- [Announcer] "Expressions of Art" is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency.

Learn more at arts.ca.gov and the City of San Bernardino Arts and Historical Preservation Commission with its commitment to visual and performing arts organizations that enhances the culture and economic well-being of the community, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

[orchestral string music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - [Lillian] Art is a form of expression.

It provides an image to express joy and sorrow, triumph, love, and so much more.

Art is symbolic, traditional, and contemporary.

It comes in many forms: dance, music, song, theater, photography.

It's on a stage, and on a canvas.

The arts can play a critical role in our lives.

Art is all around us to embrace and enjoy!

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ [louder upbeat music] ♪ ♪ On today's show, we'll introduce you to two organizations and two artists who are all focused on keeping the arts alive in our community.

(bright music) ♪ There's a team of educators and industry professionals who are committed to supporting schools through hands-on learning programs that use animatronics to inspire imagination, ignite creativity, and bring theme park magic and storytelling to life.

Garner Holt with Garner Holt Productions leads the way.

♪ - I never went to college, and I technically didn't finish high school.

People say, "Well, how did you do that without going to college?

How did you learn?"

There was no internet at the time.

The whole basis of my existence then is the shop classes I had.

Electronics; I had metal shop, wood shop, welding, print shop, drafting, sculpture, art.

I mean, I had all that stuff.

So, it was the shop classes that are the foundation of everything that I've done, and they're gone away now.

Most schools don't have 'em anymore.

And, that's why I created a concept called Garner Holt Education through Imagination, and we create animaker spaces for schools which are a modern day high-tech shop class.

♪ - Within our program, we have a variety of different things going on.

Everything from field trips to workshops to camps to the classrooms that we build out, our maker spaces.

We have programs for kindergartners all the way up through adults.

And, we focus on STEAM education and the aspects of animatronics and theme parks and how to bring that into STEAM education and put it into classrooms.

♪ - Animatronics is the combination of art and technology as kind of half art, you know, costuming, figure sculpting, everything else, and then the mechanical technology to make it work.

And, we try to do interesting things and, you know, create stories.

Is it a figure that's educating you?

Is it a figure that's entertaining you?

Is it figure that's scaring you?

So, a lot of it is storytelling.

You know, it's engaging you.

(digital sounds) - [Droid] Thank you for that wonderful introduction, my friends.

Good day, scholars, and welcome to the most magnificent imagination factory in the world.

- I have always wanted to teach.

I have a background in math, but I've always loved theme parks.

And so, this kind of got both aspects of those worlds together.

And now, I get to teach all ages as well as delve into the world of theme parks.

- One of the things I tell students in entrepreneurial schools, and that I always say, "You know what?

People wanna help kids."

If you tell 'em you're doing something, and it's really exciting, you know, people wanna mentor people.

♪ - Well, when I first walked in, there was a lot going on.

I liked seeing the tiki room animatronics, and I was very curious.

- I like to build the stuff that, like, they give to me 'cause I like to see if I can try to make it.

- We get to tinker with different animatronics such as the tiki bird I got to work on and even the little bug.

That was interesting figuring out because there wasn't much direction to it.

So, it was nice doing my own thing.

- They really like just the hands-on experience and how much they get to do.

It's kind of like here is the basic instructions of it, but they really get to take their creativity and just kind of run with it.

♪ - Usually the parents are pretty impressed at all of the things that we cover within one day.

At the end of the week, we always do a showcase to show off what the students have been working on.

And, typically, the parents are, like, "my kid did this?

Like, all by themselves?

"Like, they did every single part?

"They wrote the show?

They did all the things?"

And, I'm like, "yep, they did every single part of it."

They don't realize how many different things go into animatronics.

They just think it's programming and coding.

When there's other things like figure finishing involved, voice track, script writing, all of that.

- There's no right or wrong.

Like, "oh, you're doing it wrong.

You gotta change it this way."

It really gives them that chance to explore the materials and explore what they're teaching them and make it, you know, what they're enjoying from it.

- Some of the things we experience is always them being curious about what are things we have made, what things that they would recognize.

And, usually once we list off a couple, they're like "oh, my gosh!

You've built so many things."

- We have over 450 figures in the Disney parks worldwide.

You see the pets attraction in Universal Hollywood.

We have Knott's.

We have things in 34 different countries and all the major theme parks.

- A lot of it is also, "how do I do this?

"How do I get into this?

I wanna build these kinds of things."

And so, we explore all of the pathways and career focuses that we can get to so that they can join this kind of a field.

♪ - [Garner] Animatronics is robots.

In five years, all these kids are gonna be standing next to 'em.

You're gonna be working next to one at McDonald's in the stores.

I mean, they're already all over.

They need to know how to design 'em, build 'em, maintain 'em, work with them, program 'em.

This is a taste in an animakers space of what it takes to put all that together and code it and program it, and do voiceover and costuming.

