Students Get Dazzled by Cirque Mechanics Performance

Students from Downtown, Meredith, Merrill and Studebaker schools took a Thursday morning field trip to the Civic Center for Cirque Mechanics.

Bright and early Thursday, an eager contingent of students from the Downtown School, Studebaker Elementary School, and Meredith and Merrill middle schools fieldtripped to the Civic Center for a morning of theatrical magic. Their trolley ride was free. Their tickets to the show cost one dollar, that’s right, a dollar apiece, thanks to a mushrooming partnership between Des Moines Performing Arts and area school districts.

The Applause Series brings world-class performing artists and diverse art forms to DMPA stages for one-hour matinee performances targeted at school audiences. Each performance connects to in-class curriculum, collectively demonstrating that there’s an art to just about everything.

This year’s series has included fourteen shows since last November. Everything from ballet to Uganda to the Civil War to Stuart Little to this week’s last in the 2013-14 series, a Cirque Mechanics production. Birdhouse Factory is a nostalgic tale set in a 1930’s depression era widget plant that is transformed by the resourcefulness and creativity of the American worker. It’s a mesmerizing take on the routines and machines inherent in manufacturing that stirs physics, music, gymnastics and choreography into a stream of facrobatics, to coin a term, which held the Thursday morning crowd spellbound. They didn’t know whether to laugh or clap so they did plenty of both.

According to Karoline Myers, Education Manager for DMPA, Applause has grown from its inception in 1996 to one of the largest programs of its kind in the United States.

“This would not be possible without the generosity of our local donors and grants that subsidize the cost of staging these productions,” she explained minutes before curtain time at Thursday’s opening performance at 10:00 A.M. “Tickets for a dollar per student enable us to partner with local schools on a wide scale.”

Since the ticket price dropped to a buck per kid in 2008-09, the same year the Des Moines Community Foundation and local arts organization BRAVO launched their Connecting Kids and Culture initiative, the annual attendance for the Applause series has ballooned from about 15,000 to more than 53,000. One in every three kids is typically from DMPS. Thousands of kids across the district have been to the Civic Center this year, many of them for the first time.

The Applause Series is the foundation for many other education activities under DMPA auspices such as workshops and residencies. And last year DMPA established the Iowa High School Musical Theater Awards. The second annual event is slated for June 2nd at the Civic Center.

“I don’t have precise figures that show how we stack up nationally attendance-wise,” says Myers. “But I know anecdotally from talking with my counterparts across the country,” that Applause ranks in the top tier of arts partnerships between cities and their schools.

Packs of school kids out on the town this close to the end of the school year generate a pre-show buzz like a brood of cicadas. Downtown teacher Anne Booth knows the drill from past excursions. She and her learners were here earlier in the year to see We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. She brings a stack of books along with her and passes them out like playbills to stem the excitement until the lights dim. That’s when the buzz changes in tone. The kids shriek. The show begins. The spell is cast. Who knows how many seats were filled on Thursday by first-time theater-goers who will appear on the same stage as award nominees when they reach high school? It’s not a stretch to imagine an acceptance speech beginning “I remember the first time I ever came here. I was a second grader at Studebaker and we got to come and see The Birdhouse Factory…”

The strong supporting role played by the Applause series is a key element of the growing emphasis on integration of arts into school curricula, particularly at elementary levels where research makes clear that fine arts exposure, participation and instruction are closely linked with improved overall academic performance.

Almost as closely linked as the monograms DMPA and DMPS.

Photos from the Cirque Mechanics Performance