Amherst - Diana Coryat, media producer, educator, and former executive director of Global Action Project (G.A.P.) recently started a three-month, grant funded-countract with ACT NOW! Inc. to develop a curricular package on the MOVExperience® method, a technique proven to be over 95 percent effective in raising self esteem in youth at risk.
Coryat will work with ACT NOW's subject matter experts to devise a plan and prepare a copy for review cycles with a committee of professionals, headed by Jack Tannenbaun, former training supervisor with AT&T. The final product will be a stand-alone manual illustrated with multi media, available for a fee throught a code-protected section on the ACT NOW Website. Filled with real-life examples and tips, the instructions will be appropriate for use with any population, but will primarily be designed as a catalyst for youth empowerment, primarily with girls 11 - 14 years old. Intended for teachers, camp counsellors, and agency staff, the training materials can also be used in conjunction with live, onsite training, Internet instruction, and phone support of ACT NOW! personnel.
"A curricular package is the only way we can reach a critical mass quickly," said Nancy Fletcher, ACT NOW! founder and executive director. Fletcher says that her only agenda is wide dissemination of the method and sustainability of the agency so that it can act as the "Mother Ship," by training others and monitoring quality.
Coryat has worked in youth and community media, and documentary film and video for over 20 years. She has facilitated programs, seminars, worshops, artistic exchanges and screenings at universities, conferences, community organizations and festivals in the U.S. and internationally in Brazil, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Guatemala, Japan, Northern Ireland, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. She develops curricula and constructs participatory documentary workshops for communities that want to tell their own stories. Coryat is a Fulbright Scholarship recipient, and co-founder and former executive director of Global Action Project (G.A.P.), a youth media organization based in New York City that works with young people most affected by injustice to build community power, cultural expression, and political change.
The development of the MOVIExperience® curriculum is made possible through a challenge grant from philanthropist, Nancy S. Nordhoff of Seattle, Wash. The organization matched the grant with gifts from donors in the Valley and around the country.
A new, one-day Training MOVIExperience for Women geared to agency staff, camp counselors, and teachers who want to experience the potential of the program, will be held on Sept. 12 with a three-hour evening brainstorm on Aug. 31. Interested parties may call 256-3471 or email actnowinc@gmal.com.
Who do girls have to look up to these days? Is it Paris and Lindsay? Maybe Barbie or Bratz?
Nancy Fletcher, executive director and founder of ACT NOW!, wants to show young girls that they can grow up to be so much more than unthinking sex objects. She's been doing this for the better part of a decade by running MOVIExperience Playshops, improvisational filmmaking for young girls who hail from all over the Pioneer Valley.
Her goal: to keep girls listening to their own, true voices.
"The most challenging (thing) is to keep intact their sense of their self, throughout the treacherous years when they're told by all of society's cues that they are just decoration. They know they're not, they know they have a lot of capability, but if that's what they're seeing, this is very dangerous," said Fletcher.
This disconnect, said Fletcher, creates emotional problems for girls and costly problems for society.
"The American Psychological Assoication came out a couple of years ago showing the impacts that the sexualization of women has had on girls, and how it screws them up, and they turn into eating disorders, and drug abuse and even suicide," said Fletcher.
When Fletcher chooses mentors for each film workshop, she aims to host women who have excelled in their chosen profession, especially those who have found success in an area that workshop participants may discover during teh moviemaking expereince. A recent mentor was Rachel Muller-Lust, a vice president at ABC TV.
This year's guest mentors at the July 13-17 workshop will be 11 members of the UMass women's basketball team. Fletcher was proud of having the UMass women working with the program during the 37th anniversary year of Title IX, the federal law bringing gender equality to schools.
Since ACT NOW!'s founding in 2000, the nonprofit has aided some 500 girls in producing 31 movies. About half of the young girls who participate in the MOVIExperience are minority and about 45 percent are considered "at risk," according to a release from ACT NOW!
To counter the risks of growing up in the modern world, Fletcher's group takes the same media that is affecting girls adversely and uses it for a positive effect, she said.
At the workshops, the girls scout the locations, come up with some possible themes that incorporate a real-life situation and conflict resolution, and vote on one idea they want to make come alive. They create characters, and put together an outline of 18 scenes. The workshop leader tweaks the outline to make sure that everyone gets enough airtime.
This summer session will be shot around the Emily Dickinson Homestead and Henry Hills House.
