The young performers of Youth Onstage! and viBe Theater Experience who have joined forces to create The Compass Project, a new collaborative show exploring gender roles.

After two seasons “on the road,” Youth Onstage! is excited to return to its newly renovated home on 42nd Street. The time away has been extremely growthful, YO! has used the opportunity to strengthen relationships with many new schools and community organizations over the past eight months.

One of the most exciting of those relationships has been with viBe Theatre Experience, a five-year old non-profit youth theatre that empowers teenage girls to create and perform in collaborative theatre pieces. YO! and viBe have been supportive of one another for years, and now the two theatres are getting the chance to work together. Since February, the young people of YO! have been working with the young women of viBe to create The Compass Project, a collaborative theatrical journey exploring gender and its many roles.

The actors from both companies have been grappling with thought-provoking questions like “How do we learn to be men and women?”  They’ve used improvisation, poetry, and movement to investigate accepted categories of gender behavior and to challenge accepted notions of what it means to be male or female. They even took a trip together to the Paley Center for Media to see a presentation about the representation of women on television.

Both companies are now working diligently to put their work together in a dynamic performance in which YO! and viBe actors will be performing side by side. The Compass Project will run for three performances on May 18th and 19th at the Algonquin Theatre.  You won’t want to miss your chance to see these two cutting-edge youth theatres together on stage! You can find the details at www.castillo.org. YO! will also be presenting their portion of the work over the summer at the newly renovated All Stars center on 42nd Street. Stay tuned for the performance schedule.

As the spring draws to a close, Youth Onstage! is looking towards the graduation of eighteen new performers from the Youth Onstage! Community Performance School spring semester on Tuesday, May 20. This will be quickly followed by a new incoming class for our Summer Theatre Intensive, beginning in July.

The number of young people who are a part of our theatre work keeps growing, and we will be enlisting more and more of them for productions in our ambitious 2008-2009 season! An unprecedented number of young actors, directors, and technicians will be working on Young Playwrights at Castillo, our fall festival of new plays written by budding Youth Onstage! writers.

If you’d like to attend the YO! graduation or want more information about the program, contact program manager Brian Mullin at (212) 356-8452 or bmullin@allstars.org.