by Bailey Larson and Mel Malmberg

When you walk into the arts studio at Prep, whether it’s drawing and painting, ceramics, photography or video art, you see one thing: students creating. They might be making ice cream sundaes, sculpting a monster or editing audio—they might even be leading peer critiques—but they’re always engaged, and they’re always finding new ways to express an idea.

The same can be said when you walk into a performing arts space. Whether students are doing yoga in dance class or practicing facial 4 exercises in drama, tuning a guitar in the music rooms or reading scripts in a classroom, they are making artistic choices and finding an outlet for their imaginations—and often for their energy.

Visual Arts Chair Tim Bradley and Performing Arts Chair Rob Lewis agree that this is the ultimate goal for all students: to find a mode of self-expression. And the means to getting there is a constant balance between freedom and structure—letting the students explore independently while also giving them constraints that require them to challenge their ideas.

Prep offers an intellectually and creatively challenging environment that’s extraordinarily supportive of students who see themselves as artists, as well as of those who fundamentally don’t.

“When a student says, ‘I can’t draw,’ we say, ‘Great, come on in,’” Bradley says.

Lewis takes a similar approach with the drama classes, offering an opening for all students, whether it’s onstage, building sets, running tech or examining scripts.

The two chairs and their faculty have brilliantly crafted an ever-evolving curriculum for the performing and visual arts departments that put students at the center of their own experiences while teaching them technical skills and a vocabulary to voice their ideas.

Thinking by Design

Melissa Manfull finds inspiration for projects everywhere, but she wants design thinking to be at the base of her curriculum—each project is approached as an answer to a design question. In her 9th grade drawing and painting class, she used the gaming concept of 1000 Blank White Cards, having 9th graders work independently to design 10 playing cards, each representing an image and an action. In groups of five, students put their cards together and played rounds of chaotic games, redesigning, eliminating and honing cards to fit a more logical overall concept. The iterative design method, also used in English, science and math, emphasizes a cyclical process of testing, examining and refining—it’s a method that Manfull consistently reinforces, as it’s a way of approaching art that can be applied across all disciplines. “In art class, you’re learning a set of technical skills, but you’re also learning a way of thinking that’s not confined just to art,” she says.

Listening Up

When Jon Murray gets the rosters for his orchestra courses and notes a flood of flutes or a void in his violins, he selects—and often rewrites— the year’s scores, accommodating the makeup of musical groups. Often, unusual arrangements force him and his students to consider each piece of music and practice actively listening to one another. The demands on the orchestra are both technical and artistic. “It’s a lot of work, but it develops a responsive ear,” he says. For the jazz and rock ensembles, the music is all about improvisation. The students never play the same thing from one class or one rehearsal to the next, thus building skills of coordination, camaraderie and being in the moment. “A lot of communication takes place among the players,” Murray says of both kinds of ensembles at Prep. “It makes for better musicianship, better sound and a better performance for both players and audience.”

Pro Musica

Steve Hill aims to provide his choral students with a lifelong means of self-expression, and a feeling for both the power and exhilaration of performing in a group. He also tries to give his singers unique experiences by partnering with outside groups and professionals. When they are part of a group performing a classic requiem, or in a community concert, “there’s a sense that, yes, we did it, we’ve tackled something extraordinary, we’ve expanded our repertoire and we’ve experienced something special.”

This year, choral students in the 8th, 9th and 10th grades were more than able to rise to a challenge: create a soundtrack in an invented language for Shanghai Disneyland. These students were primed for this irresistible opportunity. “In class, we work on listening, pausing and the chance to comprehend what the world within the music is, that we can explore together,” Hill explains.

Over two days in a professional studio, Hill conducted the students, who sang in a fabricated language and provided chants, nature sounds and laughter. “It was unlike anything we had done before,” says Hill. “I’ve tried to bring that feeling back to my classes. Our students respond to a challenge, and that informs my choice of material for them.”