So, there's a little bit for everybody.

It's a STEAM thing because there's arts and there's technology.

- [Alisa] I really feel this is a good opportunity for any child because there are so many different aspects to what they get to do.

♪ - [Jillian] My favorite thing is that it shows that engineering isn't just bridges and buildings and cars, and things like that.

There is a fun side to all of it because we see these animatronics in restaurants, theme parks, and all of that.

But, no one ever really thinks about how they got there.

And, this is a whole different side of engineering that most people don't realize exists.

One of my favorite aspects about this is when the students have that aha moment and I've seen it in every single age group when they finally get their bug or their creation to work the right way.

The very first time they plug in their bird and it turns on and moves.

There's that super exciting moment of, like, "I did this", and that's just my favorite thing!

- [Garner] Find your passion and make a decision in your life how hard you wanna work to get to that passion.

And, there's a saying that says, "build your dream or somebody will hire you to build theirs."

And, you find people to help along the way, and you get people inspired.

You find people to buy into your passion and what you're doing.

It doesn't matter if it's animatronics or building guitars or building skateboards.

Do something that you love.

I've never worked a day in my life because I drive here every morning and I build giant toys that make people happy and entertain, and everything else.

I think if people have that attitude about their career, they'll spend their lives being happy.

♪ - Students are exposed to a strong foundation in creativity, innovation, and technology that keeps pace with our nation's need to create students who are college and career ready in the areas of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.

Students that are inspired through this educational approach are poised to change the world for the good.

To learn more about this program, visit their website at garnerholteducation throughimagination.com (bright music) ♪ Dance to express, not to impress.

That's the motto of the Multicultural Dance Center located in Hesperia.

Rebecca Ward, founder of the Center, shares why she created the space for our youth to learn and enjoy the art and history of dance.

She provides a stage where participants can express themselves through music and movement.

- [Rebecca] We wanna have access for all students of all different ages, abilities, and backgrounds to be able to dance and show through their heart what they aspire to be.

Whether that's something in music, theater, or dance.

Our job and our mission is to "dance to express, not to impress."

I'm Rebecca Ward and I'm the owner of the Multicultural Dance Center.

♪ Our job at the Multicultural Dance Center is to help bring out the talents of all the students of all ages and backgrounds.

We have our dance basics like ballet and tap and jazz, but we also offer musical theater, folklórico, hula and Tahitian, as well as we bring in special classes like modern technique.

We even have a heels class for the adults.

We offer music classes ranging from woodwinds up to piano and vocals, and even theater classes.

So, our youngest student is two and our oldest student, she's in her 70s, and we have everything in between.

- My older daughter wants to take all the classes.

She goes, "mom, can I take hip hop?

"Well, can I take ballet?

Well, can I take folklórico?"

And, those are just options that we can't find everywhere else.

We can find them here.

So, my older daughter, she just loves all the classes.

My little one, this is her first year.

So, she's taking the classic ballet, classic tap, and she's learned a lot and she's having a lot of fun!

- Mckenzie has improved a lot.

The first day she was like, yay!

And then, she's kind of got shy but now she loves to help the other girls in class.

And, she's like telling her friend, over here, over there, even though Ms. Rebecca is also teaching, but she's like "you have to go there."

And, Mckenzie's really, like, into her dancing and she doesn't want anybody to mess her up!

(chuckles) - They always copy what I do all the time, and I always copy what they do all the time.

- [Rebecca] What sets us apart is we will take all students.

We want them to be able to come here and participate and be involved.

We also serve a lot of our special ability and special needs students and we're one of the few studios that are able to do that.

- I enrolled Mckenzie in.

So, she loves dance and ballet and it's good for her muscles because she has muscular dystrophy.

Mckenzie's experience has been excellent 'cause she says it works out her legs.

She's always excited to come.

She's always practicing at home.

She's excited about it.

- My favorite thing about MCDC is that Ms. Rebecca makes dance so accessible for all of the students.

We live in Barstow.

We came out here because she just made it so easy to enroll in the classes.

She's been so accommodating.

- So, this area has a lot of need for combining and bringing everyone to feel that they're belonging and that they're a part of this community.

As well as being able to adapt all of our teaching styles in music, in theater, in arts, in dance, to be able to provide for that.

- Hello.

I'm Jheilyn Valenzuela, and I'm a dance instructor here at Multicultural Dance Center.

I get to teach the kids that they can express their body differently and learn about different dance cultures.

- I like Miss Jheilyn because she helps me learn the dances really well.

Sometimes some of the steps are a little hard but once we go over the steps a little bit more, I get better every time.

- The students really love our community events.

Not only do we do competitions outside where we'll compete but we want everyone to be able to participate.

Some of our students have never had the chance to be able to perform or to dance.

