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Rosie's Broadway Kids (RBKids) offers students from New York City public schools the opportunity to dance, sing, perform and experience musical theater on a weekly basis.
All types of school programs are suffering from cutbacks. While subjects
jockey for importance, dance and music complement the lessons of other disciplines:
Physical Education
Dance requires tremendous energy, challenging coordination of the legs, feet, and arms; and singing requires extraordinary control of the diaphragm, back, stomach, and facial muscles. In musical theater, both must be performed at the same time, in simultaneous response to the sound the ear hears.
History
Dance, song and music reflect the environment and the moment of their creation, often arising out of social events, conflicts and contemporary entertainment. In musical theater, shows are set in historical eras, locales and social situations.
Language
Dance uses body movement to express emotion, convey ideas, or simply tell a story. Music is a kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. Songs use lyrics, a form of poetry, to tell a story that is unique to the meter and feel of the music.
Math
Through dance, the students learn sequential, linear and complex patterns. Music is rhythmically based on subdivisions of time into fractions, which must be executed instantaneously, not worked out on paper.
Science
Like science, dance and music are exact, specific and precise. In dance, the choreography acts as a graph, guiding the dancer with the most exact control of time and gravity. In music, it is the score that acts as a graph, and it indicates frequency, intensity, volume change, melody, tempo, and harmony all at once.
Art
Dance and music allow children to creatively express their inner spirits. Art is an essential aspect of a child's development, encompassing humanism, passion, beauty and emotion.
We Go Where We’re Needed
Rosie’s Broadway Kids responds to requests from school principals, and determines the school’s need by investigating the percentage of students eligible for the Federal Free Lunch program at that school. RBKids is dedicated to offering free services to schools with a greater than 70% free lunch rate.