BRAIN STORM

EVERETTP R O G R A M G U I D E

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Scientists are starting to take emotions seriously and study them in their laboratories, well... that’s what we do every day in our studio. —Dorothy Jungels

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We meet in an empty room with nine people, a computer, a camera, a hard drive, and a pile of books on the brain. —Dorothy Jungels

Edgar: It’s like a safe

combination--there’s so

many numbers you can enter.

We have to find the right

combination, and there’s a

million options, and I hope

we have enough time. I hope

we get the right one. Two

months is scary, insanely

scary. I’m terrified...

Justine: Yeah, we should care about if the show is good and if we get accepted, but honestly i care more about how much this has changed me, and how much i’ve learned…

Grace: You can feel in your body that this is truth, that something real is happening right now, this isn’t just dance steps...

AAron: Improv taps the un-conscious, I think that’s where the work comes from. It’s not like we’re thinking it through. We’re thinking a lot and then our unconscious does its own work, processing ideas and al-lowing them to come back out in surprising ways—

Marvin:What’s behind

the wall? is it freedom, is it tears, is it joy,

is it danger?

Rachael: We’ll still be making changes right till the last second, guaranteed—

you have to be flexible. You have to be willing to let go of some of your favorite stuff…

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Sokeo: Replace that memory with something else.

Replace that horrible memory--

Ari: My favorite parts are when we start working on the gym, and we do cause and effect, and the movement and the energy reminds me of watching video of a molecule and different atoms working together inside the brain…

PROCESS

Edgar: you have to study and research a whole bunch of stuff just to be able to understand the part that you have to create…

MeganThey ColleCT

The brain stores things and comes back to them later, in unexpected ways. In Everett’s creation process, their many hours of improvisation in re-hearsal are captured on digital video. Rather than loosely basing an element of the piece on an idea discovered in rehearsal, they return to the video of the improvised dance or monologue and try to replicate it exactly. Relearn-ing a sequence initially created through improvisation is intended to recap-ture the originality and authenticity of that initial response. Once relearned, these sequences are spliced and diced, moved from place to place, and integrated with text, video, music, and theatrical elements such as costumes and lights.

Many times, stories or sequences that have been workshopped intensive-ly never make it to the final iteration. Other times, someone will remember a moment in rehearsal several months prior that never seemed quite right before, but now provides the perfect missing piece. Rachael’s story about the birds is an example of this. It didn’t appear in the piece until the day before the first performance! Until everything else was in place, it was difficult to see how it would fit—but now, it’s impossible to imagine BRAIN STORM with-out it.

“Our automatic, unconscious and ultra-fast brain processes are much more powerful than limited conscious controlled thinking. Unconscious pro-cesses run in parallel and can handle many tasks at once. They are source of

our intuition, insights, and most decisions (for which we try to find conscious explanations later).”

—The Programmer’s Brains At Work: Understanding The Software System

They CollaboraTeEverett’s process relies on the expertise that each person has, and allows for

the possibility that different people may be in charge at different moments, depending on what the moment calls for. If you walked into an Everett rehearsal at five different moments, it’s likely you’d think five different people were in charge. Edgar leads the group through an intricately choreographed dance sequence. Aaron instructs them on how to manipulate the scaffold-ing more smoothly. Rachael guides the delivery of a monologue. Dorothy rewinds a video from yesterday’s rehearsal to point out a moment she’d like to see again. Everett calls this “liquid leadership.” It turns out that the Brain works this way, too—it functions less as one coherent unit with a decisive di-rector’s voice, but as a symphony of different cognitive tools, each existing in relationship to the others, but lacking a central authority. A moment in BRAIN STORM that illustrates this is when the amygdala (played by Sokeo) and the frontal lobe (played by Rachael) are having an argument. Parts of the brain, like people, don’t always agree with each other.

“The challenge is to each be who we are, and still be together.” —Dorothy Jungels, Artistic Director, Everett

I’ve had the good for-tune to observe some of the creation of braIn STorM. Along the way, I learned some things about Everett’s process, some things about the brain, and some things about the relationship between them—

What Does The BRAIN STORM Process Teach Us about The brain? Tom

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StorieS Change themRecurring throughout BRAIN STORM is the story of Angelo, a young man

who gets out of jail only to be shot at his welcome home party. When the ambulance fails to arrive, Angelo’s friends drive him to the hospital them-selves; in the backseat, Edgar holds his friend’s bleeding body and, trying to keep Angelo from slipping away, tells him stories of fun, carefree times, of flirting with girls and hanging out in the neighborhood. Through stories, our brains can step out of the present and travel somewhere else for a moment. Scientists believe that the stories we hear have the power to actually change our brains physically and chemically. Grace said that, for her, creating the section in BRAIN STORM where she curtsies and falls over and over reminds her of how important and how hard it is to silence your “inner critic.” Once you realize what a powerful effect our thoughts have on the way our brains work, it becomes even more important to try to think positively.

“Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.”

—Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey

they are CuriouS about the mySteriouS and the unknownWe now know more than we ever have before about how the brain

works, and yet there is still so much more that we don’t know. Memory, learning, aging, brain disorders, and more, remain largely mysterious even to the most advanced scientists. The creative process can also feel myst-erious, confusing, and chaotic. During the making of BRAIN STORM, there were many moments when something was being added or eliminated or reworked simply as an experiment, when the dancers needed to take a leap of faith and try something they didn’t fully understand. I never once heard them ask, “Why are we doing this?” Instead, they said that even when they didn’t know where the process was going, they trusted that it was going somewhere meaningful and interesting. In fact, the disorient-ation and chaos was necessary to arrive at the eventual discovery. Everett believes that if you know what you’re going to do ahead of time, why do it? It’s probably already been done. Everett’s artists aren’t trying to recreate what is already known, they are trying to surprise themselves, to make new discoveries—just like scientists who study the brain, slowly revealing its strange, mysterious beauty.

“There have been a lot of times in my life where I’ve just been casting about trying to figure out what’s the next step, what’s bothering me, where to go… you keep struggling with it and eventually the structure of the problem becomes clear, and then the path through it becomes clear, but all of those moments of insight come from long periods of casting about and seeing all the pieces. You just have to be patient enough to wait for all the pieces to really fall together. You’ve got to be stubborn.”

—Eric Lander, biologist and mathematician, world leader of the international Human Genome Project

megan Sandberg-Zakian is a theater director, writer, and arts consultant who has worked with everett on strategic planning and website development projects.

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The Brain Café is a series of free presentations that create a dialogue at the intersection of neurosci-ence, medicine, and the arts. The Cafés bring to-gether scientists, artists, and community members to share their knowledge and experiences.

We originally developed the series as a way to share the process of creating BRAIN STORM with the pub-lic. We quickly realized that the Brain Cafés were an important programming model in their own right. Now they are engaging public expositions that ac-company performances of BRAIN STORM on tour and at home, and they will become part of the menu of educational programs for young people that we de-velop out of BRAIN STORM. The series will also serve as a model we continue to use in the development of future works.

One of the most satisfying things for us in develop-ing the Brain Cafés was that as word spread about what we were doing, community members started to come forward. A young woman with locked-in syndrome, a man with schizophrenia, a woman with Tourette Syndrome, and a woman with post-traumatic stress disorder shared their stories with audiences and shared the stage with scientists from several institutions. Scientists from Brown University and The Trauma Center at Justice Research Institute in Boston were among those who presented rel-evant studies, explaining the neuroscience behind some of these disorders and the technologies being created to address them. Our company presented short performances inspired by the stories, includ-ing dance, theater, poetry, and music, and audience members engaged actively in the dialogue, sharing their own stories or expertise.

BRAIN CAFÉ

These evenings of dialogue serve to inform the public about often difficult disorders and, through the shar-ing of human stories, scientific information, and creative arts, reduce the stigma associated with them.

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“I see many people looking at her with pity and with a certainty that the way she is now is the way she will remain. I have this crazy idea that she is listening and trying to speak—I’m embarrassed to say these things because I know they are not rational.

When I hear from her nurse that Maggie is moving in time with the music I am sure that Maggie is having some sort of inner life.

Her eyelids have fluttered and her mouth is moving in such a way that makes the doctor feel there are messages going through her brain stem to her brain.

I wanted to tell you all what is in store for Maggie and me in New York City.She will have an MRI on Monday. She will get hooked up to an EEG machine as well as

be in a room where she can be videotaped. On Tuesday she will have a PET scan done. On Wednesday she will have an FMRI, which is the test when they will have her listen to my voice and also will ask her to think about something physical that she likes to do and several other things, and they will see how her brain responds to those things and where, which will tell them if she hears and if she understands.

