Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati

1127 Vine Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202

Education and Outreach Programs

This has been an exciting year for Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati’s (ETC) award-winning Inclusive Arts Education programs. With the generous support of the Dater Foundation and other organizations that ensure strong, resilient, creative futures for this region’s youth, ETC is once again expanding our programing in unique ways, increasing accessibility, and focusing on real world skills that will positively impact students and adults alike.

This fall marked our first annual Inclusive Arts Education conference. As the founder of our in-demand Hunter Heartbeat programming, we sponsored a week of intensive training with Dame Kelly Hunter - all the way from London – and 5 of her top North American facilitators. This week allowed our teaching artists, ETC apprentices, and area arts educators to learn first-hand from Kelly and explore her brand-new curriculum surrounding Shakespeare’s PERICLES. We were able to share what we learned with some of our favorite students from Dater High School and TALL (formerly TALL Institute).

It is our intention to make this conference an evolving, annual opportunity for area arts and education professionals to share successful techniques and methods they have experienced within their classrooms and organizations. This opportunity to collaborate and create, using our collective experience and passion will help to accelerate the impact the arts have on education throughout the region.

Through our conference and continued local collaboration, we’re building vital connections with arts educators from Children’s Theatre, Playhouse in the Park, American Legacy Theatre, Visionaries & Voices and others. Together, we’ll continue to share our experiences, our programming, and our desire to multiply the opportunities in the Greater Cincinnati area for all students to experience personal growth through access to the arts.

Our current curriculum and blueprint for future programming, provides creative, interactive ways for students of all ages and abilities to play while honing skills that improve their interactions with each other, teachers and parents, and their understanding of their own talents and capabilities. For over a decade, our Hunter Heartbeat programming has provided this for children and adults in our community with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, improving listening, eye-contact, turn-taking, facial recognition, and self-soothing skills.

Our success with this method has inspired us to use other theatre-based games, exercises, and techniques to enhance the understanding and practice of “21st Century” skills throughout our partner schools, including our Prelude and Improv classes which explore, practice and hone skills like critical thinking, creative problem solving, teamwork, self-confidence, and resilience.

This is also the first year we scheduled an intentional “down-time” for our education team which has grown to 2 full time and 3 part time teaching artists this season. They scheduled winter/spring sessions to begin in February, allowing January to be in-house review, brainstorming, and intensive planning sessions, shaping the remainder of this season, our summer camps, and all next season. This dedicated planning time has given our team a renewed sense of ownership (four of our five teaching artists are post-pandemic hires) and they are reinvigorated to introduce new programming, drive successful current programming to new heights, and continue community collaborations – all with the shared mission of elevating our region’s students’ personal, creative, and civic growth.

Thus far this season, ETC’s education team and artists have worked with almost 1500 students, 36 different schools, in 23 zip codes, with over 80% of our participants qualifying for full or partial subsidization. The students we work with range across all backgrounds, ethnicities, ages, and abilities. We look forward to a multi-year plan that will also increase the number of students we’re able to serve during the summer months, including week-long Hunter Heartbeat workshops culminating in a public performance for participants to celebrate and share with their friends and family.
Website: http://www.ensemblecincinnati.org
Amount: $50,000
Date: July 2023