Broadway actors bring dreams to the stage in Wilcox County

CAMDEN, Alabama — As “Dream a Little Dream of Me” plays softly, Caroline Grogan, actor and teaching artist of Zara Aina, floats around the Star of Hope building “collecting dreams.”

Handing out pens and sticky notes to the audience, she asks them to condense their greatest hopes into a sentence or two, short enough to fit on small pieces of paper. Once done, she places each written manifestation into a humble, wooden basket to be read aloud by the starring cast during the show’s finale.

While she dream-catches, her Zara Aina coworkers, also actors and teachers, are busy making dreams come true themselves. Tina Canady and Shaun Taylor-Corbett rally the younger kids into position, readying them for their grand debut.

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Marx gives the older children one last pep talk before the show, and Andres Lopez-Alicea sets the stage as Justin Cimino prepares to give the preliminary remarks. Soon, it’s time to begin, and the moment that many have practiced hard for is upon them.

Almost every year, Zara Aina, a non-profit organization originally founded in Madagascar in 2012 and whose name in Malagasy means “share life,” now operating out of New York, sends a select few actors and artists to rural Camden, Alabama, for a week to work closely with the youth of the BAMA Kids program in Wilcox County.

Zara Aina’s crew cultivates the children’s creative abilities and allows them freedom to articulate themselves however they wish using song, dance and acting.

The week spent in Camden ends with a performance hosted by the group, piecing together the ideas concocted from the imaginations of the children all surrounding a central theme of their choosing. The 2023 showcase held July 2 was “Mixed Dreams.”

“They said we want to make a show about pursuing dreams, so we began creating characters, scenes, songs and dances all about dreams,” said Justin Cimino, actor, teaching artist and director, to the audience as he opened the program.

“That is why, if you’ll look around, you see pictures of the kid’s dreams, and why we asked for your dreams. It is also why they chose the title of this production.”

Devised and executed within a week, the show has no script and no definite beginning or end, which adds to its impressiveness. Even during its performance, the events occurring are subject to change.

“Everything we do is improvised by the kids, in the moment,” Cimino informed the audience. “We tell them all the time, ‘There are professional actors on Broadway in New York who cannot do this,’ yet every time we come to Camden, they can — even if it’s not perfect. We say to them ‘It’s not about perfection, it's about doing their best and having fun.’”

Zara Aina has worked with BAMA Kids for 10 years. They were introduced to the community-based organization through Kate Schutt, award-winning singer and songwriter who was, herself, a volunteer at the outreach program in the early 2010s.

Today, Schutt, through fundraisers and donations from willing philanthropists, helps raise the money to sponsor the teaching artists’ journey to Alabama each year.

Grogan said, “She’s responsible for bringing us here. She generously fundraises for us to come here every year. She’s the reason this partnership exists.”

Zara Aina’s return to Camden also allowed Iesha Smith, owner of MDCA Credit Solutions and board member of BAMA Kids, to reflect on her youth as well but with a different perspective as she now has two young daughters active in the program, Malaya and Malena, ages 15 and 9.

“Coming from a small community, they don’t get that opportunity every day. It’s not something that they’re necessarily taught at their schools.”

Taylor-Corbett and the rest of the group sings the praises of the support system that the children have within BAMA Kids and is certain that none of the trips to Alabama nor the experiences that they or the children have had would’ve been possible without the warm, uplifting attitudes of Sheryl Threadgill and Jacqueline Hives.

Hives, however, is simply thankful that the children she enriches through the BAMA Kids program receive cultural exposure that isn’t easily accessible to them through the school system or within the confines of the community.

“Even though they didn’t get to leave Camden, being in the presence of Broadway actors was still a great opportunity for them to gather experience and be exposed to the arts and acting,” Hives said.

“They don’t normally get a chance to do anything like this — drama, theater, music," Hives said. "It’s not offered in elementary and secondary schools. Spending time with Zara Aina has given them insight into what they can achieve and how creative they are and sometimes they don’t know that. They just need someone to reveal to them that they have talent.”

Kaitlin Stabler, a Living Democracy student at Auburn University, is living and learning this summer in her hometown of Camden in Wilcox County, Alabama, as a Jean O'Connor Snyder Intern with the David Mathews Center for Civic Life. The nonprofit program, coordinated by the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts, prepares undergraduate college students for civic life through living-learning experiences in the summer.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Broadway actors bring dreams to the stage in Wilcox County