Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts
The scope and sequence of each year's curriculum is designed to propel students into higher levels of acting achievement, regardless of initial experience.Based in the California Visual and Performing Arts Content Standards, each grade level includes work that "begins with basic techniques in discovery of self through classes that study how movement, voice production and a freeing of the inhibitions of the mind and body in improvisation classes can enhance performance.Students of the Media Arts Academy take classes in Video Production, Animation, Studio Photography, and Cinematography.[7] Past productions at Grand Arts include the Dance Academy's yearly spring dance concert, annual musicales by the Music Academy, Hairspray, Once on This Island, In The Heights, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Noises Off, The Glass Menagerie, Steel Magnolias, Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hello Dolly, Guys and Dolls, Dreamgirls, The Crucible where the school traveled and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2011, Peter Pan, and the school's inaugural production of La Llorona (an Aztec version of Medea).Furthermore, less than 15% of the student body is at benchmark or above for the SAT Math section test, representing a roughly 10% decrease as compared to the school's opening year in 2009.The school occupies a 9.9-acre (4.0 ha) block in downtown Los Angeles at the north end of the city's "Grand Avenue Cultural Corridor," which also includes the Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Music Center, the Colburn School of Music, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Broad Art Museum.[7][9] The facility was designed by the project team of HMC Architects (Architect-of-Record) and the Austrian firm Coop Himmelb(l)au (Designer-of-Record).[10] The design has been controversial, with the school described as "bold", "unconventional", its forms "stunning" and "a testament to the provocative power of art;" its interior spaces as having "a surprisingly rich range of personalities", "prosaic," "almost barracks-like;" its classrooms as "confined and airless," and the cafeteria as "cave-like.For a teenager who dreams of becoming an artist or a dancer, and has maybe not always found that ambition popular or easily understood by others in his family or neighborhood, what kind of campus could be better?He quotes Horace Bell as saying, "The city allowed promoters to map [the area], cut it up, and sell if off in small building lots."Zesch states, "The northern portion of the cemetery is now occupied by the Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts.