We Are Telling Our Stories (WATOS)

WATOS is CDEA’s most recently-developed residency. Led in June 2023 by Kealoha, Hawai’i’s first poet Laureate, and in June 2024 by Dr. David Gonzalez, poet, storyteller, and the winner of the International Performing Arts for Youth “Lifetime Achievement Award for Sustained Excellence,” this unique residency is a four-week summer retreat that hosts up to 35 high school and early-college-age students with special invitations extended to BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and new-immigrant youth. WATOS offers participants a writing-intensive residency that incorporates movement and theater-style methods to create a public performance.

Visiting teachers employ an array of skills (that include writing, spoken-word poetry, movement, and theater production) to guide students to evoke and embody personal experience.The first two weeks of the residency are devoted to intensive daily writing followed by two weeks of movement and theater-based processes that constellate individual creative work into a collective, theatrical presentation.

“We Are telling our Stories” aims to embolden participants to explore a wide range of interests and concerns, which include personal identity, social justice issues, gender, and environmental concerns. Students commit to meet for two-hours a day, four days each week. At the residency’s conclusion, participants receive three University of Utah General Education credits and a cash stipend from the University Neighborhood Partners (UNP), an outreach program of the University of Utah.

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