The doctor asked her to move her eye down if she could see me. There were people all around the bed waiting for her to answer, and she moved her eye down, and I have to tell you that was the most amazing moment for everyone. People had tears in their eyes be-cause that was the moment that I knew after eighteen months she really was there. I had to tell everyone that my daughter saw me today.”

—Nancy Worthen

MARGARET

—March 2011 Brain Café Margaret’s full story can be found at CaringBridge.com.

Nancy Worthen reached out to us to share her daughter Margaret’s story. Margaret suffered a stroke three days before her graduation from Smith College in 2006.

Nancy faced major decisions when asked, “What do you think Margaret would really want?” and was told by some doctors

“let her go, absolutely.”

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“Wow, it’s a lot of work putting a production together: manag-ing performers, choreograph-ing, directing, PR work, book-ing, stressing, rehearsing, more stressing and on it goes as you know very well. I finally feel like we are just about ready to give this a whirl! NPR came and interviewed us and we were on the radio this morning. Now that was great publicity. And I have you to thank for so much of this project’s momentum. You guys are the ones who encouraged me to continue this work here in Philly and I’m doing it. How awesome is that? And your idea of blending neuroscience with art is bril-liant and has inspired the direc-tion of my own piece Intersec-tion: Tourette Syndrome where performance, neuroscience and disability collide.”

—Sutie Madison

—June 2011 Brain Café

SUTIE

“I have a moderate case of Tourette Syndrome (not cursing) and my videos right now are about using my tics (vo-cal and motor) as a sort of palette or language that I compose and then edit into a rhythm or beat. It’s pretty wild and experimental. Al-though it’s a challenge to live with, I see my disability as an op-portunity as well. Alan told me about the BRAIN STORM project you guys are doing. He and I were imagining what it would or could look like to have some of your danc-ers study and learn my tics and choreograph a small piece for the project. Tourette Syn-drome is a neurological disorder directly relat-ing to the brain but the symptoms (tics, twitch-es) come in a variety of movement that affect the rest of me! So my ques-tion is would you and your students be inter-ested in using me and my Tourette’s as material for your BRAIN STORM project?”

Sutie came to Providence for two weeks and col-laborated with us on a short performance of the history of Tourette Syndrome for a Brain Café. Sokeo and Edgar incor-porated her tics into a hip hop routine and talked about simi-lar movements that already exist in hip hop, like popping, krumping, and ticking. Sutie was very open about her experience, so we were able to explore it with her unselfcon-sciously, even laughing and joking about the tics together. At the Brain Café, Sutie talked about how the tics begin to stop when she is creating art or dancing because she is so focused on another activity. She advocated arts and sports as therapy for people with Tourette Syndrome. When Sutie returned home to Phila-delphia, she created a similar performance and discussion.

Sokeo demonstrates the hip hop style krumping. These movement resem-ble some of the Tourette tics learned from Sutie.

Marvin plays Dr. Charcot in the Ballet de la Tourette.

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Meditation training works in a step-wise fashion, through two different practices, Focused Awareness and Open Monitoring or “insight.” In Buddhism, fo-cused awareness is called “Sharpening the Axe.” Open Monitoring or insight is called “Cutting Delusion at its Root.”

Sharpening the Axe is another way to say “strengthening the attention muscle of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC).” This brain area is responsible for directing and sustaining attention on a single object: Reading a book, listening to a friend (or music), without getting distracted by your own thoughts or inter-pretations.

The prefrontal attention system is also responsible for controlling the emotion and thinking systems, so when it is weak, thought and emotions explode out of control. Many forms of psychopathology, including anxiety, depression, addictions, and psychosis are due to poor regulation from a weak prefrontal cortex.

Focused Awareness meditation, where you bring your mind back to an object

([e.g.,] the sensations of breathing) over and over again, builds the attention muscle of the dlPFC. From the inside, this translates into sharpening the focus of your observing faculty and calming over-active thinking and emotions.

But this is not the ultimate goal, it is only preparation for the next step: insight.

In the second stage, “Open Monitor-ing,” the meditator takes this refined tool of focused awareness and turns it in on his own mind and experience. With this newly clear vision, the meditator can now see that the emotions that have been plaguing him are nothing more than passing thoughts (mental images, words) and body sensations (pressure, tightness, heat).

As we get better at watching our minds, we eventually see something quite shocking: that everything we took to be our self is nothing more than fleeting con-cepts and body sensations, and there is no solid or permanent “thing” called a self that we have to defend, protect, or worry about being good enough.

