Nikki Zaleski

Artist Bio

Nikki Zaleski is a graduate of Northwestern University, with degrees in Performance Studies and Gender Studies. She currently organizes Sisters Empowering Sisters, a young women's social justice and leadership program at the Chicago Girls' Coalition. She is also the administrative associate and choreographer for Redmoon Theater's Dreamgirls and has taught drama and dance in the Chicagoland area for Urban Gateways, The Actor's Training Center, About Face Theater, Kids CanDance, Creative Kids Corner, and Global Girls Inc. Nikki is a co-collaborator and writer for Project US, a participatory performance on sexual health education for youth. She is particularly interested in theater for individual and social change as well as creating new work through movement, ethnography, devising, and collaboration.

Artist Statement

I became interested in performance education when I began teaching dance in high school. It was at the Palatine Park District that I noticed I was writing lessons and choreography that included more than dance steps. I shifted focus quickly from bar work to body work during the first ballet class I taught, noticing the 6th and 7th grade girls' struggle against their bodies in leotards. In a jazz class two years later, I worked through issues solidarity with a class that split directly in half by race and class.

These programs became a powerful way to ask hard questions. Through teaching dance, I began to notice how few spaces exist for young people to practice uninhibited honesty. I wanted to find more. So if dance felt like one of few sites of honesty, wouldn't theater also amplify genuine youth voices?

I started teaching drama in 2005 and found an answer to that question. Theater gives young people the very rare opportunity to make adults and their peers listen to them. It's unfortunate that the opportunity is rare, but beautiful when it comes to fruition. Currently, I am exploring new questions around authenticity and power in our classrooms. I am working on an authenticity training series with Jessica Palmert and the Chicago Girls' Coalition for white people entering the "helping professions" with youth of color. The trainings are designed to challenge white privilege and give tools for building sustainable, conscious relationships, within communities of color.

Educational Philosophy

I believe in the power of performance as a site for critical resistance and change. Only through theater can players exit themselves to enter another subject position, another struggle, another point of view. And only through theater can players explore their own point of view with simultaneous safety and risk. These abilities advance great honesty and immense curiosity. They enable deep investigations of the world, necessary to our educational experience, our relationships with people and things, and our livelihood.

In my classes, I look to provide an opportunity for students to engage actively and excitedly in topics of their own lives. By building off personal experience, students make stronger connections to classroom curriculum. Arts integration is crucial in this way -- it opens the door to individualized learning as it focuses on the student as navigator of her/his own learning path. When students use art to connect classroom lessons to their own lives, they become the writers of distinct versions of history, literature, science, math, language, etc. And they remember their own writing because they care about it.

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDf_Ti316OE