After getting the outline together, the kids sign up for crew positions and cast themselves. Most will work in front of and behind the camera. And the props come from the girls' homes.
The films tend to cover serious subject matter. Fletcher cited one example about a young girl trying to keep her family together after their father disappears while fighting in Iraq.
ACT NOW! also offers classes that train women so they can use the workshop model in school settings, in camps and in their own agencies, or o they can make a little money.
Fletcher said the experience is transformative, recalling an interaction with one young girl in particular, whose impromptu response during an on-camera interview with Fletcher left her speechless.
"She said, 'Before, I used to think I was going to become a low-life. When I came here, everything changed. I'm going to have a life, and I'm going to stay in school," said Fletcher. "I nearly dropped the camera. I said that's exactly what I wanted. It's such a potent process."
Kelsey Brown, 18, of Belchertown, took Fletcher's classes in 2004 when she was 13 and then worked up through the ranks at ACT NOW!. She is now a coach-in-training and the president of the Interactors, a group of alumnae from the program. This fall, Brown is going to Mount Holyoke College.
Brown - who has a background in theater, - said when she was done with her first filmmaking session, she felt like she had accomplished something.
"It was the first time I had walked away with something to show for it," said Brown. "I felt really proud of what I had done, which is partially why I went back.
ACT NOW! gave Brown a sense of responsibility and a good glimpse of a career in filmmaking. More important, for young girls, "it really brings you out of your shell."
Worcester-"I'm proud of you." These words, written in soap on a mirror at the end of "A Teen's Life," a movie conceived written and then viewed by a group of Latino girls, encompassed the feelings of the main characters as well as the young actresses themselves. The teenagers laughed and cheered as they watched their movie.
Improvisation and enthusiasm for an original script replaced traditional methods of movie making Saturday afternoon at Centro Las Americas. Fourteen girls, ages 12 to 17, wrote and acted in a movie produced by ACT NOW! The project aims to foster self-esteem in young girls. It was funded by the Greater Worcester Community Foundation.
Nancy Fletcher, executive director of ACT NOW!, coached the girls through inventing the story, casting the roles and improvising each scene. The movie was shot in eight hours on the premises of Centro Las Americas, 11 Sycamore St.
While the girls viewed their short movie Saturday, it wasn't the finished product. ACT NOW! will do some post production work on the film and give each of the participants a copy of the completed video.
" The girls in our intensive adolescent program are all facing real-life personal and family challenges. ACT NOW! superbly supports the program's overall objectives and more importantly exposes the youth to an alternative artistic expression," said Orlando Rodriguez, executive director of Centro.
During a three-hour brainstorming session, Joandra Arocha, Appolinia Gonzalez, Nemesis Pagan, Lesley Perez and Chriselly Vega devised a story in which they would play the main roles.
Joining them as players were Kayle Burgos, Zuleyka Vega, Vanessa Semidey, Vanessa Arocha, Carol Sepulveda, Caroline Delgado, Lury Pizarro, Alejandra Corona and Lora Ardino.
Orisbel Natera played a case manager, a role she is familiar with as a social worker at the organization. "Our main purpose is to keep families together," she said. Fellow case manager Michelle Rivera played a mother. She said the video and the organization offer young girls help with "self-esteem, school and communication at home."
Johanna Diaz of Centro said there are about 40 Spanish-speaking young adults in the adolescent program. Ms. Diaz said while most participants come from Worcester, some travel from Fitchburg, Clinton and Southbridge.
South High Community School sophomore and actress Nemesis Pagan has been involved in Centro for about two months. "I get a little nervous, but I'm having fun," she said. As the main character of the film, she plays a young girl affected by her turbulent life as a foster child.
Vanessa Velez joined her friends for the making of the movie. She said making the production girls-only helps her talk about what is going on. Camerawoman Lynn Nash said, "The production is going great and the girls are enthusiastic. The main subject is a nice but troubled girl and how others react to her."
After completing movies in Arizona, Iowa, Connecticut and Massachusetts, Ms. Fletcher said her goal is to provide youth organizations across the country with the tools of ACT NOW! in the hopes that girls utilize the medium of film. "In the long run, it holds the potential of getting more women into positions where they can have an impact on the way their stories are reflected in the media," Fletcher said.
Centro Las Americas, a non-profit organization, provides a variety of services for the Latino community. The agency recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. ACT NOW's MOVIExperience™ was founded in 2000. Ms. Fletcher said during the movie-making process that young girls "see their views as legitimate and their voices as worthy of attention, which helps them to take the lead in their own lives."
