With Chicago in the thick of Operation Midway Blitz last fall, Orland Park-based Ballet 5:8 faced the problem of producing a show about the Latino experience for communities afraid to leave their homes.
Ballet 5:8 was in the process of adapting “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros, a 1984 coming-of-age novel that follows a Mexican-American girl growing up in Chicago.
“Where this originally sparked from was, we had actual field trips set up in the fall for a bunch of Chicago schools to come and see the early excerpts of ‘The House on Mango Street,'” said Ballet 5:8 executive director Jeremy Slager. “But because of all of the ICE raids that were happening during that time, the schools and the families did not feel safe to travel.”
That eventually led to virtual field trips: professional filmed performances accompanied by educational supplements that can be shared with students remotely, including through partnerships with schools and libraries.
“They were asking, like, ‘Hey, we’d love to participate in this, but we can’t travel around the city right now and feel safe, so would you be able to create something that could actually come to our schools, where we have more control?'” Slager recounted.
The production of the virtual field trips is funded by state and federal grants, including from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“What all three of those grants allowed us to do was to put on beautiful productions, and then hire a professional film crew to both film the productions themselves so that we can make that available to every school district and public library in the state of Illinois, as well as bring in world-class experts on the topics,” Slager said.
The standard rental price for the virtual field trips is $50, Slager said, although there are scholarships available to make the performances free for groups or school districts with fewer resources.
Ballet 5:8, founded in 2012, is one of the largest nonprofit arts organizations in the south suburbs, Slager said.
“We’re serving a community that doesn’t have a lot of arts access,” Slager said. “Our mission is to spark conversations on life, faith and human dignity.”
Making art as accessible as possible is important in a region like the south suburbs, he said.
“It’s considered an arts desert. It’s hard to get live art into the area. There’s some, like, structural challenges with that, with having the right theaters and the right artists,” Slager said. “We believe that art should be made available to everyone.”
For example, he said, the virtual field trips could be useful for schools that don’t have the capacity to bus their children out for in-person field trips.
Ballet 5:8’s goal is to create ballet that “speaks to the current cultural moment,” Slager said.
“A lot of ballet is kind of fueled by nostalgia, doing old works of previous centuries, a lot of times on fairy tales, and stories of kings and queens of Europe,” Slager said. “We want to tell stories that really matter for the 21st century that reflect the world that we live in, or look back and kind of dig deeper into those stories handed down to us from previous generations.”
Along with “The House on Mango Street,” Ballet 5:8 is also finishing up production on another virtual field trip, called “The Curious Life of Edgar Allen Poe.”
“We are putting the finishing touches on both of them, actually,” Slager said.
One little-known detail of Poe’s life incorporated into the production is that he grew up near the slave auction house in Richmond, Virginia, Slager said.
“The kind of moral reckoning of pre-Civil War America was a big feature in kind of the way he wrestled with the world around him,” Slager said. “So in the actual performance, a part of the corps de ballet is slaves, and they are a part of the scene around, but then they also have their own culture and role to play.”
The virtual field trips are accompanied by educational material, including historical context, discussion guides and artist interviews.
Ballet 5:8’s production of “The House on Mango Street” will have its first live performance on May 8 at Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago, Slager said. The performance used for the virtual field trip has already been filmed.
The virtual field trips can be accessed at ballet58.org/virtual-field-trips.
elewis@chicagotribune.com
