Nikki Zaleski

Artist Bio

Nikki Zaleski graduated in 2008 with a double major in Gender Studies and Performance Studies. At Northwestern, she concentrated on community-based and educational theater as well as gender-focused performance. Currently, Nikki is the youth organizer for Sisters Empowering Sisters, a
reproductive justice and leadership group for young women. She is also a member of Ag47, an arts mentorship collective that serves girls in the Logan Square neighborhood, as well as an Artistic Associate for Dispatch Art School in Bucktown. Nikki works in public schools as a teaching artist through Urban Gateways and Communities in Schools of Chicago. In addition to her work with youth, Nikki is a member of the Junk Birds Collective, an arts justice group that facilitates anti-oppression trainings for colleges and organizations. She is also a member of an anti-racist white allies circle, which uses Theater of the Oppressed techniques to interrupt racism and challenge white supremacy. Nikki is a writer and director, who recently co-created Project US, a participatory play about adolescent sexual health. She is just finished co-creating a new play event about the first Thanksgiving.

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