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Kalamazoo College joined the list of campuses where APTP has performed when 5 ensemble members helped open the college’s WITH/OUT Borders Conference. The performance also gave our APTPians the opportunity for a college visit.
This summer, APTP launched a two-year project to create Learning Curve, our first immersive theater production, in collaboration with Third Rail Projects, one of the foremost creators of immersive performance.
Bob Hoyt’s kindheartedness didn’t hit me right away. I was too busy letting myself be intimidated by his political opinions and his business savvy. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been aware of his generosity since he and his wife invited me to live in their home for the duration of my APTP internship this summer. But it wasn’t until I heard him speaking in baby voice to his dog—as we shared a tub of mini peanut-butter cups—that I understood why he and Albany Park Theater Project were a perfect match.
Update: APTP alumna Stephanie Castrejon and her cast-mates from College of Wooster have been selected by the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) to perform “Women of Ciudad Juarez” at the annual Region III competition this January.
The commitment and sincerity you see on the APTP stage reflects months of rehearsal, but represents only a fraction of how ensemble members invest their time while at APTP. By joining the APTP community, our young artists also dedicate themselves to discovering their own success through education. For most teens, the culmination of their APTP journey is our free college counseling program, through which more than 90% become the first in their families to go to college.
Marta Popadiak, APTP Class of 2003, has made a career out of the passion for social justice that she developed at APTP. We interviewed Marta about her blossoming career as an organizer around progressive political issues and candidates in Minnesota.
We bid a bittersweet farewell this fall to APTP’s Class of 2013 as they embarked on their college careers: Jancillin Chacko to Coe College, Randy Dang to Northeastern Illinois University, Lilia Escobar to St. Olaf College, JP Marquez to Beloit College, Nichole Martinez to Wittenberg University, Stephany Perez to Kalamazoo College, and Raul Rico to Middlebury College. Most were APTP ensemble members for five years, since 8th grade.
Albany Park Theater Project visited The College of Wooster in Ohio as artists in residence for a long weekend in Fall 2013. As part of the College’s fall forum, “Facing Race,” APTP youth ensemble members performed select works from APTP’s repertoire for an audience of 300 students and faculty.
Paloma Morales joined APTP when she was thirteen years old, four years and three plays ago. Audiences will remember her as the young Ahlam selling her treasured dolls to audience members in Home/Land, and as the young heroine who loses her childhood home in I Will Kiss These Walls. Paloma took a break from rehearsals to reflect on APTP’s new play, God’s Work, and her four years with the company.
I was 14 when I joined Albany Park Theater Project in the spring of 2000. That same year I started at a high school notorious for after-school shootings and a high dropout rate. My own family fell victim to schools with similar statistics; not one person had graduated from high school. I remember my grandmother having tears roll down her face because my uncles had all failed out of the system, and there was a continuing sense that there’s violence in this neighborhood, and we’re being swallowed up by it.