Salon: Use Your Outside Voice
Our "Salon: Use Your Outside Voice" came out our Artist's Way work.
Our students are very creative and we wanted to give them an opportunity to share their gifts with each other and to the larger public. Our participants get a chance to showcase their talents which have included poetry, short stories, dance, singing, improv, comedy and much more. We created the Salon as a venue for them to do so. The Salon is a quarterly event, running 2 hours on a Friday evening in Wallingford.
We make a point of emphasizing that the night is a very low-key event and encourage a pressure-free zone. The Salon is ALL about play and experimentation held in a very supportive environment. We encourage participants to try things out and to allow for failure - squeaky notes, mispronounced words, missed dance steps - to embrace all elements of performance. When asked how formal an event it is we note that it's a combination of "one step up from performing for your parents" (in the best way) and an old-fashioned hoedown in a Little House on the Prairie vein. We ask the participants to put up pieces that are G-rated as we often have children attending the event as well.
The event is free but we pass a hat for donations with donations going to a worthy organization or cause. Past recipients of donations have been an orphanage in Mozambique, Etta's Project and an Alzheimer's facility called Liberty Shores.
We also encourage others to create their own Salon experience and have created a very loose format that can be helpful to follow in generating your own Salon night. You can find more information about creating your own Salon at our Salon Use Your Outside Voice Facebook page.
And in the spirit of the night, hum along with us (and Bruce!) our guiding mantra for the Salons:
"This little light of mine, I'm going to let it SHINE!"
The next Salon date will be on Friday, March 21st at 7:00 pm
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