For the past 13 years, the Outreach and Education Department of Pennsylvania Ballet has coordinated a special after-school project funded by the Delphi Project Foundation of the Reliance Standard Life Insurance Company. Through this project, Philadelphia middle school students (Grades 5-8) participate in a unique arts program designed to provide a meaningful cultural experience that positively affects a variety of school behaviors and community interactions. In addition to after-school dance classes, field trips to the Ballet Center and attendance at Pennsylvania Ballet dress rehearsals and performances, the students spend several months during the school year working on their own production, which is presented at a local college theatre.
The original model this paralleled what the company was doing. The schools have performed Cinderella, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Sleeping Beauty, and The Taming of the Shrew. In year four, one school continued the original model, while the other undertook a more strictly dance oriented production for their end-of-year performance, including Journey of a Hero, loosely based on the students' reaction to 9/11, Bouncing Back to the Beat of Time, a history of their school and community told through music, dance, and the written word, and Born for Broadway, a celebration of Pennsylvania Ballet's 40th anniversary.
The Delphi Project currently features three Philadelphia middle schools. Each school participates in Shall We Dance?, a program that explores the interrelationships of three different forms of dance: classical ballet, contemporary/urban dance, and ballroom dancing. Pennsylvania Ballet's Outreach and Education Associate Jon Martin teaches the ballet classes while Dara Stevens of Eleone Dance leads the contemporary dance classes at each school. For the ballroom element, students are bused to the Society Hill Dance Academy for lessons with Director Shana Vitoff. All three schools participate in a unique combined performance at the end of the school year at LaSalle University.
Selected students also learn video production as a way of documenting the students' activities leading up to the project's culminating event.