Ms. Fletcher said making the film showed the girls of Centro "they can cooperate together and make more than they could alone." She said she came up with the idea for ACT NOW! from professional improvisation expert David Shepherd. She also said young girls can learn a lot about self-image when they see themselves on screen. Saturday's film was fictional, but the content was taken from familiar situations in the girls' lives, she said.
Not everyone would describe building a fire pit or constructing a staircase of logs and soil as summertime fun. But for Miranda Jacobus and Julia Kurtz, two 12-year-olds from Shutesbury, this work, which involves using shovels and wheelbarrows and doing some heavy-lifting, is a labor of love.
When complete, their work will become the sets used in an improvisational movie involving girls from the YWCA of Western Massachusetts in Springfield and being produced by ACT NOW!, a non-for-profit organization run by Nancy Fletcher.
Fletcher, who lives at the Belchertown home where the girls' landscaping work is being done, formed ACT NOW! two years ago as a way to empower young girls, especially those ages 11 and 14, though film projects in which girls create the stories they want to tell.
The project is funded partly by a $10,500 donation made by the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts. Fletcher said that when they reach their teens, many girls stop speaking up and lose their self-esteem. "I want the girls to get their power through their actions," Fletcher said. Jacobus has been involved in some of these improvisational films for several years, acting in one titled "Family Reunion" and another where everything she speaks is in a language she described as gibberish.
"I've done it a lot, the first time I did it I was a lot younger," she said. Jacobus visited Fletcher's home earlier this summer, helping to clear out a shed when she became interested in preparing the property for the next movie. Miranda invited Kurtz to help.
"We do everything together," Miranda said Kurtz recently took part in the taping of improvised poetry, a project being tested by David Shepherd of Belchertown, the creator of MOVIExperience™ and Fletcher's inspiration.
The sets the girls are working on will be featured prominently in Fletcher's latest movie, which tells the story about several girls staying at their aunt's house and then getting lost in the woods. "There's no script, just a scenario they've made up," Fletcher said. The scenario was developed during a three-hour brainstorming session. When they are not on camera, the girls are still active participants, holding lights, monitoring sound, dressing sets, playing music and creating sound effects.
Fletcher notes that in 2001, women accounted for just 6 percent of movie directors, 10 percent of screenwriters and 17 percent of executive producers. Beyond lifting girls self esteem, Fletcher sees the improvisational movie making as a way of getting more women involved in the production side of film.
What happens when eleven girls from the Hilltowns get together to write a script and make a movie? "They get invested," says Nancy Fletcher, director of ACT NOW in Belchertown, " and go beyond what they think they can do." She teaches teen and adolescent girls "improvised movie making," a format that allows them to invent their own story and improvise each scene.
Making a movie can benefit girls' self esteem, according to Fletcher, "partly because it's popular media, which is why it's so influential." When the girls see they can control it, they feel a sense of power. "There are many moments that are instructive throughout the process because it calls on the girls' capacities," she explains, "some of which they don't know they have."
Last month, ACT NOW brought video cameras to Sisters Inc. in the Hilltowns to work with a group of girls who range in age from 9 to 11. Their story line was sparked by one girl lamenting the fact that she did not get enough attention. The resulting video, "Getting What You Want," shows what happens when one makes a wish that actually comes true.
"We can all learn a lot seeing ourselves on camera," comments Carlyn Saltman, a documentary filmmaker who films the activity behind the scenes during the taping of the movie. Fletcher stresses the importance of the second camera. "We document the whole thing, all their decisions, so they get a record of the process. We tack this on to the end so they get to see how they are. And if there are things they want to change, they can just quietly change them."
"Getting What You Want" will be shown May 19 at the Cummington Community Center (time TBA). For more information, contact ACT NOW! at 256-3471 or Sisters Inc., at 585-1213.
The film's title: "The Haunted Slumber Party." Setting: An old Victorian house in Holyoke. Director: Nancy Fletcher, local entrepreneur, PR pro and one-time comedy-improv-troupe performer. Cast: A dozen hyperactive preteen girls from inner city Holyoke. Time frame: 24 hours. Script: None.
Sound improbable? Well. The no budget "Haunted Slumber Party," which was inspired in part by the low-budget "Blair Witch Project," does, in fact, exist. True to its genre, the film includes pillow fights, flashlight games, blood-curdling screams, strange noises and ghostly images. But its starts are of the unlikeliest sort.
