Subway Moon is a multimedia, transgenerational experience that reroutes your daily subway ride, transporting you to the moon and beyond through poetry, music and visual art. Our mission is to enhance artistic self-expression through collaboration, mentoring and shared performances with students, professional artists and teachers.
Subway Moon is a poetry and music educational experience with poets, professional jazz musicians, filmmakers and high-school music students from around the world who collaborate over several months of workshops culminating in a live performance in a professional venue. The project explores poetic connections between the student and professional performers through the lens of the common underground experience.
In this fractured world we’ve been amazed at what a humanizing experience the Subway Moon project always turns out to be. Subway Moon has proven its ability to break through the stubborn barriers between peoples that seem to make it so hard to find compassion. Subway Moon opens complex hearts in complex ways yet the healing that it can produce is simple. The subway theme continues as the cultural anchor for the creation of new work, celebrating our lives and cities in concentrated dosages underground.
—Roy Nathanson
Subway Moon provides students with the tools to learn to work as an ensemble while offering and receiving respectful critiques of their work. A community of engagement and support emerges. Students can practice positive risk-taking and appreciate the pursuit of a common goal among a diverse group of individuals.
Subway Moon offers opportunities for students not only to write original material but also to perform it in prominent, professional venues (museums, theaters, concert halls) side-by-side with their peers from other countries. Students are empowered by offering audiences what they receive from teacher-mentors. Students see themselves as content creators capable of inspiring others. The students are from every kind of background and sensitivity: some are at risk with poor academic histories or financial challenges, others are more sophisticated and come from more stable homes. Some have never experienced formal music concerts of any kind in any way; others come with music performance histories on both sides of the proscenium.