SAUGUS — The Cultural Council heard from staff at the newly opened Boys & Girls Club Teen Center at its meeting, at which members of both the council and club discussed the possibility for collaboration.
“I told them to come to this meeting, and hopefully you guys agree with me that it would be a great thing to incorporate stuff that’s going on,” Council Co-Chair Dennis Gould said.
David Cardenas and Javier Lozada, the regional arts and music directors for the Boys & Girls Club, respectively, were in attendance at the meeting.
The club offers activities that align with ideas the council previously discussed for its Saugus Cultural Celebration event, which is slated for February 2025.
Gould said that when he visited the new Teen Center, he discussed the possibility of showcasing art or music created at the center through the Cultural Celebration event.
“And they’re all kind of excited to figure out how to do that,” Gould said.
The council’s secretary, Vanessa LeFevre, said that she had heard of “music petting zoo” activities in the past, where kids can play with instruments.
“I have some weird homemade instruments that the kids would probably find intriguing that they could bang on,” LeFevre said.
Lozada said that he had done prior programming similar to what LeFevre described with Makey Makey kits, which allow users to create musical instruments with unorthodox objects, including food. Lozada showed council members a photo of a kit that had been hooked up to bananas.
“You can map that to any virtual instrument and they could play through it,” Lozada said.
Cardenas said that the arts program does a “little bit of everything,” and that all of the computers that the kids use at the Teen Center are high-tech and loaded with Adobe software. He added that some of the center’s hardware is portable.
“We can make stamps with the kids, so they can kind of etch out what they want to do, and they can do a quick little stamp of whatever image they want on like, a little piece of cut-up canvas,” Cardenas said.
Gould said that he is passionate about showcasing the diversity of interests teenagers have in town and said that if Lozada could program something allowing them to display the musical projects they are working on, it would be “pretty cool.”
Cardenas said that getting something together to showcase that in town would be easy, and added that he has seen it first-hand at the Teen Center, where kids show a range of interests and go from program to program.
“I think it’s something that is easily doable, to… showcase who these kids are, because the kids are Saugus, they’re kind of forming what will be,” Cardenas said. “So, I think that’s super easy to do, and the kids will be super into it.”