All those giggly inner-city girls attend the after-school program at Girls Inc. of Holyoke, a nonprofit organization whose mission includes building girls' confidence. Ninety-five percent of the girls who take advantage of the after-school program are Latina and 85 percent of them come from low-income homes. Such statistics interested Nancy Fletcher, who says her life's passion is girls' self-esteem.
"When people have low expectations of us, then we think we can't do it, and then we don't, because that's the gate," she says. "But if others - adults, models, mentors - have high expectations, then that affects our self-concept, and then that affects what we do."Raising the bar
Fletcher, 54, is a former girls' camp counselor and Mount Holyoke College alumna who served for a time as that college's director of public relations. "Being at Mount Holyoke, you were in an atmosphere where you were expected to excel," Fletcher says. "And when there is the expectation, you fill it. ....So I'm kind of creating a little microcosm of that. I'm saying, 'We expect you to be able to produce a movie.' And they will live up to that expectation."
Fletcher is creating that microcosm with ACT NOW!, an improvisation movie company that she founded last year and runs out of her Belchertown home. The company's format compresses the movie making process-from brainstorming and casting to shooting, editing and screening-into a stunningly short 24-hour period. More importantly, however, it shows girls how to play the lead in their own lives.
The 20-minute "Haunted Slumber Party," made almost exactly one year ago, was the company's pilot project. Fletcher plans to work with Girls Inc. again this spring, and she has applied for a grant from the Women's Fund of Western Massachusetts to bring her program to pregnant and parenting teens in Berkshire County.
In the future, Fletcher says, she'll target metropolitan areas within a two-hour radius of the Pioneer Valley. She hopes to bring ACT NOW! to schools and prisons, girls' camps and leadership programs, the Girl Scouts and the YWCA. In the meantime, she has been engaging in all the behind-the-scenes minutia associated with getting a fledgling nonprofit like ACT NOW! off the ground.
She has applied for tax-exempt status, started constructing a Web sit (www.actnow-online.org), set her prices (as low as $1,500 and as high as $9,000 depending on the number of participants, the scope of the project and other factors) and established a so-called "E-visory Board," which consists of more than 30 females from around the country who advise her via e-mail on how to reach girls and boost their self-esteem. Nerves yield to confidence
On a recent afternoon, four of the young "stars" of "The Haunted Slumber Party" took a break from snack time at Girls Inc., to reflect on their film debut. "We were like, 'Ohmigod, we're gonna be in a movie! We're gonna be in a movie!" recalled 11-year-old Samantha Caballero.
But while the prospect of making a movie excited Caballero, it terrified 12-year-old Yessenia Fernandez, who appeared in two scenes set in the backseat of a car. "I've never been in a movie, so I was scared," Fernandez said. "When I was in the first scene in the car, I was embarrassed and shy because I had to speak out loud." Even Caballero found herself tongue-tied. The sight of a camera made her sweat, and she got so nervous before one take that she forgot what she was going to say. That scene had to be re-shot, she said.
As the girls got used the format, however, their nervous laughter gave way to a fresh confidence. "After that, I understood; I wasn't scared anymore," Fernandez said. Caballero, too, overcame her fears. "I forgot about the camera," she said. "I didn't look at it. I thought it was not there."
After wrapping "The Haunted Slumber Party," the girls screened it for their family members. Eleven-year-old Alicia Ortiz invited her mother, father and brother. "They thought it was cool to make a video at my age," Ortiz said. So cool, in fact, that they took her to McDonald's afterward to celebrate.
Among other things, Ortiz said, the moviemaking experience revealed her sense of humor. " I learned that I can do things that I never thought I can do," said Ortiz, who wants to be a lawyer when she grows up.
Her friend, Christina Cruz, who is also 11, wants to be a doctor. ACT NOW! "showed me a lot," Cruz said. "I didn't really know how I was inside. I didn't really care about that. The movie gave me a time to express myself. It showed me that a lot of people like me if I express myself more.
ACT NOW! is an outgrowth of MOVIExperience™, David Shepherd's method of creating improvisational movies. Shepherd, whose role in producing professional improvisational theater in Chicago in the 1950's earned him the nickname "father of improv," is credited with launching the careers of Alan Alda, Elaine May, Mike Nichols and others.
