iPower Pandemic Empowerment

Cosmic orchid

iPower Theatre Collective, an arts enrichment program at Quest to Learn in Chelsea, NYC, integrates performing and visual art through the lens of social justice and personal empowerment.  Our 2020 project had been postponed, its focus shifting and re-shifting, in concert with the rapidly changing COVID landscape.  Over the next sixteen months, school would be fully remote, hybrid and back to remote again, multiple times. All the stakeholders had strong (and differing) opinions of how to handle our students’ education in the midst of the pandemic. We heard from politicians, parents, teachers, administrators, UFT and DOE officials. But not a word from the kids. No one asked them what they thought or how they felt through all of this.  

"So, we decided to amplify our collective voices by interviewing one another. In the midst of expressing ourselves with our artwork and under the stress of maintaining some semblance of normalcy, in what was anything but normal, we created the content in this video."