Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Purple Dreams, a documentary that chronicles a powerful theatre arts success story in an urban high-school, promises to be a model illustration of why the nation must embrace public arts education and recognize its immense role in producing engaged, successful, college and career-ready students.
 
GreyHawk Films is currently in post-production on their feature length documentary that is an inspirational testimony to the transformational power of arts in education, particularly in underserved at-risk communities. After following high school arts students for three years, they have chronicled an inspiring true story that features the lives of six black performing arts students who struggle with homelessness, low-income neighborhoods, gang-related violence and single parent households as they proudly participate in a trailblazing high-school production of The Color Purple at Northwest School of the Arts (NWSA) in Charlotte, NC. NWSA received the Top High-School Theatre Honor of 2013 - an invitation to perform on the main stage at the International Thespian Festival in Nebraska. It was the first time in 32 years that this honor was bestowed upon a NC high-school, and even more groundbreaking considering the predominantly black cast.
 
Four of the six featured students received college scholarships as a result of this experience and the mentorship of their theatre arts teacher & director, Corey Mitchell, who received the inaugural TONY AWARD in 2015 for Excellence in Theatre Education. 2014 Graduation rates for NWSA, an urban school with a diverse population of 1045 students, were in the top 3% of their district, with a graduation rate of 96.2%. GreyHawk Films partners, Robin Grey and Joanne Hock, intend to ignite a national conversation about the transformational power of arts in education with the release of their documentary in early 2016. They are passionate about its message and the undeniable positive effects an arts curriculum has on at-risk students. When students are given an avenue for creative exploration and emotional expression, their imaginations blossom. They become more confident and self-aware, develop enhanced communication skills, their academic performance improves and they adopt brighter views of the future. Arts education has the ability to transform schools into places of wonder, creativity and exploration, increasing student engagement and the motivation to strive for higher learning and life long success.
 
Get a sneak peak at the documentary Purple Dreams here