This residency was an opportunity to work with the amazing Panos Panay and his new program, the Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (ICE), which has already been identified as one of the major forces for change in how we define and teach entrepreneurship in music. I was the co-artistic Director for the week with the remarkable soprano Carla Dirlikov Canales who has already established herself as a truly innovative thinker and activist. The objectives of the week as presented to the students were nothing less than this!
Your challenge over the next five days will be to take your idea of a better world, your passion for change, your spark of a project from concept to reality. Soak in inspiration from the guest speakers, learn from their failures and successes, tap into the on-campus coaching and imagine how the arts might be used to positively impact your community, your home, your country, or even the world.
Pretty astonishing! What I loved about the residency was the response and attitude of the students who committed themselves to all sort of new challenges culminating in throwing themselves, literally, into the “Shark Tank” where they had to present their project to an expert panel. The approach to teaching and learning breathed new life and oxygen into the whole experience. This was about flexibility and responsiveness to the needs of the students rather than administering an inflexible syllabus. It allowed the students to create their best work and it left me very moved by their responsiveness to the problems of our world.
You can read about the project in more detail in my Huffington Post blog “Why Not?”