Bro/SisOn Friday, the Providence String Quartet, Minna, and Heath visited an amazing program in Harlem and were rewarded with an energizing, affirming experience. Brotherhood/Sister Sol was started in 1995 by two Brown University grads, Jason Bro/Sis serves two hundred Black and Latino kids after school, providing mentoring, leadership development, international study, academic
The highlight of our four hour visit was the teen writing circle that we sat in on for a couple hours, with the PSQ members supplying improvised music under gritty, powerful, funny, often challenging poetry shared by the Bro/Sis teen group. Here’s a scrap that I managed to jot down: Look at all the Blacks in jail
"The music enhances the emotion and the strength of the poetry… It was great how you could give them two or three words about what the poem was about and they could make something up." -Marsha "It was just hot. Some people the way they wanted their poem to sound, the music made it sound better. It tried to show what the emotion of the poem was." -James -Heath Marlow, CMW staff Visiting Bro/Sis was unusually inspiring. I met a very talented cellist named Chris who became my instant buddy. He performed for the first time in front of his buddies that day (with some accompaniment from the quartet). The smile on his face after the performance was infectious and kept me going all weekend! He kept asking me how far Providence was, and I started wishing, for the first time, that Providence was a suburb of New York! -Sara Stalnaker, Providence Quartet |
