As part of the Embassy’s ongoing collaboration with the Salvadoran Youth Symphony Orchestra, three artists are visiting El Salvador to conduct a 10-day workshop. Los Angeles’s 24th Street Theater director Jay McAdams, actress and art director Debbie Devine, and producer and composer Ed Barguiarena are State Department “Culture Connect Envoys” and will be helping the Orchestra’s musicians improve their performances.

The workshop is entitled “Unmasking the Musician: Teaching Body Expression to Youth Symphony Musicians”.

Its main goal is to teach the musicians to use their bodies to better convey the feelings associated with music and to improve their communication with the audience. Theater techniques and yoga are used in this workshop to help musicians express their emotions during performances.

Taking advantage of the theater group’s presence in El Salvador, the Embassy also organized additional events, including a theater workshop for youth-at-risk, a teaching workshop for community-based theater group teachers, two music appreciation conferences at the Salvadoran American Cultural Center, a workshop on teaching for Salvadoran professional actors, and theater games for children of the orphanage “Hogar del Niño San Vicente de Paul.”

The Embassy is proud to be associated with the Youth Symphony, one of the finest of its kind in the hemisphere.