SBHS MUSE 10-Day Program

MUSE is a ten-day movement based performing arts workshop for 14-19 year-olds.
MUSE is for actors, singers, dancers, designers and artists hungry to sharpen their creative muscles, gain confidence, deepen connection and become part of a collaborative family.

Over the course of 10 days, Kyra Lehman and Jake Himovitz will devise an original performance with 10 local teenaged artists; the same students who brought you the wonderful performances in Hadestown. The courageous duo strives to bring out the ingenuity of these young adults. Now more than ever, Kyra and Jake believe that we need awake, courageous, creative, alive young people to walk this earth.

Lehman and Himovitz have developed a highly rigorous, structured program that is heavily based on atmosphere and the bodily movements of the performers to present theatre pieces that leave the audience curious, wonder-filled and begging for more. The couple’s process invites the young performers (14-19 year olds) into a world that challenges radical intimacy with themselves, each other, and the spaces between.

The relationships created with themselves and the artists around them, will become groundbreaking performances that asks the audience what is alive inside their skin and then allows them to ‘become’ in real time. As Lehman and Himovitz have stated, “MUSE is a living, moving, meditation on friendship, commitment and limitation.” This summer performance piece is designed to have the audience wonder: “How does it feel to be held? To hold? What is the taste of familiarity? What is aloneness? What am I capable of?”

Though this creative pair have worked in the SBHS theater department for a few years, leading the physicality of choreography, it wasn’t until last fall when Lehman and Himovitz created an original piece with the SBHS Theater program titled Teenage Wasteland. The purpose of this practically non-verbal performance was created to ask the question, ”what does it mean to be human right now and where do we go from here?”

Those who have watched Teenage Wasteland, recounted that, “The bond that was created amongst the ensemble was palpable, and they brought the audience into that created community with gentleness and care.” The beginning of the show had a student welcome the audience before sitting next to a stranger and admiring their hand with nothing but love. An audience member recalled this moment as “the eye to the soul [where] the hand was the window [and] set the tone.” Kyra and Jake focus on movement technicality, allowing students to explore the strength, precision, fluidity, shape, and energy of their bodies in order to embody every emotion on-stage. As Teenage Wasteland focused on the complexities of being a young adult in a modern world, students have declared the performance as “This is me, this is who I am.”

This summer, Kyra Lehman and Jake Himovitz venture into the great unknown of theater, visual art, and teenage life once again to create a performance piece unlike anything Santa Barbara has ever seen. This troupe of young artists will alchemize their lived experience, emotions and storylines to portray themes of friendship, community, foundations, and limitations with contemporary movements. Please come to the free performance Friday, July 25 @SBHS Theatre 7-8pm.