By Frank Sentwali
Healing through the power of theater
Black Youth Healing Arts Center (BYHAC) Program Director Jan Mandel found life in the theater and healing in the art. The long-time high school theater teacher, who for years was the cultivator of the St. Paul Central High School Black Box and Central Touring Theater (CTT), has spent a lifetime offering youth “theater art” as a way to heal—heal trauma, heal pain, heal wounds, heal scars, and heal any fear of expressing joy publicly. Often, the youth Jan guides choose to heal with a mixture of gut-wrenching experiences, youthful pragmatism, and laugh-out-loud wit—all delivered authentically and expressed through poetry, song, intense dramatic monologue, or skit.
For decades, Jan Mandel has provided the “safe space” and the structure for young people to exercise the healing power in their voices. This past August, Jan and COMPAS artist Aimee Bryant helped a group of community youth at BYHAC produce their own healing stories. In just a few short weeks, Jan’s recipe of compassion, freedom, and empowerment guided a creation that required both performers and audience members to be on their healing journey.
A Journey of Transformation Through Art and Connection
In order to help others on their healing journey, Jan first had to go on her own. There’s such authenticity in her passion and her approach because, as a former special education student herself, Jan knows firsthand how art can transform and transcend. “I didn’t come to theater because I wanted to be a star. I was trying to stay alive,” Jan says as she describes her personal discovery of art’s healing capability. She tells a story about a time when she was failing all her classes, and a teacher suggested writing a poem for a final paper. She chose to write about Harriet Tubman because Harriet “also had a hard time reading—but for different reasons,” she says with a tone of honest recognition. Jan explains that when she performed the piece for her class, memorized, it was the first time she realized she could “retain information.” From then on, Jan’s learning technique involved putting everything in a rhyme or a poem.
“Theater became a way for me to get through education—to survive public education and get out of Special Ed,” she says. “It really launched me into being able to have confidence—so that one disability, sorta, became the launch pad to all my abilities.”
One of the most important of those abilities for Jan’s success with youth is the ability to connect. In order to connect with urban teens, what one cannot do is be afraid of them. A woman who’s willing to hitchhike from Illinois to San Francisco, California, by herself because she “saw the San Francisco Mime Troupe perform a play about Bobby Seale” likely doesn’t scare easily. Jan found a relentless passion for “street theater.”
After six years of following her purpose and gathering the tools while studying social justice theater across the Nation—from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.—Jan made her way to Minnesota. Here, she would take Central High youth, many of whom were themselves just trying to survive public education as she once was, and steer them toward their own healing and self-discovery in the “Black Box.” There, on Central High’s lowest floor, Jan’s status as a theater arts instructor, director, and mentor for young people would become legendary.
The Power of Voice and Healing Through Art
While teaching at Central, Jan began working with Dr. Darlene Fry, who had left Saint Paul Public Schools to start the Irreducible Grace Foundation (IGF). Dr. Fry was seeking solutions to the low graduation rates among transient youth in St. Paul. After interviewing some of the youth and asking them what they felt they needed, Dr. Fry discovered that what the youth really wanted more than anything was a voice.
Enter Jan Mandel, and the youth were able to create a theatrical production called I Got Somethin’ to Say! As the play’s audiences grew throughout the Twin Cities, so did interest from other organizations. Jan credits Susan Koepplinger, with the MPLS Foundation, as being the catalyst for recognizing a key component in Jan’s work. Koepplinger suggested that as much as the youth needed a voice, they needed healing. Jan’s response was also an epiphany for herself: “Art is healing,” she exclaimed. Jan explained, “That was my ‘a ha’ moment where I also realized what I was doing in the Black Box all those years had a healing aspect.” Yes, she was “fostering voice and building community and empowering youth,” as she recalls, but healing was a different language. “Healing was a new word. Healing was a word that was not used much when I was in public education.”
From there, with help from community members and organizations, Jan and the youth at IGF embarked on a journey of not only learning the biology of trauma and healing but also acquiring skills to become peer mentors, teaching other youth trigger recognition and healing practices. Through the creation of a series of scenes, Jan describes the process as “using theater to understand the roots of trauma.” Just as the healing theater program grew to outreach and performances beyond Minnesota’s borders, COVID-19 put a halt on things. With much healing work to be done, in true teaching artist form, Jan and the youth at IGF got creative and made animated scenes and other digital tools for dealing with trauma and supplied them to school districts.
