History Comes Alive! Youth Engagement in Local History Through the Arts

Over the last two decades, the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts has paired youth engagement, the study of local history & heritage and creative, dramatic self-expression through its signature History Comes Alive! program. In partnership with the Shelburne Museum, the Ethan Allen Homestead, Shelburne Farms and the Rokeby Museum, the Flynn has offered a youth summer program in which youth spend a week learning about and dramatizing the lives of people from a particular era in Vermont. Through improvisation, students develop real and fictional costumed characters who respond to the challenges of the time, a process that augments understanding of and a passion for history.