"Who's got the torch? I need you to put it away," says Rachel Bishop as she scans a row of teenagers hunched over gleaming white MacBooks.She raises her hands to her head in mock distress.
"And the helicopters!"
Bishop grins at me.
Kidz Connect isn't your typical summer camp.
We're in a black-box theater at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center's Patel Conservatory. To an outsider, the sight of a dozen youngsters staring fixedly into laptop screens, some with headphones firmly in place, seems out of place at the Patel, better known for its ballet and musical theater classes. But these kids are performing, too, just not on a physical stage (at least, not at the moment); they're performing online.
During about half of the three-week-long summer camp, the teens interact with each other and a group of Dutch teenagers on a private island in Teen Second Life (TSL). Each of their laptops offers access to the virtual environment of TSL, a massive, multi-user playground limited to teenaged members and their adult guides. In the immersive 3D world, they collaborate to build a virtual environment and stage performances under the supervision of instructors including Bishop. Between real-life activities, including singing, dancing and reading monologues inspired by their experiences in Second Life, the Tampa kids are allowed — no, encouraged — to do something most teenagers relish: Chat and play with friends online.
Call it cultural exchange for the Facebook set.
As it happens, 13-year-old Imani Smith — or, more accurately, her TSL avatar, Mimmi Galicia — is holding the torch, and it's my fault. At my promptings, Imani has exchanged her virtual self's everyday outfit (denim skirt, sleeveless top and blue handbag) for an eye-popping ensemble that includes leopard-patterned skin and a fitted hot pink dress. ("Fierce," I murmur approvingly, momentarily channeling Tyra Banks.) As Imani demonstrates how to accessorize the avatar with a sword, a sports car and a torch, Bishop tries to focus the group's attention on a stage on the Kidz Connect Island in TSL where they will perform.
"I know it's fun," Bishop empathizes as the torch disappears from the computer screens.
It's about 10 a.m. in Tampa and late afternoon in Amsterdam, where students from IVKO Montessori School are logging on to TSL to join the Tampa group. "Come to me," Imani messages Abe Andel, a Dutch student who hasn't yet appeared online, offering to teleport him to her location on the island. The instructors at the Patel — Bishop, Kidz Connect artistic director Lisa Powers, program co-director Dan Winckler and a handful of others — work to set up a video stream with the Amsterdam team so the students and instructors can see each other in person even as they meet in TSL. Projected onto a wall in the theater, an image of the faraway classroom appears.
Eric "Mint" Leeks, 16, flips between applications on his laptop: GarageBand — in which he composes a song with fellow Kidz Connecter Justin VonFischer, who sits nearby — and TSL, where his avatar, Mint Bellic, boasts some of the best accessories of the bunch. When a monster truck materializes next to his avatar, which resembles a tall Lenny Kravitz, the other kids flip out. Everyone wants a copy for their own collection of accessories, but Mint understands the value of exclusivity: He will only share it with the closest of friends.
"It's like MySpace with animation," he says of TSL.
Accordingly, the kids have spent hours there, tweaking their avatars and constructing 3D houses, boats, photo cubes, a reflecting pond, a nattily decorated lodge and other unusual forms of architecture unique to Second Life with the help of their new Dutch friends.
At the instructors' request, the students pull away from virtual reality for a few minutes and take to the theater's real-space stage to rehearse a song they cowrote about the Kidz Connect experience — fittingly titled "What's Real?" — with Patel instructor James Crumbly. The song tells an uplifting story about overcoming cultural differences online, and the choreography, also co-created by the Tampa students, has a hip-hop flavor. When they finish bouncing around with varying degrees of abandon and self-consciousness, the Amsterdam students (via video feed) burst into applause.
It's nearly midnight when Kidz Connect creator-director Josephine Dorado phones me from John F. Kennedy Airport. Having spent most of June in residence at the Patel, she's flown back up to New York City on this day, temporarily leaving the kids in the capable hands of the program's Tampa staff and co-director Dan Winckler. The call is brief; her cellphone is running out of battery power, and she wants to know if we can Skype.
Communication that crosses space and time zones is second nature to Dorado, explains Wendy Leigh, TBPAC's vice president of education and a longtime friend of the Kidz Connect creator.
"It's normal for her to lead a class in India at 4 a.m.," Leigh says.
