The summer humanities program grew out of March cabin fever. I had made a presentation on teaching the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf in high school as part of the Council's Winter Weekend at Bowdoin. At the end of the day, Victoria Bonebakker asked if I would bring Beowulf to the Maine Youth Center as the Council had done with previous Winter Weekend subjects.

She set up a meeting with Peter Duffy, who is an English teacher at Maranacook High School in Readfield and involved with theater. I had been considering staging Beowulf as the focus of the Youth Center project, and Peter's experience and qualifications were a wonderful fit. He has taught creative movement with inner city students in New York and New Jersey and appeared in two Shakespearean roles this summer at the Theater at Monmouth.

Peter outlined our plan in broad strokes and worked out a division of labor. I met twice with Jim McManus, chief of volunteer services at the Youth Center. He was helpful, supportive, and enthusiastic.

On July 2, Peter and I met with the boys who had signed up, and we all dived in. I began with an introduction to the poem and then plunged into reading it with the group. Students volunteered to take turns reading. I paused often, to emphasize or explain or simply comment on the story. Reactions varied. Some boys were enthusiastically involved and offered their own ideas. One or two responded to poetic turns of phrase and images. Others were less attentive.

We read the poem in four days. We would read for an hour and a half, have refreshments, and then do theater exercises, including mime, improv, and focus exercises. The refreshment part was clearly an important draw. As Jim McManus said, "Food is the coin of the realm here."

After the poem had been read, we identified 12 significant events that could be dramatized. Each boy chose a scene to be responsible for. Each was the writer/director for his own scene. They found that the creative exercises they had been doing with Peter all week had prepared them for the task of developing their scene and directing the other students to make it work. One of the most enthusiastic poets in the group worked on splicing quotations from the poem together with bridging phrases to make a unifying narrative to place the individual scenes in context.

The boys clearly enjoyed developing the action segments and took obvious pride in their own scenes, in which, incidentally, they usually starred.

I cannot say all went smoothly. Maintaining focus was a problem, and there was some friction between individuals. In the hours, even minutes, before the show, much was still chaotic. Changes were made up to the last minute. It was all up to the boys. I told them that what would be remembered is how responsibly they played their parts.

To my delight - and, frankly, my surprise - the production (to a packed house of their peers, their parents, staff from the Youth Center, and other adults) was practically flawless. The young people in the audience seemed engaged in the play. The actors focused, each playing his part and making the effort to take up any slack that developed. The show was a huge success.

I found the experience frustrating, emotionally exhausting, and deeply rewarding. Most rewarding was the apparent success the boys felt. They worked together through an unfamiliar process. They had to cooperate with and support each other as well as take initiative and responsibility. We had taken a 1,000-year-old poem and made it available to a contemporary audience without compromising the integrity of the story or the poetry of the translation.

As part of the Council's Beowulf project, writer Hodding Carter -- in his multi-layered Viking costume -- also spoke at the Youth Center about his own adventures in the North Atlantic retracing Leif Ericson's voyages in a replica of his ship. Each of the nine boys received a copy of Carter's A Viking Voyage. The Youth Center project was made possible by the generosity of Winter Weekend participants. An article on the Council's literature project for young women at the Center will appear in the next issue.

African Masks at the Maine Youth Center

The ability of African tribal masks to convey deep and unspoken truths about the human condition is proving a remarkable teaching tool this spring in a Maine Humanities Council-led program for young women at the Maine Youth Center. Arts and humanities educator Odelle Bowman invited an expert on Nigerian masks to explain their meaning and then asked the teenagers to create masks expressing their own sometimes fragile sense of identity.

Oscar Mokeme, from Portland's Museum of African Tribal Arts, told them how in his culture masks are used both for self-awareness, Bowman reports. "as well as for looking at your dark side, that side of ourselves which, in a Jungian sense, we all have." There is "the mask that fades away your sorrow," she explains, "and the mask that gives you power."

The girls' masks will be used later this year in a performance, possibly of a Shakespearean play, says Bowman, for whom this is one more innovative technique for persuading troubled youths to reflect on their lives. The program is made possible not only by the participants in the Winter Weekends but by a grant from the River Rocks Foundation.

