Child’s Plays
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Last weekend was huge for the Duncan YMCA Chernin Center for the Arts. The first class of the center’s new arts training academy showed their stuff in a musical revue Sunday evening, and another group of 30 youngsters trouped valiantly through three full performances of the musical Working after seven weeks in the center’s youth-theater workshop. Ya gotta love the kids–who, in the performance I saw, were pretty much drowned out by the musicians accompanying them–but the jury’s still out on the question of whether plans being implemented by new executive director Malik Nevels will work for the city’s only arts-based Y and its rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on the edge of the UIC campus. When Nevels took over a year ago, he cut staff and the professional adult-theater productions that a previous administration thought would put the center–conceived as the cultural jewel of the west side–on the map. Now, with new hires including Columbia College adjunct faculty member Wilson Cain as the training academy’s director and former part-time producer Ed Krystosek as its producing director, he’s making education the center’s main mission, at least temporarily. The training academy is offering year-round, fee-based classes for kids in voice, dance, and acting, and by 2005 Nevels hopes to have an arts-oriented charter elementary school for 100 kids up and running.
Nevels says cutting staff and adult productions was necessary to get a handle on the center’s budget ($790,000 this year). The Duncan Y has operated in the red for the last three years, he says; in 2002, when YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago posted a $16 million loss, the deficit at Duncan was $380,000. Nevels says 80 percent of Duncan’s revenue was going to pay staff salaries; he thinks 70 percent should have been going to programming. His restructuring, which reduced staff from 27 full- and part-time workers to 14 (just 7 full-time), has shrunk 2003’s projected deficit from $320,000 to $87,000. On the other hand, he’s added a marketing director and is about to hire a fundraiser–positions he hopes will have a positive effect on the bottom line. He’s looking to expand the youth-theater workshop (which this summer, through a city program, paid the kids minimum wage for 22 hours a week) and Shoebox programs into year-round schedules, revive the Writer’s Voice (if he can get $60,000 a year to fund it), and build the academy, which had 16 students in its first session, on the model of Philadelphia’s Freedom Theatre. (Andre Ford, originally hired from Freedom to run the academy, lasted just eight months.) There may be a resident theater company or in-house adult productions in the center’s future, Nevels says. But right now he’s focused on getting operations in order, offering opportunities to economically disadvantaged kids, and positioning the center as a place that will “strengthen the sense of community” as the neighborhood changes. “We read in the paper every day that these mixed-income communities may not be working because very little social mixing takes place,” he says. “If there’s any medium that brings people of different ethnic and social backgrounds together, it’s the arts.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
