Live Bait Theater in the community

We see ourselves as part of many communities – our immediate neighborhood, the Chicago area, and the broader community of artists. Our community programming, Bait, Hook, and Link, was established in 1993. We designed Bait, Hook, and Link to serve our immediate neighborhood, and all programs focus on issues of literacy and artistic expression.

Our outreach programming involves our community in the role of making art, rather than just as passive observers. Programs include Police-Teen Link, which unites Chicago Police officers and teens through shared creativity; Police-Tot Link, which brings Chicago Police officers and pre-schoolers to the Uptown Branch of the Chicago Library for a weekly story-telling and safety awareness session; and our after-school arts program at nearby Blaine Elementary.

In 2003, we taught more than 275 outreach sessions and theater-arts classes, reaching roughly 2,400 persons. We strongly believe that the arts should be accessible to persons of all backgrounds, ages, and educational levels – and the wide range of people we serve proves our belief.

The focus of the program at Blaine School is to create a daily after-school program of theater that teaches performance skills to a mixed group of kindergarteners to fifth graders. The program culminates in performances for the rest of the school and the parents. The basic teaching tools for almost all of these skills are theater and improv games. Attendance is voluntary, and therefore if a sizable group chooses to attend, it shows that they are engaged. We confer regularly about the program and compare notes as to what has been accomplished, what skills learned, and how successful the performance is in engrossing the audience.

Children involved in Bait, Hook and Read program at the Uptown Library are mainly from the Uptown neighborhood, the nearby Lady of the Lake School, and the Step-Ahead Day Care Center. The children reflect all of the ethnic groups that live in Chicago. On of our goals was to enhance the children’s experience of the library and make them more likely to use it willingly through our enjoyable and informative story-telling sessions. A large number of the children come gladly each week to the library for story telling, participate actively in the games, follow the performance closely, and promise us as they leave that they will come back the following week. Because our audience members are two to five years old, we believe that their enthusiastic responses are one indication of our success.

Live Bait Theater Adopts the Sheridan El stop.

We are currently integrating Police-Teen Link into our story-telling program. While brainstorming one day about Police-Teen Link, P.O. Tom McNamara spoke to us about the need for very young children to feel comfortable with the police. He talked about how in the course of his job, younger children often need help and are afraid of the police. We then had the idea to involve him in our Uptown Library story-telling program. With P.O. MacNamara joining our program at Uptown, Bait, Hook, and Read was transformed into Police-Tot Link.

In addition to our standard story-telling and linguistic exercises, the children now engage in conversation with the selected police officer. For example, recent sessions have included Identity: Knowing Your Full Name, Address, and Phone Number; and The Police: Identifying Police, Emergency Phone Numbers, and Strangers.

It is our hope that this new aspect of our program will help children feel less afraid of the police in daily life and, if they were to call the police in case of an emergency, to feel more comfortable articulating their needs. This is also a therapeutic and pleasant experience for the police officers.

For information about our Police Teen Link Program click here to go to the Police Teen Link web site.