A New Creative Hub for Mental Health and Art
A couple of years after the worst of the pandemic was over, IGF acquired the building that now houses BYHAC. Located just north and west of St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood, BYHAC has everything a young person might need for using creativity for their mental health. There’s a community garden from which they cook vegetables during cooking classes in their commercial kitchen. There’s a gymnasium for basketball and dance classes. There are rooms for poetry, visual arts, sewing, and theater classes. A music studio is on the way. And, of course, there’s Jan Mandel making sure the spirit of the building is healing, artistic, and community-focused.
“It’s about being seated and rooted in that soil of community,” she says. “The source of the artist in the community is that you can see something and make something different,” she continued. Jan approaches her role as Program Director at BYHAC in much the same way she has approached youth work all along. “They (youth) would talk about what they wanted to do for programming, and I would go out in the community and get the people to make it happen,” Jan explains matter-of-factly. For Jan Mandel, it really is as simple as that. She makes it sound so easy, even when pulling together a play production on short notice after a BYHAC employee had to leave their position.
Creative Process and Youth Empowerment: Building a Production in Three Weeks
When tasked with coming up with a production in three weeks, Jan first wrapped her mind around the task by doing some walking and bicycling. Then she remembered what acclaimed director Marion McClinton told her, “It’s all in the casting.” She then hand-selected her young cast of teens, pre-teens, and mentors. “The first step was scheduling,” Jan explained. “You can hurry the art, but you can’t hurry the art.” She continued, “The second step is setting the expectations.” Jan’s only expectation was that everyone be on time for all rehearsals and performances. The rest of the expectations were set by the youth themselves, the most important of which was the expectation to not expect perfection. “They didn’t want to put pressure on themselves to be perfect,” said Jan.
The play has a scene about boundaries directed in the form of a commercial. It has a song Jan says was written with giving BYHAC a “theme song” in mind. It has a chant that reminds us all: “Pain that is not transformed is transferred. Trauma that is not transformed is transmitted.” Jan spoke in wonderment about her favorite scene, directed by a 12-year-old, in which the trauma of being publicly berated in a store by her grandmother is acted out. Jan expressed her desire to continue tweaking this production with COMPAS artists next spring. “They (the youth) took it somewhere that I had never imagined,” she reflected.
A Path to Confidence: Theater as a Lifelong Journey
When a young Jan Mandel was searching for herself and for answers as to why she wasn’t “as smart as the other kids,” she researched Harriet Tubman and found a hidden pathway inside herself to confidence, education, and success. She set herself free using theater art. When I consider how many youth she’s impacted over the years and the branches of positive community influence that she has grown, I can’t help but find it symbolic that Harriet Tubman was her inspiration as a youth.
When I asked what she was trying to accomplish all those years in the Black Box, Jan explained, “It wasn’t that I was ever trying to raise an artist, but rather I was trying to help young people grow, so the system wouldn’t kill their gifts.” Jan has been using the same pathway she used to heal herself to help heal youth in the St. Paul schools and community centers for much of her life, and she’s not slowing down.
In true Jan Mandel spirit, she celebrated her recent birthday by inviting friends and family to BYHAC for their free Thursday night African Dance class, led by Sister Patricia Brown. I attended with my daughter to join the festivities. There were toddlers and elders. There were former students, such as award-winning author and Spoken Word artist Danez Smith. Jan danced the entire class as if she were the youngest in the gym, only stopping to greet each new face coming
Long before COMPAS, Jan Mandel gave me my first teaching residency. I developed my chops as a teaching artist and eventually joined the COMPAS roster. Over 20 years after that invite to help with Spoken Word for the CTT classic play Barriers to Entry, my life is on a much better trajectory than it was at the time. Jan helped heal my life as she’s done for so many young people over the years. Now, with BYHAC and COMPAS partnering, Jan and I get to continue our art mentorship story together—the story of helping young people heal through theater.
Join us in empowering youth through creativity! At COMPAS, we’re committed to helping young people, like those Jan Mandel has mentored, discover their creative voices and heal through the power of art. Whether you’re a teacher, an artist, or simply passionate about the arts, there are many ways to get involved. Learn more about what we do, how to support our work, and how you can stay up to date on COMPAS news! Together, we can create a lasting impact in our community.
