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When & Where

What the show will be like

Volunteer to be grabbed during the show!

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Why do Rites of Passage Theatre?

Contact us

Rites of Passage is generously
sponsored
by:

Community partners:

* ArtsConnect

* Society for Community Development

* PoCoMo Youth Services

WHAT OUR PROJECT WILL DO
FOR YOUTH IN OUR COMMUNITY
Our musicals for youth – both with DreamRider Theatre and other companies across Canada - are so successful at reaching kids because we clearly remember what it was like to be a kid – how kids wish to be communicated with, how they wish to be treated. That, fundamentally, is the gift we have to offer youth.

Yes, they will have a terrific experience. Yes, they will be part of a great, exciting theatrical production that has a cool ritual celebration component that actually means something – where something actually happens.

Yes, they will gain experience in a field they may one day work in, and take away skills they can use later in life. But in the end, they will have spend a summer being seen. Seen by a group of adults who are passionate about their work and in love with life. Who care about them as people. And they will come away feeling that something magical in life is possible for them too. There were a few adults who did that for us, when we were young. It’s time to “pay it forward”.

The Search Institute (www.search-institute.org) has identified forty “Youth Developmental Assets” as those that youth need in order to succeed in life, work, parenthood, and in the community. Our project will be able to achieve 25 of those 40 assets.1

Jerome Bouvier, Program Director of PoCoMo Youth Services says that in our city, “there is definitely a need for any expressionary arts that invite kids involvement and contribution. . . They just need to know that there’s adults out there who care.” In an email to us, he wrote that important values to youth are “community connection, sense of belonging, friendships, and contribution. . . Your theatre program will create circumstances where the youth involved will be able to meet those needs, thus strengthening [their] connection to community. [They will] know they are valued and belong, and have a stronger sense of self.”

WHAT THIS PROJECT WILL DO
FOR OUR COMMUNITY AS A WHOLE
The impact on the community of this project is greater than any other project we could imagine. We believe that it will deeply impact everyone who participates. This project will bring theatre and creativity to the daily life of its residents. As Jerome Bouvier wrote in his email, “It will foster a stronger sense of community connection and contribution -  strengthening [the] community’s capacity to care for itself. [It is] the hero's journey  - [towards] a more nurturing and richer condition.”

As Dolly Hopkins, Artistic Director of Public Dreams Society, writes, public rituals serve “to promote community well-being, to have fun, to celebrate, to sustain community beliefs, heritage or traditions, to create a forum for the enactment of myths, legends or stories, or to draw attention to the beauty of where you live.” 2

“To find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read your local and national newspapers,” writes Paul Hill, founder of the National Rites of Passage Institute in Cleveland. “The news is full of descriptive and violent acts by young people.  We, as adults have provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe or community.   Where do the youth growing in the community get their myths?  They create their own.  This is one of the significant reasons why youth gangs exist.  We do not provide them with community sanctioned ritual through initiation which culminates in membership as men, women and adults.” 3

With the support our sponsors, DreamRider has the potential to create an annual theatrical-spectacle-rite-of-passage event that is entertaining, healing and community-building. The audience in our community is maturing, and is ready for theatre that is not on tour from elsewhere, that begins here, that grows here, and that is unique.

Aleisha and Ian in rehearsal