I have a student who has a lot of disformity with her leg and throughout different therapy and practice and being with us, she's been able to perform.

We have a few deaf students who we will turn the bass part of the music up so they can feel it on the floor through their feet, and they're on time every single count.

It's so exciting.

♪ Doesn't matter your background, your size, your age, your type, who you are.

Just being here and feeling accepted is definitely paving the way for even more programs that we can provide for our kids.

Growing up, it's been a lifelong dream to own a performing arts center.

[shaky voice] And, I saw the struggle my parents had trying to pay for costumes, all the extra practices in order to be on the competition team.

My mom, she would sew for me all of my own costumes, and it meant so much.

(pauses) I wanted to do that up here where I saw a big need.

And, even more so in a community that was lacking support for students with special needs.

And, to see the amazing abilities that come from these kids was phenomenal.

And so, I really wanted to provide a safe place for them to be here and to come together and feel accepted and to feel a part of the community.

♪ - [Sarah] What I love most is watching how much progress the girls have made.

I know I danced as a kid and I was on the competition team and I was pushed and pushed and pushed.

And, to see my girls make progress without being pushed really hard, it's just amazing.

And, I'm so thankful for that.

- [Rebecca] Growing up, there was very much a stereotype of how you have to be, how you have to look, how you have to act, what size you have to be, and none of that matters.

Dance is an expression of your inner self.

Dance is an outward look of what is inside, whether that's, you know, a celebration or joy or pain or exhaustion.

Like, that's just an outward expression of your inside self.

(elegant piano music) - [Rebecca] I want to expand even more at, like, more locations and to be able to have our own theater, and having a place where everyone can feel that they belong.

That's what I want.

♪ - From ages 2 to 82, if you wanna dance, there's a space on the dance floor in Hesperia.

To learn more about the Multicultural Dance Center, visit their Instagram at MCDCdance.

(calm music) ♪ Two professors, two artists, one with words, one with pictures, team up to acknowledge the importance and the beauty of where they live and the effect on their lives.

Their political, cultural, and environmental posture are rooted in the love of the place they call home.

(playful piano music) ♪ - There's always a positive in every negative situation.

- [Juan] Good.

- My fear of being different drives me away from the people I want to be closest to.

- [Juan] Oh, sad.

- That's sad, but that's the truth.

♪ - [Thomas] Well, I'm a university professor, Cal State San Bernardino, and Juan was a longtime professor when I was fairly new there and my good friend and fellow photographer, Sean Carlson, told me, like, "oh!

You gotta meet this guy, Juan Delgado.

"He's kind of a cool guy on campus.

"He's a fixer.

When there's a department in trouble they send Juan and he fixes it up!"

- [Juan] One of the things I love about Tom is that we'll be walking down the street and he goes, "oh, my God!

Look at that."

And, I go, "what?

What am I looking at?

What am I-?"

And, he'll say, "Look at those beautiful gum drops on the sidewalk."

And I go, "what?"

Oh, yeah!

Gum drops are beautiful.

"All those black dots?

That means a bunch of kids hang out right there."

He looks at something that would be kind of-- is unique.

- My name's Thomas McGovern.

I'm a photographer and artist.

- My name is Juan and I'm a poet.

- Primarily I make photographs, but I make other things other than-- as you see!

♪ - The word poet comes from the word to make, and I make things out of language and images.

♪ - Well, my mom was an avid photographer.

Six kids in my family, big Irish Catholic family.

And so, my mom's always taken pictures.

So-- and she always had two cameras, one for film and one for slides.

And so, it was always a joke, you know?

It's like, mom does one and you gotta hold still, get another one.

And so, I grew up, you know, sort of loving photographs.

- Well?

I was born in Central Mexico, Guadalajara.

When we went to school in elementary, they didn't have ESL, English as a Second Language.

So, as a young person who doesn't know English well, they kind of put me to the side and maybe gave me some crayons and paper.

And, I think I started drawing and writing things.

So, I think that's kind of when I started thinking about using language and drawing as a way to deal with that loneliness or isolation.

- When I got to the University of Maryland, I took a photo class, and that's turned me on to photography as an art form.

I, you know, I was taking lot pictures and terrible, terrible photographer.

And then, I had a breakthrough a few years later where I was bringing a bunch of work into a teacher and it was a little portraiture and a little landscape, a little blah, blah, blah.

And, the teacher was like exasperated with me and he's like, "just choose one thing."

And I said, "portraits."

And, I said that because that was the most challenging for me to do, walk up to people and say, "hi, can I take your picture?"

And, he says, "great.

For the next two years, do nothing but portraits."

And, that transformed my life as a photographer.

That idea of focusing, choosing a subject, and committing yourself to it.

- My father passed away.

I started thinking about how fragile life is and how life can be taken away from you.

And, I started thinking about university as a place that would give me-- enrich me as a person.