The two met nearly 20 years ago when Dorado, who grew up in Brandon and Chicago, was an undergraduate with a passion for dance at the University of South Florida. When she approached Leigh, then-director of the now-defunct Loft Theater, about staging some unconventional performances in the Loft's space for emerging artists, the pair clicked. They remained friends and collaborators even as Dorado moved to New York City, where she entered The New School's Media Studies program in 2002.
During graduate school, Dorado received a Fulbright to study in Amsterdam at the Waag Society for New and Old Media. She calls the experience a "creative watershed;" at Waag, she began to practice networked performance, working with artists located in different locations and time zones but linked by streaming video. For a 2006 project that became her thesis at The New School, where she is now a professor, Dorado linked dancers and musicians from New York, San Jose and Tampa in a simultaneous performance with video and live components.
Bishop, the Kidz Connect instructor, was the Tampa-based dancer. Like Leigh, she kept in touch with Dorado over the years. While Bishop admits she knew little about Second Life before becoming a Kidz Connect instructor, she credits Dorado with perpetually turning her on to new uses of technology — and not just for the sake of bits and bytes, but to build creative relationships and, ultimately, make art.
The program shows parents "what kinds of creative and educational experiences these kids are having in these strange virtual worlds they are occupying online," Bishop says. "Maybe it's not just a bunch of games and a waste of their minds. … We have to show people its potential for positive use."
Studies already indicate that experience in the performing arts makes kids more likely to earn higher grades, get elected to student office and participate in math and science fairs, says Leigh. By that measure, the multi-modal nature of Kidz Connect — bridging digital literacy, cultural exchange and performance — would seem to offer a host of benefits. What's more, the program embraces teenagers' interest in spending increasing amounts of time online, rather than attempting to struggle against it.
"It's a sign of the times — and we need to figure out how to catch up and how to make arts relevant in the context of technology, or we're going to lose our youth," Leigh says, calling Kidz Connect "probably one of the most thrilling experiences in my professional career."
Besides new laptops and broader bandwidth, TBPAC has invested in the program by engaging a bevy of instructors and staff to interact with the kids. In addition to composer Crumbly, the group includes actor/comedian/hip-hop artist Ranney, choreographer Paulette Rolle-Aleshik, stage managers, sound and lighting technicians and more. Dorado programs the animations that enable the students to dance in Second Life, while Bishop works with them on dancing (on the real stage) to a version of "Thriller" streamed from YouTube onto the theater wall. Between the music, monologues and dancing (both physical and virtual), there's hardly a moment when the students' creative skills aren't tested across disciplines and platforms.
Though the program's technical complexity impresses, the cultural exchange component is just as significant. They don't have cheerleaders in the Netherlands, one of the Tampa students tells me incredulously. In the New York version of the program, students were shocked to learn that some Dutch people are black, Dorado tells me. But other than the fact that Dutch kids tend not to drive their own cars and have relatively easy access to pot, the consensus among the Tampa students is that they have more in common with their Dutch counterparts than they expected.
On Saturday afternoon, about 100 friends and family members show up at the Patel to watch the Kidz Connect group's final collaboration, but the performance hits a snag of sorts. Andel, who is a popular child actor in the Netherlands, has a film shoot and can't make it. One or more of the other Dutch students also has a conflict; as a result, only the instructors attend the performance via webcam from the Amsterdam school.
Otherwise, the technical aspect of the performance comes off without a hitch. After introducing themselves, the students sing and dance on stage, performing "What's Real?" and a rap song cowritten with Ranney. They dance in Second Life (projected onto a theater wall for the audience) and read scenes they've written both on stage and in TSL, whisking the audience between physical and virtual realities.
During a Q&A session after the performance, the students field questions from the audience and a viewer (Harry from the U.K.) who watches from kidzconnect.org. When asked if they'll keep in touch with their Dutch collaborators, the teens seem noncommittal — except Imani, who looks crestfallen and asks for everyone's e-mail. Mint raises some parental eyebrows with a story about being offered a joint by an Amsterdam student online. And Justin VonFischer is so overjoyed that he plants a big kiss on artistic director Powers' cheek as she stands center stage.
"People don't really know what's over there," he tells me later. "They're just kids — we could really connect."
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2008.