Rosie Perez takes offense when you ask her how she managed to get a good education. “The question should be ‘how were you able to stay inside a classroom setting with so much trauma around you?,’” she corrects the interviewer.
Perez is right. It’s a much better question, and her answer is given through her very compelling life story. Perez was a week old when her mother left her with an aunt, who raised Perez until she was four years old and her mother placed Perez in foster care.
Every weekend, Perez would go to her aunt’s home and the aunt would tell her, as she returned Perez to the foster home on Sunday evenings, “not to let my heart go hard.” It was a strong message that Perez says has guided her throughout her life and one that she shares, in particular with the many young students she has mentored over the years.
Perez credits that aunt, her father and “the nuns who made me apply myself” with her ability to stay in school and to thrive. “My father was a merchant marine so he traveled a lot, but he never ever missed an opportunity to tell me I was beautiful and to give me non-stop unconditional love and support,” she says.
That unconditional love and support helped Perez find the courage to follow her heart – and her calling as an artist. Perez began her professional career as a dancer on Soul Train, then as a choreographer of the Fly Girls on Living Color before she made her film debut in Spike Lee’s 1989 movie Do The Right Thing. More professional successes followed, including an Academy Award-nominated performance in the 1993 film Fearless.
Around the time of those early successes, Perez became involved with teaching and mentoring through Working Playground (now known as Urban Arts Partnership – see box), an arts-based program which partners with over 50 public schools in New York City. Her former sister-in-law, who founded the program, asked Perez to fill in for a teacher one day, “and I was hooked,” she recalls. Although involved with a number of important causes – Perez is often described as an “actress and activist” – including the fight against AIDS and weapons training on Vieques, mentoring is particularly close to her heart.
As she explains it, the program complements schools’ academic curricula, using art to “help articulate what students are learning in the classroom. Inside the educational system, there has to be meaning. So we tell the students ‘put it on paper, write it, paint it, dance it.’” Perez shares anecdote after anecdote about her “kids”, as she calls them fondly, stressing the need to “celebrate the heart and its intelligence. We’re not there to create artists but hearts; empathetic human beings who’ll make a difference in the world.”
Besides teaching, Perez chairs Urban Arts Partnership’s artistic board, which includes Marisa Tomei, Fisher Stevens and Aasif Mandvi, who participate in the program’s Master Class series, events and ongoing special projects.
The students benefit most, Perez believes, by knowing that the adults in their lives are there for them. “You have to convince the kids that you are in it, that you are committed.”
At the beginning of every academic year, Perez chooses several schools and gives what she calls a “pre-commencent speech” to that year’s graduating class. “It’s taxing,” she says of the talk. “I tell my own story, and it’s brutally honest. I used to never want to share my personal story but I tell the students that they have to know theirs. ‘There’s no shame in your game,’ I tell them.”
That brutal honesty includes talking about her own fears, even today. “I tell the kids, ‘I’m afraid of nothing, and I’m afraid of everything. I’m afraid every night I go on stage but I pause and take stock of who I am. You’ve got to push through your fear and step into your greatness.’”
Although she dedicates a lot of time to the Urban Arts Partnership and other causes, Perez continues to be very busy professionally. She is in an episode this season of Law and Order: SVU playing the mother of a sexual abuse victim, she’s producing two movies, and is in rehearsals for the play “Free Man of Color”.
Of her mentoring and teaching, Perez says it “has made me a better person and forced me to nurture my heart and to check my ego.”
“The school of the heart is never ending,” Perez says. “There’s always another level of learning.” >>>
The Urban Arts Partnership
THE URBAN ARTS PARTNERSHIP, a New York City-based program, was founded in 1991 (under the name Working Playground) to provide arts-based solutions to urban educational issues. “What that means is that we strive to help students make more meaningful connections [through art] to the academic curriculum,” explains Philip Courtney, executive director. “The key is preparing students for what the world is going to look like a year, five years or more from now. We want them to become creative thinkers, problem solvers, analytical thinkers, and we encourage team work. The world is changing and they need to be ready for that.”
The Partnership works with schools eligible for Title 1 supplemental funds (that is, schools with the highest concentration of poverty among students). The program itself receives funds from multiple sources: all levels of government; corporations; and foundations.
Rosie Perez takes offense when you ask her how she managed to get a good education. “The question should be ‘how were you able to stay inside a classroom setting with so much trauma around you?,’” she corrects the interviewer.
Perez is right. It’s a much better question, and her answer is given through her very compelling life story. Perez was a week old when her mother left her with an aunt, who raised Perez until she was four years old and her mother placed Perez in foster care.
Every weekend, Perez would go to her aunt’s home and the aunt would tell her, as she returned Perez to the foster home on Sunday evenings, “not to let my heart go hard.” It was a strong message that Perez says has guided her throughout her life and one that she shares, in particular with the many young students she has mentored over the years.
Perez credits that aunt, her father and “the nuns who made me apply myself” with her ability to stay in school and to thrive. “My father was a merchant marine so he traveled a lot, but he never ever missed an opportunity to tell me I was beautiful and to give me non-stop unconditional love and support,” she says.
That unconditional love and support helped Perez find the courage to follow her heart – and her calling as an artist. Perez began her professional career as a dancer on Soul Train, then as a choreographer of the Fly Girls on Living Color before she made her film debut in Spike Lee’s 1989 movie Do The Right Thing. More professional successes followed, including an Academy Award-nominated performance in the 1993 film Fearless.