M e c h a n i s M s o f M e d i t a t i o n

WilloughbyWilloughby britton is Professor of Psychiatry and human behavior and Professor of behavioral and social sciences, brown university.

“I’m going to share with you something I learned about triggers—how to set up happy triggers for yourself—and it has to be really common. I have a happy trigger, and I don’t really tend to share it with people, but I’m going to let you know what it is. It’s birds! Every time I see a flock of birds fly by I say to myself, “Go Rachael! Go Rachael! Go Rachael!” I learned it from a therapist. And it’s funny because I probably set it up at least twenty years ago but still, every single time I see a flock of birds fly by I say to myself, “Go Rachael!” and at that moment I feel really happy, and it can trigger a little change in myself. So I wish there were birds in my house. I wish there were birds on my wall at night as I was going to sleep. They have to move though, and there has to be a lot of them.”

—Rachael —March 2011 Brain Café

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“Angelo was a special case, he had a lot of anger issues. We all knew he was one of the bad kids who always gets in trouble.

Saturday night, we’re all partying because it’s Monkey’s 18th birthday. Now

every gang is in here, I’m talking about Bloods, Asians, Black, Spanish, every gang you can think of. We are all celebrating, not only because it’s Monkey’s birthday, but because Angelo just got out of jail. Six of us decided to go out back to smoke. There’s a lawn facing Pine Street. All of a sudden—pow pow pow—Angelo goes down. People go chasing after the people across the street, people running everywhere, people are screaming, girls are crying. I lifted up his head so he could breath. I asked him if he was okay, how’s he feeling, what’s wrong. Checked to see where he got shot. Right shoulder.

Angelo is trying to laugh about the situation, really first day back and this happened. At the same time he’s spitting up blood. We grabbed Angelo from the legs and arms and carried him to the back seat. By now it’s already been 25 minutes since we’ve called the ambulance. I’m pissed. Angelo’s on my lap. I’m talking to him the whole way, to tell him about memories we had like buying sneakers, flirting with girls, going to the beach, crazy things just to keep him there with me.

I thought the best thing to do was to tell him memories that would make him laugh... like in movies when people are trying to act calm but tears are coming down their face... I didn’t want to tell the story [in BRAIN STORM] because that would be a little too emotional for me. But it turns out that Sokeo tells the story, and I do the movement. Every time I do the movement it brings me back to that day. And if you actually see me do [it] you can see on my face the different emotions I felt that day, like when he actually got shot, when we carried him away, when we put him in the car, talked about memories. You can see all the different emotions I went through every time I do it.” —Edgar

ANGELO

In the process of creating BRAIN STORM, company members shared personal

stories of deep emotion. Edgar told this story about his friend

Angelo.

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Justine Bevilacqua

Justine Bevilacqua

Stories like Angelo’s sparked our interest in the connec-tion between neuroscience and social justice. Mark Gap-en from the Trauma Center, who presented for our Brain Café on PTSD remarked that there is more post-traumatic stress in the young people growing up in poverty in our cities than in veterans returning from war. He also stated that the prisons are filled with people with undiagnosed mental illnesses often directly related to untreated trau-ma. Angelo represented so many young people that we’ve met over the years who have been put in the ‘bad kids’ corner since they were little.

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“When I had my breakdown the first voices I heard was like people using the intercom system to make fun of me. Jeez it’s so hard. And I quit my job. I would stay home washing the floors.

So I started walking, and I didn’t stop until I was way out of town, and I would hitch across the nation. Met a lot of interest-ing people. And I slept in Salvation Army’s and missions and I’ve heard girls sing and saxophonists play their saxophones and there was this beautiful guitarist playing guitar. And I just had so much fun and it was very cold weather because it was winter and I love winter—FREEZING.

I used to argue with voices, wanting to play guitar. And some-times they put a thought in my head and I couldn’t touch the guitar. And this happened for ten years, and I kept arguing and I...I was a little brat but I wasn’t getting my toy. Then about ten years later when I was 35 I got to play my guitar, and I thought it was such a beautiful miracle that after all that time that I would get a chance to be at one with my guitar.”

JOELMy cousin Joel was struck by schizo-phrenia when he was sixteen. This was devastating for his family. Joel was the oldest son with three young-er brothers who worshipped him as a guitar hero. Joel knew from a young age that he wanted to be a musician, and he diligently practiced his guitar for hours every day. One of the hard-est things for Joel about the voices was that they would not let him play his guitar. As time passed I began to forget the young man Joel had been and became accustomed to the wild-eyed man who lived in the basement of my Aunt Barbara’s house. The in-terviews for BRAIN STORM were the first time I heard from Joel himself what his experience of schizophrenia was like.

