We are so excited about Go Girls!, we can hardly stand it. Our upcoming summer camp is totally sold out. We have 2 Go Girls! Camps on the Road this summer – 1 in Healdsburg, CA with Cosmic Cowgirls and 1 at the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito, CA. And, we are actively working to increase our Go Girls! Afterschool Clubs from 1 to 10 in the Fall of 2010 (and we are half way there).
Plus, we just started collaborating with a videographer who we will collaborate with to make a “microdoc,” a very short documentary about the Go Girls! Project. In preparation for this and the expansion of this work, I figured it was time that we tell the Go Girls! story…
Go Girls! is a project for elementary school aged girls to use drama, visual arts, creative movement, and music to create and perform their own peaceful and powerful plays. It is based on the idea that, when women and girls learn how to access our true power of creativity and compassion, stand up for ourselves and others, and put our voices center stage, we will become the leaders we are meant to be. We will change the world.
Go Girls! is a program of Oakland, CA-based Glitter & Razz Productions, founded in 2003 to celebrate kids and the grown-ups who love them with premium camps, classes, and events that promote compassion, community, and creativity through theater.
We, the founders, Lynn Johnson and Allison Kenny, had been teaching and creating theater with and for communities in different parts of the country for 10 years before we met in 2002. That summer, we met while both teaching drama for a summer program in Marin. In addition to falling in love with each other, we also discovered our shared philosophy of the magic and power or theater for personal development and social change.
We began our Glitter & Razz began life as a once a year summer camp at the Marsh Youth Theater in San Francisco (2003-2006). Then, since we wanted to move to the East Bay, Glitter & Razz had to move with us. We officially and established ourselves as a business in 2006 and spent 1 year in residency at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts in Berkeley before moving into our current location, the Glitter & Razz Dramatic Play Space, in September of 2007.
During the summer of 2008, we were preparing for our first summer camp season in our new space and something happened that had never happened before. We had one session where only girls signed up. It was a shock to us at first. Having come from the non-profit arts education world, we were all about diversity and inclusion. It was a little uncomfortable for their not to be any boys participating.
Then, we figured that we had to roll with it. We remembered the important women and girl spaces that had been important to us in our own development. Allison grew up in a family of 4 sisters and a single mother and was active in WomenStory, a AZ-based organization that facilitates intergenerational groups of women and girls in spiritual and creative exploration. Lynn was a Girl Scout for many years and actively found her feminist voice in college when she minored in Women’s Studies and focused on the role of women in mass media and the arts as creators, subjects, and audiences.
That summer, we made “the magic and power of being a girl” the theme of the camp. We created a play that was about the celebrations and the challenges that young girls experience on a day-to-day basis. The play took place in, what we called, Lovely Land, where nothing ever went wrong. Until one day, it did. The play was about how all of the characters (which ranged from princesses, to fairies, to dogs to rats) learned that, in order to navigate and overcome challenge, we had to learn how to work together. The original song from the show went like this: “Sometimes it’s hard in Lovely Land / Things can get ugly, out of hand / We chose to be mean but we can change / Let’s choose to be kind, right now, today.”
That was such a successful summer that we asked the girls and their parents if they would sign up for camp again the following year if we repeated the “Go Girls” theme. The answer was a resounding “Yes!” Now, in 2010, we are facing a sold-out camp (with a long waitlist) and the Go Girls! Project is a year-long program made up of 3 different components:
- The Go Girls! Camp | A summer creative intensive just for girls
- The Go Girls! Afterschool Club | 10-week sessions where girls connect to their own communities while they explore the greater world around them
- Go Girls! For All | Learning Events for girls and the women and men who love them
The main activity of Go Girls! camps, classes, and workshops is the creation of theater. But the work goes even deeper than that. We intentionally integrate social/emotional learning into our Go Girls! curriculum in developmentally appropriate ways that seek to address: the formation and maintenance of positive and healthy friendships; confronting bullying behavior in yourself and others; navigating and regulating our emotions; effectively overcoming challenges; strengthening communication; taking responsibility for and pride in ourselves and what we say and create in the world.
Our main curriculum influences are:
Allison: “We definitely have a peace agenda. There is just so much violence in children’s lives. It seems like everything that they sees flashes, beeps, and screams. Being a girl means having to encounter attacks from boys and each other. Not to mention the messages from our culture and the media about that teach us that we are weak and less than. And on top of that, our feelings are constantly invalidated. We are told to ‘get over it.’ Telling a child to ‘get over it’ without also teaching them how to name, claim, and regulate their own emotions is like telling someone to become a millionaire without teaching them first how to balance a checkbook. Go Girls! is designed to give girls the skills and tools to center themselves, to listen to and trust their own emotions and voices, so that they can know it’s okay to feel. Not only is okay, it’s what makes us strong. It’s what we bring to the world.”
Lynn: “I believe that the process of creating and rehearsing an original piece of theater is one of the most important learning experiences that anyone can have. It teaches women and men of all ages to collaborate effectively with others, trust their own creativity, and establish a reflective practice. These are the world-changing skills that need to be cultivated by all of us. I am choosing now to focus my effort on women and girls because, as the Dalai Lama says, ‘the seeds of compassion were sown by my mother.’ We are the leaders that the world is desperate for. It is time for us to step up and teach ourselves the true power of the feminine; the power to stop, to be still, to listen, to collaborate, to reflect, to trust our own inner wisdom, and to act according to that wisdom. We need to teach it to ourselves so that we can model it for others.