Sound Systems

Ricardo Rodriguez wants students in his video art class to create their own works while also learning about the medium. He balances the two by leading students through a critical study of the history of video arts while giving innovative assignments that often are inspired by the artists students are learning about in the classroom. Other projects focus on the technical side of the art. In one such assignment this year, Rodriguez challenged students to rethink the connection between what their eyes see and what their ears hear. Each student recorded seven to 10 isolated sounds, and then they swapped with classmates. “In video, students usually record their images and leave the audio work for the end,” Rodriguez says. “We worked backwards, and the work was really abstract and unexpected. It forced the students to be less literal.” To end the year, Rodriguez gave the students a much more open-ended assignment: they had to come up with an artistic representation of Southern California’s historic drought. With its impacts being discussed in the news and in science classrooms throughout Prep, Rodriguez wanted students to have an imaginative outlet for expressing their views on the serious issue. “I wanted them to have the freedom to interpret something real in their lives in an artistic way,” he says. The results were stunning, with interpretations ranging from literal to abstract and beautiful to disturbing.

Trusting Your Voice

Even in Prep students’ early years, selfexpression and confidence are fostered. This year’s middle school play, Prepp’d, was written, through a workshop process, by students. The 7th, 8th and 9th graders were excited to share their voices thanks to the structure of their courses, in which teachers Jen Bascom and Lewis routinely applaud when students take a chance, while building a climate of trust and positivity. “Early exposure to improvisation helps students gain confidence,” Bascom says. “They internalize listening and supporting the ensemble. This is the foundation on which the whole performing arts program is built, and it’s both risk-taking and rewarding—truly innovative. It will serve them well as creative and competent people.”

Cameron Slater ’21 says the process was completely different than his experience in other productions, including the musical. “During rehearsal, sometimes we were practicing scenes that hadn’t even been written completely,” he says. But despite the difference in material and rehearsal structure, the fundamental lessons he had learned as an actor applied. “Even when you’re playing a role that’s never existed before, you can still use the same methods of developing your character,” he says.

In Good Company

Prep students come to the performing arts department with a variety of levels of exposure to arts, from zero to expert. Responding to varying levels of expertise, dance teacher Molly Mattei created a Dance Company, open to any student in the high school, by audition only. The three-times-a-week class welcomes dancers from 9th to 12th grades. While the class rewards and deepens technique, it also teaches leadership: members of the Dance Company not only perform, they choreograph shows, teach routines, learn how to control a classroom and generally lead the department. Yet that’s not where the music ends. Dance Company students get a taste of the real world by participating in premier Los Angeles dance studio classes. Over the years, Mattei has taken Prep dancers to Edge Performing Arts and Millenium Dance, where they learn alongside trained professionals working in the industry. In these most passionate Prep dancers, Mattei has seen “a lot of growth. They can continue to develop their own styles as dancers and choreographers, and they really bond as a class.”

Independent Exploration

When Biliana Popova sets out to design a curriculum for her senior students, she stops herself. Instead, she passes the baton to students, asking them at the outset of the year to consider what skills and artistic visions they hope to achieve.

This year, Popova’s students were enthralled with the idea of tableware—they contemplated the ergonomics and function of pieces as well as their beauty. In years past, students have explored installation pieces, chasing a singular idea or concept.

“By their senior year, the students have a foundation of skills and have had a little taste of a lot of things,” Popova says. “In senior year, they must have the self drive to take it a step further and to really dive into an area of study.”

These and many, many more projects make up arts curriculum at Prep, two signature programs that play key roles in the academic life of the school. Lewis and Bradley have led each of their departments by example, building an incredible working faculty while remaining incredibly engaged in the classrooms themselves.

Sarah Kersting ’16 is headed to Berkeley this semester and plans to continue her arts study after nearly exhausting Prep’s offerings. “We were allowed access to explore so many mediums,” she says. “We got to figure out what we do and don’t like and determine what resonates most.”

Nanita Balagopal ’16 is also headed to Berkeley and plans to continue taking drama courses. She says her experiences onstage at Prep have had a significant impact. “It’s given me greater confidence and spirit,” she says.