art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

40 art / vision / voice
know. We all already knew what was going on and what was expected
from us. I gave Luis enough trust to go in there and do all that crazy
stuff with him. I guess since he knew Ron and Brian and them so
well, I was like, “Yeah, I know I’m safe with them.” It was pretty easy
at the point when they came in since Luis did know them.
brian The week before the Columbia students arrived, I went and spent
the day at Association House and did the warm-up with Luis, and
then I ran them through some exercises and sort of gave them an
idea of how I work and how I would expect them to work. Luis’s
work is an amalgamation of me and Ron in a lot of ways, although
he’s developed his own voice very strongly as a teacher, so they
knew the exercises, they knew the approach.
We talked pretty directly about the college students. Luis and
I sat down with the Association House students and talked about
how the whole thing was going to be structured, with two college
students leading the class each week, and asked them for their
patience and forbearance because some of these students were not
going to run them through the best hour of instruction in their
lives. We told them if it wasn’t working well, they shouldn’t pretend
that it was, but we asked that they not be directly disrespectful,
even if they felt they were being disrespected themselves.
And when the college students were not teaching, they participated
fully as students alongside the Association House kids, which was
important. They weren’t just sitting up on the dais watching their
peers teach. That would have been awful. I would generally do the
voces anciosas (anxious voices) youth
group ensemble, left to right: cindy,
william, elsa, brittany, ivan, yamil, and
antoinette. lead instructor luis
crespo and columbia college chicago
student teachers are in the
background.