—Aaron JungelsEverett Co-Artistic DirectorTo

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“I’ve sat on a horse and looked up at the pyramids. I’ve stood at the top of the World Trade Center as it swayed back and forth. I was a reporter for a while. I lived in Manhattan and wrote junk mail… that was fun. The nice thing about that is I can sit here not being able to walk, and think back and realize I’ve done some really interesting things and that I’ve been lucky to do that stuff. And so I don’t really feel like I’ve been ripped off of life experiences.

I was born with this thing called arteriovenous malformation, which means I had no capillaries in part of my brain. Because of that malfor-mation I had a massive brain hemorrhage, which I was very lucky to survive. So, I ultimately am not as upset about what happened to me as some people might be because I’ve known for years [that it might happen], and I knew there was a good chance that it would kill me. You know, I can’t remember getting up this morning so that gives you a funny perspective on life. I remember the people here, but I don’t re-member what I did yesterday. It’s funny, a real jerk that I knew in college I think said to me one time, “you gotta love your fate,” and every day I repeat to myself, “you gotta love your fate.” That’s a funny irony, and I love irony so. You know, a lot of the things that meant a lot to me were things that took place in the mind. Intellectually I’m fairly intact, and so I’m very relieved and happy on the whole.”

Crotched Mountain, in Greenfield, New Hampshire, is a hospital and rehabilitation center for people with brain injuries, and a school for stu-dents with disabilities. As part of our research for BRAIN STORM we did a two-year residency at Crotched Mountain, leading theater and movement workshops with resi-dents in the school and Brain Injury Center. We met Richard during our residency and were captivated by his story of surviving a massive brain hemorrhage and by his outlook on life in the aftermath of his injury.

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“The garden of neurology offers the investigator captivating spectacles and incomparable artistic emotions.

In it, my aesthetic instincts were at last full satisfied. Like the entomologist hunting for brightly colored butterflies, my attention was drawn to the flower garden of the gray matter that contained cells with delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, the beating of whose wings may some day (who knows?) clarify the secret of mental life…

Even from the aesthetic point of view, the nervous tissue contains the most charming attractions. In our parks is there any tree more elegant and luxuri-ous than the Purkinje cell from the cerebellum or the psychic cell, that is the famous cerebral pyramid?”

—Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1894, known as the father of modern neuroscience

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“I am always self-conscious when de-scribing anything I do creatively with either my writing (I write short stories and poetry) or art.

My usual day as a neurologist is spent trying to support patients who have hor-rible diseases such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) where there is no hope, no cure, and inevitable death. After I make the diagnosis of ALS the majority of patients usually die within three years. My art is a way for me to cope with all the sad-ness and fear I take on each day. As I tell my medical students and resident physicians, I feel the best physicians are the individuals

who can take on and experience their pa-tients’ feelings.

So I will try a brief explanation of the fol-lowing poem: This was a patient of mine who was a gifted athlete. He was diagnosed with a neurological disorder. A lot of his sense of self was based on his athletic prowess. With-out fail he would run in Central Park twice a day; he especially enjoyed the uphill portion near 110th Street. As his illness progressed he was no longer able to run his Central Park route. He had to inject himself ever other day with a medication in an attempt to control his illness. This poem tries to convey his sad-ness and my sadness for his loss.”

Jeffrey Cohen, MD is a professor of Neurology at Dartmouth Medical School and the Associ-ate Chief of Neurology at Dartmouth-Hitch-cock Medical Center.

We met Dr. Cohen when we presented BRAIN STORM at Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College and sat on a panel with him about current research at the intersection of art, medicine, and neuro-science.

