Dance Program's
Youth Performance Exchange

The Youth Performance Exchange is made up of Drexel Dance students and encompasses a Touring Ensemble that performs at local elementary schools, a choreographic residency program at local middle schools resulting in a performance at the Mandell Theater, and an ongoing collaboration with the HMS School for Children with Cerebral Palsy.
The Youth Performance Exchange Touring Ensemble, now in its fourth year, is a group of seven to nine dancers who perform a lecture demonstration on the art of choreography and modern dance for children in the Philadelphia School District. The students and faculty spend the fall term preparing the program, and winter and spring terms performing. The performances take place every Friday morning in the winter and spring, allowing the ensemble to perform for approximately 20 schools each year.

The Residency Program, now in its fifth year of operation, has eight to ten students from Drexel’s dance program visit local middle schools once a week for eight weeks of the spring term to teach dance and create choreography with sixth, seventh and eighth graders. Approximately 75 Philadelphia School students participate each year from four area schools. The project culminates in a matinee performance in the Mandell Theater where student performers learn about the backstage workings of the theater and tech-rehearsals before the audience arrives. Members of the Drexel Dance Ensemble, the teachers in the program, also perform at this matinee. Each participating school also an audience from their community.
 
Also performing in the matinee are students from the HMS School for Cerebral Palsy in University City. In collaboration with dance/movement therapist Rachel-Federman Morales, students from the Drexel Dance program partner with wheelchair bound students from the HMS School. Each volunteer works with a partner student once a week from October through May in a wheelchair dance class that ends in the creation of piece of choreography for seated and standing dancers.
.