Oakland arts education nonprofit hatches new plans as Black Swan

Helen Stoltzfus clearly remembers the day Alice was born. It was 2004 and, by luck of the draw, her fifth-grade daughter had just won a coveted spot at a middle school in the Oakland hills — with a rich arts curriculum and a PTA full of moms with MBAs.

“It was a lottery system, with four slots and 100 applicants, and she just happened to get in,” Stoltzfus recalls. But instead of celebrating, the actress, director and playwright found herself fixated on the sheer chance of it all and on the disparities between her daughter’s school and those in lower-income areas. She got in her car and drove around the neighborhood. “Literally half a mile away, there was another Oakland public school with twice the number of kids and no arts program at all.”

Then and there, Stoltzfus and her husband, writer-composer Albert Greenberg, who had recently left their positions with A Traveling Jewish Theatre, decided on a new labor of love: a nonprofit seeking to bridge the gap between “the haves and the have-nots” by bringing professional artists — actors, musicians, dancers and storytellers — into low-income schools.

A few months and a good amount of fundraising later, Alice (it stands for Arts and Literacy in Children’s Education) came to life. Yet, like so many artists, Stoltzfus and Greenberg are constantly following their inspiration down different avenues — and have given Alice a rebirth.

'A bigger umbrella’

Last month, the organization announced that it would be celebrating its 10th anniversary with a name change. It will now be known as Black Swan Arts & Media, a name chosen in part to reflect a new emphasis on its production arm — music and theatrical performance, politically charged dialogues and more. (No relation, the couple add, to the Natalie Portman movie.)

“We realized we needed a bigger umbrella to encompass all that we do,” Greenberg says.

In the decade since Alice was born, Stoltzfus estimates, 12,000 students in more than 20 schools have participated in the nonprofit’s programs, including artist residencies and oral history workshops in which children research and share their families’ immigration stories. One of those workshops, Burning Libraries, grew into an ambitious stage production, with music and aerial dancers accompanying the stories of more than 400 subjects, collected over the course of five years.

While its programs for kids are still going in half a dozen Oakland schools, the organization’s newest projects involve neither children nor school campuses. “The Lost American Jazzbook,” which premiered in February 2014, is an album and live show comprised of original jazz songs in the style of American standards (a la George Gershwin) with a modern spin. “Prepared Table,” coming soon, is a multimedia performance that tells the stories of Afghan, Iraqi and American veterans through food.

There’s an element of a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience to their work, so in selecting the new Black Swan moniker, Stoltzfus and Greenberg looked to the essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb — who, in his 2011 book, “Fooled by Randomness,” defined a black swan event as “an outlier that lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.”

If that’s a bit too heady, the composer happily acknowledges that he also owes the idea to much-ridiculed Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll — specifically, to the Seahawks’ final, infamous play during the Super Bowl.

“My friend looked at me and said, 'Now, that is a black swan event,’” Greenberg says. (Another impetus: The couple were tired of having their organization confused with Oakland’s Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, formerly the Alice Arts Center.)

Stoltzfus and Greenberg, who make up half the four-person staff of Black Swan, are clearly invigorated by the fresh start.

The organization’s decade in existence has been a particularly difficult one for nonprofits, many of which lost vital support from foundations and individual donors when the economy crashed in 2008.

Although Black Swan relies on relatively stable grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the city of Oakland, in addition to a number of community funds and individuals, Stoltzfus says they’re “constantly seeking support.”

Greenberg is particularly energized by the reception that “The Lost American Jazzbook” has received since its debut performance at Berkeley’s Maybeck Recital Hall. With an eye toward that moment in history, when the Great American Songbook met jazz, he set out to create songs that were “sophisticated, sensual, witty and sublime.” Then he recruited a band, including Grammy Award-winning violinist Mads Tolling, jazz pianist Dan Zemelman and young singer Rose Armin-Hoiland, whom Greenberg calls an “undiscovered treasure.”

The result is an ongoing show that blends classic songwriting, improvisation, a modern jazz sensibility and a deep strain of irreverence. “We have the only song in the history of music to rhyme 'connubial’ with 'post-pharmaceutical,’” Greenberg boasts, as well as a big-band “lesbian love song.”

Unlikely human connections

Thanks to Internet radio, the project has earned fans as far away as China, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. But to hear Greenberg tell it, that’s not surprising. The passion that drives their work, after all, is for the unlikely human connections that music and art can forge — whether in schools, on a stage or broadcast from 6,000 miles away.

“People say music is an escape,” he says. “But when you go to that great blogosphere in the sky, are you going to think about who won the Senate, or who you deeply cared about in your life, who you touched? ... We’re trapped in this capitalist mind-set where you have to go after something every minute of your life, when all anybody wants is one tender moment that you can remember. That’s where life lies.

“If that’s escapism, I want to escape there,” he says. “And I hope other people come with us.”

Black Swan Arts and Media

More information: www.blackswanarts.org.