Jeff

Tonight is...So tonight it is the even day or

odd day I don’t remember ... I just know I am supposed to

give myself the injection ... so is this how it all ends up giving

yourself some sort of medica-tion ... I am sure no one knows exactly what the long term ef-

fects are ... I heard the ad on TV while I ate the take out dinner: the announcer gravely intoned

in a very soft and pleasant voice: “risk of infection anemia

diarrhea malignancy” ... I pull up the clear solution in the

syringe ... it looks harmless ... and wait ... my left leg has a

purple spot ... my right leg has a red spot ... I wait for a divine sign ... nothing happens ... the floor fan drones on ... I start to

cry I am not sure why ... maybe it is for all of the lost opportu-

nities in my life: the past life of running in central park, the

skiing, the absence of pain, the missed meetings ... the needle barely hurts as I push it deeply

into the skin ... the clarity of this act somehow seems ok

... a drop of blood appears as I pull out the needle ... there is no change ... I am not run-

ning up to 110th street ... ever again ... and the cells are silent

as they divide and divide and divide ... I will be the last to

know ... as always ... but please no pity ... they taught me how

to do thisbroken (1993)Jeffrey Cohen

BRAIN STORMCo-Directors: Aaron Jungels and Dorothy JungelsCreators/Performers: Grace Bevilacqua, Justine Bevilacqua, Ari Brisbon, Aaron Jungels, Rachael Jungels, Marvin Novogrodski, Sokeo Ros, Edgar ViloriaProduction Design: Aaron JungelsVideo Collaboration: Laura ColellaAnimation: Steven SubotnickLighting Design: Deb SullivanSound Editing: Justine Bevilacqua and Dorothy JungelsCostume Design: Robyn Duffy

Everett Managing Director: Kate Anderson

Program Guide Contributors: Willoughby Britton, Jeffrey A Cohen, Megan Sandberg-ZakianFeatured: Angelo, Richard Lamb, Sutie Madison, Joel Smith, Nancy and Margaret Worthen

Program Guide Design: Brian Jones / brianjonesdesign.comProgram Guide Project Director: Adrian Moore

THANK YOUBrown University and the Institute for Brain Science (BIBS), the clients of Crotched Mountain, David White – Art Ven-tures New England, Bob Jungels, Cherisse Bandy, Susan Joyce, Kenneth Moore, Rachel Panitch , Megan Sandberg-Zakian, and our community.

The scientists who sat for interviews: Stephen Correia, John Davenport, Lachlan Franquemont, Carlos Vargas-Irwin, Catherine Kerr, Jennifer Lambert, Jim McIlwain, Stephen Mernoff, Naveen Rao, and John Stein.

Brain Café presenters: Rick Benjamin, Willoughby Britton, Victoria Chang, Thomas Emmet, Mark Gapen, Hakon Heimer, Beata Jarosiewicz, Brian Jones, Sutie Madison, Michael Paradiso, Lisa Peck, Carl Schoonover, John Stein, Patrick Tracey, Jeffrey Wishik, Margaret Worthen and Nancy Worthen.

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CREDITS

The BRAIN STORM Program Guide is funded by the Rhode Island State Council for the Humanities, an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities.

BRAIN STORM was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Boeing Company Charitable Trust. Additional funding was provided by the MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

BRAIN STORM was created through a multi-year artist residency produced by ARTVENTURES New England at the Crotched Mountain Specialty Hospital and School (www.crotchedmountain.org) in Greenfield, NH. Crotched Mountain is one of the country’s leading brain injury and neurological disorder rehabilita-tion and treatment institutions.

Funding provided in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and private funders, and The Rhode Island Foundation.

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Everett is a cross-disciplinary, cross-generational, and cross-cultural ensemble of dance and theater artists creating, performing, teaching, and engaging a diverse community through the arts.

Guiding Everett’s mission is a deep belief in collaboration, ex-perimentation, and the artist’s role in creating a just, equitable, and joyous future.

Our Company, Stage, and School work in concert to build and support this vision.

Our COmpany was founded in Providence in 1986, and has since gained national recognition for its unique creative vision, social consciousness, and effective youth programs. We create original dance theater performances, produce film and video, carry out a wide range of educational programs, and mentor new generations of young artists.

Our Stage serves as both a community gathering space and a laboratory for the Company and the School, a site where ideas are explored, concepts are tested, and discoveries are made. Everett’s Stage provides an intimate and inviting space for the community to come together to tell and hear stories, learn from experimentation, and celebrate our lives together.

Our SChOOl is a three-tiered education program that offers the following: free ongoing classes in the performing arts to underserved youth, mentorship, and apprenticeship op-portunities to those who want to pursue the arts in a deeper way. Through this training, students’ unique qualities and life experiences are treated not as obstacles to be overcome, but as valuable material, which they can own and use.

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Marvin Novogrodski, Justine Bevilacqua, Aaron Jungels, Ari Brisbon, Grace Bevilacqua, Sokeo Ros, Rachael Jungels, Edgar Viloria

—©2012, Everett—

BRAIN STORM

www.everettri.org

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