OUT AND ABOUT Everett finds its strength in community BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

When choreographer Dorothy Jungels and Everett Dance Theatre opened the Carriage House on Duncan Avenue in 1994 as a venue for their troupe and an after-school space for dance classes, they made a concerted effort to tap into the surrounding Mount Hope community. Hope High School students came for classes and stayed to join the company and tour with Everett. Neighborhood kids dropped by to show off their street moves and ended up in a performance at Rhode Island College.

And in the fall of 2001, a monthly open-stage, open-mic night called Re-Verse was initiated at the Carriage House. That first season of Re-Verse combined scheduled appearances and impromptu sign-ups, but it was primarily hip-hop and rap-oriented, and most of the performers were male. In the just-completed spring season of 2003, the Re-Verse programs have broadened, in both genre and gender, with two of the four Re-Verse nights devoted to short video presentations — and with many young women joining in on modern dance, classical music, song, and poetry.

At the end-of-season Re-Verse on Friday, June 27, (the series will resume in the fall), the opening number was a comedy improv piece by Everett Dance Theatre and members of their Teen Team. These youth had been participating in Everett’s "tiered mentorship program," a place where teens and professional artists can explore ideas, create pieces, and perform together. The teens and their teachers were by turns hilarious and thought-provoking.

After this mentorship project caught the attention of a program officer at the Ford Foundation, Everett and the Carriage House Stage and School learned in June of a $50,000 grant from the foundation. The money will go to continuing the community outreach and education that have been the underpinnings of Everett’s work, as well as that of their students.

Therese Jungels, financial and marketing director at the Carriage House, explains the popularity of Re-Verse this way: "There is such a need that when people see it, they respond to it. If the stage is inclusive, then the audience becomes inclusive, and then that crossover happens."

Indeed, the audience was unabashedly wild about Friday’s other performers: Sokeo Ros and Pedro Malave, doing a hip-hop theater piece; Re-Verse’s regular MC Romen Rok performing his original poems; and guest artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the 1999 National Poetry Slam winner, presenting poems with a hard-biting critique of contemporary culture, as well as a narrative and demonstration of the first art form he ever learned — tap dance. The open stage/open mic portion of Re-Verse kicked into gear for the last 45 minutes of the evening, with a spine-tingling song from Keirra, a startling poem by Brie, a short rap from David, a quartet of young dancers called "The Tiggers," and several other performances.

Poet Forrest Gander, who heads up the Creative Writing Program at Brown University, was so impressed by his experience at Re-Verse, noting he’d "never been in an audience that was so mixed racially and generationally, never seen a single night’s event with as much aesthetic and formal variety, and rarely felt [that] kind of sustained enthusiasm." Clearly, the Ford Foundation felt the same way and has backed the Carriage House’s commitment to bringing art to the community and the community into art.