Catamounts is a Heatherwood Tradition

Heatherwood Elementary second graders are singing and dancing about economics this spring. The students have spent the last six weeks working with professionals from the Boulder theater group, The Catamounts, to create an original, curriculum-based production.

This second-grade tradition began in 2011, when teacher Jolie Evans teamed up with her longtime friend Amanda Berg Wilson of The Catamounts to bring theater education to Heatherwood.

Berg Wilson had recently moved to Boulder from Chicago where she ran a theater group called Striding Lions. “Over the 10 years I was [in Chicago] we honed this methodology where we would go into the schools and take curriculum-based material and create an original show out of it,” she explained.

Twice a week, during the six week residency at Heatherwood, Berg Wilson and other Catamounts performers use this methodology to walk students through the steps of creating their own production. The students generate everything for the show including the scripts, the songs, the choreography, and the sets.

The theme of this year’s show is economics, and students found ways to weave concepts like supply and demand into their song lyrics and skits. “It’s a testament to the methodology that you can do economics and still make it stage worthy,” Berg Wilson said.

“I chose the parts for my skit,” student Oliva Consiglio said with pride when asked to explain her role creating a skit about a shopping trip to Grandrabbits.

In addition to learning curriculum concepts, students also learn the vocabulary of musical theater and dance, such as words to describe how performers move their bodies. “I learned about staccato and legato movements,” student Jace Pollock said, explaining that staccato movements are short and quick while legato movements are long and slow.

For the first several years, The Catamounts program was funded through a grant from the Boulder Arts Commission, but when the grant was no longer available the Heatherwood PTO, families, and private donors raised the necessary funds. “That they continue to value [the program] and provide it to the kids is a testament to the community spirit of Heatherwood,” Berg Wilson said.

“Kids who don’t excel academically come alive and out of their shells in Catamounts,” Evans said, when explaining the program’s impact. “Students are able to show their knowledge about curriculum in an artistic fashion, not just the traditional pencil and paper.”

Berg Wilson also points out that the program is valuable because it fills a very real gap in elementary education. “We have music in schools now, but we don’t have dance and theater, and this may be these students’ only experience to create and perform their own work and maybe discover that this is important to them.”

Though Heatherwood second grader’s show, Artful Economics 2017, will both debut and close on May 2, Evans and Berg Wilson are confident the memory of the production will live on. And thanks to the support of the Heatherwood community, next year’s second graders will look forward to their own experience with The Catamounts.