And so, I felt that my English skills were always still lacking.

And so, I went to the English department and I said, "you know, I still feel like I need to express myself in writing better."

And, he says, "well, the only other class we have is Creative Writing."

And so, when I took that first Creative Writing class and I started writing about my father's death, about hardship, it was like, the first time that I ate, like, a real meal.

Yeah.

And, these spell words, different kinds.

- Juan's an idea machine!

There's a million ideas comin' out of this guy.

And, I was like, "whoa!

This guy is, like, kind of nuts!

I don't think I can work with him."

- Tom and I do a lot of things and most of the things we do is we talk.

We talk about things, you know?

- [Tom] And, quickly I realized it's not that he's expecting us to do all those ideas but "here's some ideas.

Is there anything there that appeals to you?"

Like going to, you know, a buffet!

(chuckles) And, with him, we latched onto something and the swap meet was one of the early ones we latched on to.

We had this common interest.

- [Juan] He wanted to do something about swap meets.

We worked together on Rose and Palms.

He did some photography.

- [Tom] The project we did was at the National Orange Show in San Bernardino; big parking lot [background music] with just hundreds and hundreds of vendors out there.

And, there's so many fascinating aspects of it.

- [Juan] I think we get along because we're wired that way, that we can see the beauty in unexpected places.

♪ - [Tom] I love the idea of going and being in places that are under-recognized and underappreciated.

We went over to Citrus Park here in Riverside, Heritage Park, and we were able to go out into the field and photograph.

So, first of all, I did, like landscape; pretty, beautiful landscape pictures.

And then, we went into the field where the guys were picking.

And, you see these trees rustling and you hear this little radios going off.

And, you're feeling-?

You know there's people there, but where are they?

And, all of a sudden, some guy comes down out of a citrus tree with a huge bag full of fruit or filling it up with fruit.

And so, we got to speak to them.

I did portraits of them.

Juan interviewed them.

And so, it was really kind of seeing that citrus, the hard work, the amazing work.

Of course, most of these guys are immigrants.

You know, they're coming in maybe with day passes that they can do this very, very tough work that nobody else wants to do.

The respect that we had immediately, like, "wow.

You walk into the store and you pick up an orange.

Where did it come from?"

Man, you go back to that grove and you see what these guys were doing.

And so, it's really kind of a beautiful project and Juan wrote about it with his poetry.

That was one of the projects that I loved the most doing, for sure.

So, I think it's really important to be able to highlight the ordinary experiences of ordinary people in ordinary environments.

- Being an artist has connected me to my place, has connected to me to my past, has connected to people who have died like my mother, my father, my best friends.

It's allowed me to have-- be more intimate about those people and to record it and to talk about it.

- Photography certainly is a very wonderfully selfish medium; it's just me and my camera.

I get to indulge my vision, the thing that I see interesting.

You can start to really create that sense that, "no, I'm powerful.

I can do something.

I have a certain amount of control."

So, that's one of the great things about art is both healing and empowering.

(peaceful music) - [Juan] It's not about the product.

It's not about the book.

It's not about the objects.

It's about the journey of working with people, putting things together, talking about it.

- [Tom] We both have big egos.

But for some reason, when you start working together with a collaborator, all of a sudden those egos start to move in and out and the work starts to move in and out.

And, it's a "pas de deux," you know, the "dance of two."

It's these, you know, we're dancing and you start to move and it becomes this very kind of spontaneous and sort of fluid organic experience that we start to have.

- [Juan] Art is one of the most fundamental ways we communicate.

Let me put it this way.

What do you want to fill your head with, and your heart?

♪ Money?

What do you want to fill your head with?

You might say, "oh, it's just words", but I'm thinking about my mom.

I'm thinking about my father.

I'm thinking about my community.

When I'm just using words or images, I'm preoccupying myself with those things.

I'm filling my brain and my heart with that.

And so, to me, it connects you in ways that are profound and meaningful.

♪ - This artistic duo has created a series of expressive art exhibits.

They celebrate the culture of what reflects the Inland Empire region.

To learn more about artist Juan Delgado, go to poetryfoundation.org And, for Tom McGovern, go to thomasmcgovern.net Art education is sometimes underestimated and sometimes the first subject in the classroom to be cut from a curriculum.

But, understanding the importance of the arts and engaging our youth in creative activities at an early age can and does have a positive effect on the students and the community we live in.

We hope you've enjoyed exploring the many expressions of art in our community.

I'm Lillian Vasquez.

Thanks for watching, and bye for now.

♪ [uplifting music] ♪ ♪ ♪ [music fades] - [Announcer] "Expressions of Art" is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency.

Learn more at arts.ca.gov and the City of San Bernardino Arts and Historical Preservation Commission with its commitment to visual and performing arts organizations that enhances the culture and economic well-being of the community, and viewers like you.

Thank you.