Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month Through the Arts

Posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2020

Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15 to October 15, is dedicated to recognizing the contributions and influence of Hispanic Americans. This fall, Gaynor students did just that through both drama and music.

Drama Teacher Meredith Akins’ asynchronous lessons from the last few weeks for Orange through Blue Cluster students have focused on the achievements of Hispanic Americans who have inspired others to achieve success.

“While Hispanic Heritage Month is only thirty days, students understood that the contributions of Hispanic Americans can and should be celebrated continually,” Ms. Akins said.

The lessons specifically focused on Cesar Chavez, a civil rights activist, as well as Augusto Boal, a Brazilian theater director, writer, and politician.

“Although Boal is not Hispanic American, we used his theater activities and strategies that engaged students and explored social change,” Ms. Akins said. “As the founder of Theater of the Oppressed, Boal used strategies to inspire poor Brazilians to rise up against racial and class inequalities.”

First, the students participated in one of Boal’s activities called Columbian Hypnosis to examine systems of power.

In the activity, one of the participants would play the hypnotized, and the other participant in the pair played the lead. The lead would hold up their hand with the palm forward, known as the hypnotizing hand. They would ask the other actor to be totally hypnotized by this hand and start following the hand, keeping socially distant from it. The lead would then slowly move the palm however they want — up, down, left, right, or at any angle.

Ms. Akins said, “This exercise allows students to understand that power is about the control of resources and decision, or the ability to cause or prevent action, which was the case for grape growers in Delano, California, over grape pickers, like Cesar Chavez.”

Orange through Silver Cluster used BrainPOP to learn about the nonviolent forms of protests Chavez used that were inspired by Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., such as strikes, boycotts, and protest marches. Green and Blue Cluster students used Teaching Tolerance’s “La Causa.”

“My Lower School and Silver Cluster students used their bodies to make tableaux, which are frozen pictures that tell a story, of each of these forms of protest,” Ms. Akins said. “We also looked at other forms of protest to understand their concepts, such as the musicians strike on Broadway in 2003, the Montgomery bus boycott, and women’s suffragist protest marches.”

Students in the Green and Blue Cluster examined how other students use Theater of the Oppressed to devise works of art. They watched high school students on PBS Learning as they created a safe space to create and perform original works rooted in social justice.

Ms. Akins said, “I think the most important aspect of this work is getting students to think about how theater can be used to shine a light on injustices, but also allow people to create solutions through discussion, role play, and reflection.”

Students also celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month through music and dance with Music Teacher Michael Piedmont.

Yellow Cluster students explored musicians of Hispanic heritage whose work has been influential in different genres of music, ranging from classical, opera, rock, pop, hip-hop, ballet, broadway, dance, jazz, and country.

Their studies also included learning about Eduardo Vilaro of Ballet Hispánico. Vilaro is a Cuban-American dancer, choreographer, educator, and artistic director & CEO of Ballet Hispánico.

The students watched a video of Vilaro teaching a lesson on how to mambo, and they then performed the dance themselves.

“I believe it’s imperative for our students to have an understanding of how musicians of Hispanic heritage have had a profound impact on the music we listen to, and how they have helped shape the foundation of so many genres of music,” Mr. Piedmont said.