Good Ideas We Are Watching: The Albany Park Theatre Project
Albany Park Theatre Project - Upcoming Production
The process of sharing your story can life changing for both the audience but especially for the participants.
This is the belief behind The Albany Park Theatre Project (APTP), a Chicago based, nationally recognised and award winning initiative – and one of the good ideas that CoM is currently watching.
Albany Park is a neighborhood of 57,000 people on Chicago’s northwest side. It is one of the most diverse communities in the country, with more than 50% of the residents having been born outside the United States.
The Albany Park Theatre Project is a multiethnic, ensemble-based theater company of teens and young adults that creates original performance works based on the actual stories of immigrants living and working in the Albany community.
The result is that they bring to stage voices that are either overlooked or too frequently have their stories co-opted by other organizations and media outlets. Along the way, the lives of the youth participants are also changed. In Chicago, where almost half of the students who enter a public high school never make it to graduation, more than 90% of the Albany youth who become a part of the Albany Park Theatre Project graduate from high-school (or earn a Graduate Equivalency Diploma) and matriculate into four-year colleges.
Since its founding in 1997, the Albany Park Theatre Project has performed over 50 original performances for more than 25,000 people and have shared the life experiences of Mexican indocumentados, Bosnian refugees, Bolivian revolutionaries, persecuted Ukrainian Jews, Palestinian-American Muslims, Persian Sufis, Polish domestics, Vietnamese refugees, and more.
Watch our site for more on this initiative…
