New Beginnings

An excerpt from the archive:

Dear Friends and Family,

You are receiving this because you are an important part of my life, my community, and my work. As you likely already know, I left Double Edge Theatre in April. This letter, which is not going to many recipients, is sort of like a soft opening.

After 22 years of helping build Double Edge into what it is today, I left to pursue a vision: a long-term and meaningful process that tends to children’s imagination, creativity, and sense of wonder. This calling has deep roots, and many personal factors have contributed to a growing sense of urgency. This includes but is not limited to having my own small children and my mother’s passing last December. But most of all, it’s that we are living at the hinge of history. The confluence of crises our children are living through compel me to devote creative resources to the potential of the youngest generation–their creative resilience, sense of possibilities, and feeling of aliveness in community.

This is an experiential artistic laboratory for children 5-11 years old. It offers components of exploration and collaboration with eclectic, world-class master artists within a creative process that gives kids a ton of agency. It includes performance creation, pageantry, exploring the natural world, and engagement with community. This project is still unnamed because I want to see what the kids name it after a year of experiences. 

2022 was a successful pilot year. We conducted a month-long micro-pilot (Winter), held weekly laboratory sessions (Spring), launched a week-long summer creation laboratory (Summer), and created a pop-up parade program which the children named The Moving Museum (Fall). The kids in our rural community are showing up with great enthusiasm. Here, you can see a photo gallery (2 pages!), and attached you can read about what we’ve done and where we’re going in 2023. Also read a testimony from a parent!

Before I close out, I want to uplift three things:

Access: Funding is built into this program to ensure that all children can participate. There is 100% full access regardless of ability to pay fees. 

Creative Team: An incredible, multi-disciplinary team of artists has been assembled to shape this work.

Partnerships: Institutional partners who have come on board: Ashfield Library, Boston Children’s Museum, Trinity College, Common Good, and Ashfield Community Hall.

As I said, the past nine months since leaving Double Edge has been a major life transition and a soft opening of something new. In the new year, we will developing the next stages, as well as be raising funds and the project’s visibility. You may hear from me in the new year as I reach out to my community to support this work. Funding will go towards project overhead (space rental, admin, insurance, materials), providing subsidies to families, and paying the artistic team a living wage. I also need thought partnership and help raising visibility so in the meantime, please share any thoughts and please share this vision widely across your networks. And if you can’t wait to make a contribution—that can be arranged! Honestly, your support will make this a reality. We are in the early stages but it’s growing fast. In the end, this is about providing children with an experience of wonder from which they will draw inspiration from for the rest of their lives. 

Thank you for reading this! And please be in touch for any reason. 

With love and gratitude,

Matthew 

To see a mind map, click here.

Dear friends and supporters of Matthew - 

My 9 year old daughter, Anne, has been so lucky to be part of this experiment from the beginning. She has gained skills (including stilt walking!) and artistic confidence, which alone would be pretty wonderful. But more that that, she has become part of a community of humans who see creative, collective problem-solving as the obvious path in any situation, and who have the tools to meet their needs in ways that are both functional and beautiful—people who understand the deep impact that art and awe can have on how we move through life, and who are working to create multi-generational consciousness shift together. If this sounds a little wild, wonky and wonderful, that’s because it is! As a parent, I believe so strongly that this program is part of the antidote to the despair and crises welling up for all of us, including our children. And nothing easily explained could do that. I hope you’ll throw your support behind Matthew and this project in many ways as he and his team work to bring this to life!!

Ariel Brooks