"A big part of what we do is trying to change how these girls operate in the world. We want them to think about the patterns of their lives and the patterns of their mothers' lives and their grandmothers' lives. They tend to be very creative young women, very good with words, but many of them accept the labels that other people pin on them and miss out on discovering the talents they really have."

Bowman says a major challenge is to persuade them "not to think of themselves as 'jailbirds,' but try instead to make the best of the time they have at the center. We encourage them not to build up more anger about their situation but to take responsibility for why they're there. We want them to feel alive instead of feeling numb." This involves, she adds, frank conversations about addictive behavior, eating disorders, family histories, even suicide. The masks provide a neutral, non-threatening way to approach such topics as body image and self-image.

Bowman is experienced in working with troubled youth, notably through her Company of Girls, a theater group for more than 50 at risk young women in Portland ages 8 to 18. They meet one afternoon a week with 12 to 15 participants.

"Some of the girls are at the center because no one knows what to do with them," Bowman says. "They are runaways, and no one knows where to send them. But they love our program. By the second session they've established their own rules. There's no acting up. They are on their best behavior."

The faculty for the 2002 program are Odelle Bowman and Leah Cross, an artist.

The Summer 2000 Maine Youth Center program introduced young women in the program to well-known women poets, helped them find their own poetic voice, and encouraged self-expression through a performance piece showcasing selected poetry--their own and established works by Anne Sexton, May Sarton and Maya Angelou. Now a veteran , and chief architect of the Council's Youth Center program model, teacher Anita Charles teamed with theater artist Odelle Bowman to lead another moving and successful program for girls.

The girls published their own volume of poetry, titled Tears and Footprints, written entirely over a two week period in June 2000. Leaders Anita Charles and Odelle Bowman write in their introduction to the volume:

Their writing reflects youthfulness, sincerity, insight and spirit as well as pain, struggle and sadness. Some of the girls had written poetry before, others had never even attempted it! Yet all of the girls challenged themselves to grow as writers and thinkers. As the girls learned, any given poem was not "just about a hand" or "just about the sea" but about the self hidden in the lines. They learned that the conscious and the unconscious work together to weave images that celebrate an individual voice. For example, when Jane ends a description of her hand with the word "breakable", the connections to her life and spirit are poignant. In the personification poems about specific objects, we hear anger, confusion, hope and faith. In many poems, we can also hear the humor and wisdom of these young women. We are proud of the accomplishments of these young women, and we wish them the very best in their futures as they continue to examine their identities and embrace their true voices. We encourage them to keep writing and acting as avenues for self-expression — in the words of one of the girls, to keep "drawing and painting with the rainbow".

In the summer of 1999, the same team of teachers as from The Odyssey below, Doris Anne Holman and Anita Charles, worked with a group of teenaged girls at the Youth Center, exploring the Sandra Cisneros novel, The House on Mango Street.The program evoked heart-rending response journals from the girls and poignant discussions about the meaning of home. The House on Mango Street is about a Mexican-American girl trying to find her place and her identity in the inner-city of Chicago, not unlike the troubled girls at the Youth Center. The culminating project was a book that each girl created about her own life. Many sad and personal stories poured forth over the course of the intensive one-week program. Girls who had great difficulty with writing gained confidence. Girls with important stories to tell found a strong voice in the writing and art of the book-making project. Of special interest was that the teachers' natural daily interactions– who are mother and daughter– were a source of character study for these girls, most of whom had little experience with a healthy mother-daughter relationship.

Although not our first program for youth-at-risk, a Summer 1998 interdisciplinary, two-week program for teen-aged boys incarcerated at the state's sole correctional institution for minors was a pivotal point in the Council's programming for this underserved population. They studied Homer's Odyssey,creating art in response to the readings, and produced an original puppet show version of The Odyssey.The boys readily identified with Odysseus, and the program was filled with many discussions around such issues as the role of brain versus brawn and fate versus choice, and the rewards of human relationships and home in contrast to eternal life or life in the land of the lotus-eaters. The boys were very proud of themselves, and we think at least some of them have a broader perspective on their own life journeys. This program was run by the mother-daughter team of Doris Anne Holman and Anita Charles.