Shepherd, 76, developed MOVIExperience™ in the 90's as a means of exposing non-professionals to the art of improvisational filmmaking. Fletcher first met Shepherd in 1998, when he led a MOVIExprience™ at her bungalow-style home in Belchertown.
Shepherd lives in New York, but he paid a visit to the Pioneer Valley after a friend moved here. According to Fletcher, Shepherd liked the area and thought the people here would be receptive to his MOVIexperience™ format. When Shepherd asked his friend about potential collaborators, Fletcher's name came up. "I was doing PR at the time, and he thought maybe I had a client that would work somehow," Fletcher recalls. "When he called me I didn't have an appropriate client, but my birthday was coming up so I said, 'Would you do it in a house?'"
Shepherd agreed, and the rest is history. "When I was exposed to MOVIExperience™, I said, 'Aha! This is perfect!'" Fletcher says. "You don't have to talk about self-esteem... You just give these girls the tools to express themselves in a very popular medium which has such influence in their lives."
Fletcher apprenticed with Shepherd for the next two years. She helped him conduct about a dozen MOVIExperiences™ across the country, and she came to consider him a mentor. "One of the things that I've found about improvising and working with David is that I have become eminently more flexible," she says. "It is amazing. I can see alternative ways of doing almost anything - and I grew up thinking there was one way to do something."
Fletcher figured that if MOVIExperience™ could have such a significant impact on the way she lived, then it would probably be healthy for other people as well, particularly young girls with fragile senses of self. This was, she says, "an epiphany career-wise."
Before she discovered MOVIExperience™ and founded ACT NOW!, Fletcher, who is not married and has no children, did everything from start her own PR company (Fletcher Associates, which has subsidized ACT NOW! thus far) to establish a video-production business (the Amherst-based Equinox Documentary and Promotional Video). In between, she headed up Mount Holyoke's PR department and acted with an improv-comedy group called Shtick and Stones.
But she became convinced that Shepherd's format would appeal to preteens. Children, she says, "grow up improvising when they play, when they play house. They just don't say that it's improvising; they say, 'I'm playing. You be the mom, I'll be the dad.' It's not foreign to them, really."
In particular, Fletcher became convinced that the format was suited to 11- to 14-year-old girls - "because that's where their self-esteem starts to dip." If she could boost girls' self-confidence while simultaneously introducing them to the movie industry, all the better.
"Our diet is violence -we're fed on that - and that's got to have an impact," she says. "the people that are making the decisions are mostly men. And I think that if women get themselves into those decision-making positions, we will see other images."
Nancy Fletcher '68 hates to see forthright and independent preteen girls gradually retreat into a shell when they hit puberty. As self-esteem plummets, they tend to "tone it down" to be more acceptable. "But how can I tell these spunky ten- and 11-year-old girls that they'll run into the wall in a few years?" she wondered. If she warned them, the girls would scoff. Yet the problem is real.
Her solution doesn't even mention the word "self-esteem" yet boosts that very quality in preteens. Nancy founded the improvisational movie company ACT NOW! to give girls practice in telling stories they create in their own voices. "We're showing them their views are legitimate, their voices are worthy of attention and that they have the power to control this medium that's so influential in their lives. That kind of power will translate into the [wider] world," she explains. "The audiovisual images our society feeds on are mostly designed by men and filtered through a male lens. We need to rebalance that."
In a twenty-four-hour marathon, Nancy and her all-female crew meet with girls, brainstorm plot ideas and characters, create sound effects, improvise scenes, shoot and edit in camera a short video. When given free rein, girls' ideas don't center only on boys and makeup, she's found. One group's suggested topics ran the gamut from "superwoman" and "friends" to "getting lost," "running for your life" and "winning." By starring in their own film, Nancy hopes girls will realize they can play the lead in their lives too. "I feel strongly that the way we're bringing up girls, we're not using half of our population's capacity," she says, "So everybody's losing."
Girls are apparently changed by their roles in front of or behind the video camera. Nancy says one mother said her shy daughter "had become much more expressive at home" after her ACT NOW! experience. Other girls said they were "inspired to do things they didn't dream of before."
Nancy says the project "pulls together everything I've ever done and loved: special events, video, parties and people, even going back to playing dress-up and making up stories." She is currently fundraising to make ACT NOW! affordable to schools and agencies around the country. "The drop in girls' self esteem is a well-chronicled problem, and my hunch is that this is a powerful antidote," she explains. Giving girls the tools to be actors in their own lives keeps them speaking up just when society threatens to shut them down.