The RC CTC believes that creative expression is essential to the process of self, civic, and academic learning; its practice has the power to transform personal, local, and global communities. The RC CTC’s mission is to “crack open” the worlds of art and education through teaching and practice so that all people will have access to a creative education—this we believe is fundamental to healthy human development.
Based in the University of Michigan’s Residential College, the Residential College Community Theater Collaborative (The RC CTC) was founded in 2006 as an alliance of community-based arts partnerships sponsored by the RC, some having lasted six years.
The RC CTC serves the university and the community by training undergraduates to use the arts for social justice, by using arts to expand university knowledge from the community, and by encouraging arts-based learning for college students of today and tomorrow.
At the core of the RC CTC are several partnerships between the RC and many exemplary community-based organizations throughout the Detroit Metropolitan Area.
Partnerships
A Telling It Playshop
Telling It partners students with special needs youth from S.O.S. Community Services, COPE Alternative School and Ozone House to promote literacy as UM students and youth co-create works in the visual, literary, and performing arts.
Teaching Artist Assistantships: Students also help teachers at arts-based community organizations, including Ann Arbor’s 826 Michigan, and Southwest Detroit’s Matrix Theatre Company.
The Intergenerational Theater Program brings UM Students and seniors from Detroit’s Hannan Center for Senior Learning to co-create theater based on shared personal experiences.
Programs
Hannan House senior Anna struts her stuff during intergenerational theater rehearsal.
Course Work: Michigan students learn the theory and practice of community-based arts by enrolling in a four credit course, cross-listed through the Residential College and the School of Social Work called Empowering our Communities Through Creative Expression. Part classroom discussion and part internship experience, this course helps students learn how to become artists/activists.
Bridging the College Gap: Youth participants are regularly invited to the University of Michigan campus to become more comfortable with college life as they engage in Educational Arts Excursions with faculty, staff, Hannan House seniors and other students. These events have brought us to see Mos Def, the Urban Bush Women, Matrix Theater Company’s Jesus in the Hood, and attend MESA’s sponsored Hip Hop Summit on UM campus.
In June, young people become immersed in college life as they are come to campus for the Summer Arts and Leadership Institute (SALI). SALI participants, stay in UM dorms for a weekend, do a campus-wide scavenger hunt, and participate in arts workshops led by UM faculty.
RCCTC Staff and Faculty
Kate Mendeloff
Kate Mendeloff: Kate is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the Residential College of the University of Michigan and the faculty supervisor for the RC CTC Program. She collaborated on oral history to performance projects with both Mosaic Youth Theater and with Matrix Theatre in Detroit and has been involved with local community organizations in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Before moving to Michigan in 1990, Ms. Mendeloff was artistic director of Talespinners Theater in San Francisco, California, a theater which developed new plays from oral history of the Bay Area and was active in a similar organization in her hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. She was educated at Princeton University and the Yale School of Drama and worked as a professional director at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. and at Center Stage in Baltimore. She has been on the faculty of the University of Maryland, San Francisco State University and the theater department of the School of Music at the University of Michigan. She can be reached at mendelof@umich.edu.
Rebecca Fried (Left)
Rebecca Fried: Rebecca is the program director of the RCCTC, as well as class coordinator for its core course Empowering Our Communities Through Creative Expression, and site coordinator for the Intergenerational Theater Program. She has received her B.A. from the University of Michigan in History, and her M.A. at the University of Texas, Austin, in “Performance as a Public Practice.” Rebecca has had an extensive history with community-based theater and Detroit, being in the first class of young people to participate in the Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit. Since then, Ms. Fried has worked with community-based theater initiatives in Chicago, Austin, as well as Detroit. She specializes in oral history to performance, performance analysis, and personal non-narratives. She can be reached at becaif@umich.edu.
Deb Gordon Gurfinkel (holding book)
Deb Gordon-Gurfinkel: Deb, site coordinator and creator of “Telling It,” trained as a Drama in Education specialist at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London England, where she received a Bachelors In Education Honors degree. After teaching in London schools Deb moved to San Francisco and applied her skills in working with homeless children, shortly after receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to broaden her access to that population. She later moved with her husband to Ann Arbor in 1996 and started “Telling It” with local artists soon after. Deb can be reached at dmgordon@umich.edu.
