Young Renaissance Scholars Program

Thanks to a Mid-Region Council of Governments Government Results and Opportunity award obtained by Representative Derrick J. Lente, the Town of Bernalillo has launched the Young Renaissance Scholars (YRS) project, a multidisciplinary youth development program focusing on the art, music, theatre, and dance of the European Renaissance and its New World manifestations, from 1500 to 1650. The program is 100% free, with sessions take place at Martha Liebert Public Library.

Young Renaissance Scholars Actors Studio

Performance of Renaissance theatre and poetry offers young people language, history, and a means of addressing life with appropriate emotions and a sense of moral purpose. 

Weekly workshops provide professional development through textual analysis, verse technique, diction, projection, euphony, expression, and stage dancing and fighting. Students may advance to the New Mexico Young Actors program in preparation for a possible career in stage or film. Participation culminates in performances of works by William Shakespeare and others.

Young Renaissance Scholars Art Studio

Timeless, enduring, and now increasingly popular, classical realism offers students a way of seeing and thinking about the world from the sane perspective of beauty and truth.

Weekly workshops are directed by a living master and provide an opportunity to master classical drawing focused on the four principles of visual language: line, shape, value, and form. Students are introduced to the “atelier” method used by the Old Masters and refined by the great French painters of the 19th century.

Young Renaissance Scholars Music Studio

Renaissance music is intellectually stimulating because of its complexity and history, prompting youth to explore sublime emotions as they develop aesthetic taste and musical appreciation.

Workshops provide lessons on a variety of early instruments: recorder, traverse flute, shawm, crumhorn, sackbut, viola de gamba, lute, vihuela, early keyboard instruments, and more.

Young Renaissance Scholars Dance Studio

Traditional Renaissance dance ennobles the compartment of the human body via stately, elegant forms that have stood the test of time. Engagement with the courtly dance traditions of old develops the entire person, giving confidence in other areas of social interaction.

Workshops provide training in European, Mesoamerican, and colonial New Mexican dances of the 16th and 17th centuries, in view of actual performance and further professional development.