreography and floor work. Guided technique and time for improvisation are part of the unique, supportive curriculum offered by core company members and director Amelia Rudolph in these two-day intensives.

Residency Activity:

While on tour, the company offers master classes and youth workshops in the communitties in which they perform. In the 2003-2004 season they will be doing residency activity through the Teton Mt. Festival, Swarthmore College, Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, UC Santa Barbara and the Kennedy Center among others. Past residencies include WolfTrap Foundation for the Performing Arts,University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, Raleigh, and Theater Artaud.

Destiny Partnership, 1997-Present:

Amelia Rudolph began her relationship with Destiny Arts Center in 1997 when she met its founder Kate Hobbs and began teaching and choreographing aerial dance with the Destiny's Youth Performance Company. She has taught 10-13 week workshops annually that culminate in works performed in Destiny's annual Oakland show. Amelia has enjoyed collaborating with Sarah Crowell, the Artistic Director of the performance company until 2002, and now the new Executive Director of Destiny Arts Center. Destiny is an Oakland based organization whose mission it is, "...to support and encourage a community of multicultural youth to become creative, peaceful, strong, and expressive leaders."

Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company has been in existence for the past 8 years at Destiny Arts Center. The primary objective of the group is to create performance art works in collaboration with a group of up to twenty-five 12-18 year olds, utilizing movement and theater, while also incorporating self expression and the idea that performance art can instigate social change and empowerment. For the past two years, members of Project Bandaloop have been involved in teaching beginning and intermediate/advanced vertical and aerial dance to members of Destiny's Youth Performance Company. For the last three years, with rigging by Peter Mayfield, and Rudolph's artistic direction, the youth performers have rappelled down the face of McClymans high school in Oakland, to perform an entrance piece for the show. Last fall, four of the most experienced youth aerialists performed on the Senator Hotel, a seven story building face in San Francisco's Tenderloin District as part of the San Francisco International Street Theater Festival.