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The Kimmel Center celebrated its tenth anniversary with a concert featuring a 200-member violin-orchestra as well as a choir 200 singers strong May 20. While a concert at the Kimmel may seem like the usual fare, the performance was distinguished by one notable feature — the musicians on stage consisted solely of children from kindergarten to eighth grade.
The students were from the Philadelphia Performing Arts Charter School (PPACS), 2600 S. Broad St., which also celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Yet the school’s participation in the concert commemorated more than just a shared ten year celebration; it represented a reenactment of the concert staged by the school at the Kimmel in 2001. Eighth graders participating in the evening event thus received the opportunity to relive a crucial moment from their kindergarten days, before graduating and leaving the world of elementary school behind.
“The audience was roaring,” Angela Corosanite, founder and CEO of PPACS said about the crowd’s post-concert response. “To see 300 children on the strings at the same time is just wonderful. It brought tears to my eyes because they’ve come so far.”
“It was very good, especially when the kindergarteners started to perform,” Richard Baccara, a fifth grader who participated in the concert, said. “It was very impressive, the whole scenery was spectacular. All the staff, how they helped out, was very good of them to do.”
Eighth grader Cody Wise, of the 2400 block of South Eighth Street, who performed with classmates at the ’01 concert, led his peers and PPACS alumni in “God Bless America.” Wise, who traveled across the country playing Simba in “The Lion King” last year and performed in an off-Broadway performance of “The Scottsboro Boys” last summer, has signed a record deal with Interscope Records.
But the evening consisted of more than just musical entertainment. Ballet performances were interspersed between acts while an art exhibit designed by visual arts majors from the school graced the Kimmel’s lobby. In addition, all programs for the concert were written, typeset and bound by creative writing students in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
Seventh grade creative writing major Angela Gray, participated backstage as she she gathered students, helped them get dressed and ready to go on stage.
“We’re really good as a whole school,” Gray said of the progress she has witnessed during her years at PPACS. “I think it was always a good school, but it’s actually started to come along more.”
Students at PPACS are no strangers to performing in large, well-respected venues. The school’s winter concerts are held at the Merriam Theater while selected scholars have appeared in major productions of “The Wizard of Oz,” “Evita,” “Whistle Down the Wind,” and the Pennsylvania Ballet’s “Nutcracker” among others.
“The kids are still on a high although some are a little nonchalant,” Corosanite said. “…I asked one little girl and she said, ‘It was a really big theater, but we perform all the time.’”
Perhaps this comfortableness with large audiences stems also from the rigorous arts program at PPACS. A typical day for its 450 students from across the city consists of seven-and-a-half hours of classical arts, which includes spending each morning practicing a concentration that is chosen by the sixth grade and ranges from dance to acting.
“The arts program is what ties the academics together with the child,” Corosanite said. “It gives them the confidence in their academic classes because the child finds what it is that they are successful at.”
Baccara, who sang and played in the orchestra, shared Corosanite’s enthusiasm.
“I think that anyone can perform on stage,” he said on the message he hopes audience members took away from the recent concert. “You just have to keep on rehearsing it.”
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