CityStep is an award-winning performing arts partnership between universities and surrounding public schools. I created the CityStep program while a student at Harvard as a way to encourage creative self-expression in young people—and give college students an opportunity to get outside the campus walls and connect with the community. It is presently the largest independent service program at Harvard and is entirely student-run. It has been replicated to UPenn, Princeton and, most recently, Yale. Each year, teams of college students teach a yearlong CityStep dance-theater curriculum to kids in public elementary and middle schools. Afterschool and special sessions bring kids onto the college campus. Each spring, over 100 kids from across each city collaborate on an original, thematically-unified dance production, performed for a large, diverse community/college audience.

Read the Harvard Gazette article

See the CityStep Photo Essay

CityStep Harvard
CityStep Penn
CityStep Princeton
CityStep Yale

The conversion of New York City's pier 25 into a glorious park was the inspiration for To the River, sponsored by Dancing in the Streets and the Hudson River Park Conservancy. I led three weeks of workshops with 40 children from NYC's Chelsea and Clinton neighborhoods, generating movement, dance and scenes, and recording interviews with them about their memories of water and impressions of the Hudson River. For many kids living right nearby, the performance and the new park brought them to the banks of the Hudson for the first time.

I directed Everybody Over Here, an exuberant on-air promotion for the Nickelodeon Channel, with a group of New York City kids. The material grew out of a day-long workshop in creative movement, collaboration and self-expression, filmed by talented cameraman Russell Fine at the Sailor's and Soldiers monument. Producer Alicia Sams and I co-edited.

Present Tense grew out of my two-week Artist-in-the-Schools residency at Martha's Vineyard High School, sponsored by The Yard. Aided by my collaborators, I worked with theatre arts students on an original piece about growing up on the Island, with its rugged seas and challenging winters. I used interviews, writing exercises and movement improvisations to generate the material, then interwove music and sound. The students chose to perform the 20-minute piece for the entire school. Afterward, their peers expressed respect at the way these students from different social circles had formed such a strong ensemble, sharing material that was personal and challenging.

Where are You From, Where are You Now, Where are You Going? was the culmination of my residency in a refugee camp in Croatia, where I worked with Bosnian Muslim teens. Collaborator Sonja Kuftinec and I conducted writing and movement workshops, shaping and developing the material into a profoundly moving performance that we presented to the camp's residents. This was perhaps the most challenging and rewarding project I have ever undertaken. Learn more about Odakle Ste.

A collaboration with over 200 students at Seward Park High School on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Too (2) Noble Brothers was an original adaptation by members of Cornerstone Theater Company of Shakespeare's final play, The Two Noble Kinsmen. The production was sponsored by the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival. As a longtime affiliated artist with Cornerstone, I choreographed the production, which included dialogue and song lyrics in Bengali, English, Mandarin and Spanish.

Learn more about Peck's choreography for Cornerstone Theater Company.