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Saturday, 5 March 2005

San Jose Young People's Theatre

I don't usually blog about family events here, but sometimes it is important.
My children have been attending and performing at the San Jose Young People's Theatre for four years now, and it has deeply impressed me.
Carole Ferris-Greer, the program director, has created something very special in a quiet corner of the San Jose Parks and Recreation department. For 22 years she has been bringing together a fresh cast of a hundred children every few months, and building them into a performance powerhouse.

These are not simple children's pageants, but properly staged, costumed, choreographed performances with complex sets and original staging. Each show is adjusted in rehearsal to fit the children cast in their roles, and every child in the chorus is given a moment to shine.

Carole is a master of what Larry Lessig calls 'Walt Disney creativity' - taking classic folk tales, and remixing them with contemporary cultural references to bring them alive for a new generation. Whether it is sly references to reality dating shows in Cinderella, with the stepsisters singing 'Material Girl', the apes singing Louie Louie in Jungle Book, or the replacement of the Indian song in Peter Pan with 'Colors of the Wind', each story is refreshed and updated.

So why am I writing about it now?

Despite its track record, its huge local support, the 100,000 cans of food it has generated in donations to the homeless, and the thousands of children whose lives have been improved by being part of it, the Young People's Theatre is under attack by the Parks and Recreation Department of San Jose city council.

Accordingly we have set up a support site at yptsupport.blogspot.com. We're seeing if the citizen journalism publishing tools of photos, weblogs and videos can make a difference.
Do please visit it, link to it and spread the word. Help us hold the local council to account.

And help make sure that future generations of children can experience this too.
Posted by Kevin Marks at 21:34

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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