About Us

BRAVO is the award-winning, nationally recognized Performing Arts program at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School. Now in it’s 22nd year, BRAVO is committed to ensuring that all Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School students have the opportunity to gain experience in the transformative power of the Performing Arts. BRAVO is designed to introduce the performing arts alongside other learning experiences, expose children with special interests to training, designing, teaching and managing, identify and utilize all community and school resources for the provision of arts experiences, identify the needs and strengths of individual students through performances and showcases and provide equitable instruction to all populations of students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School.

The emphasis of BRAVO is on educating every child to be academically and artistically successful in partnership with home and community. BRAVO includes  several initiatives and objectives centered upon the art of music, dance, drama, visual, technical, applied and the performing arts to inspire and teach students through motivation, time management, organization, esteem and parent and community involvement.

The BRAVO staff and Advisory Board are committed to offering and maintaining diverse, educational, unique, quality, and equitable programming.

Research shows that students have only to gain from involvement in the arts; a sustained education in music gives children the intellectual and creative skills that will last a lifetime. Through participation in BRAVO students learn focus, accuracy, discipline, patience, respect, perseverance, to listen and how to be quiet and they learn genuine pride and gain self esteem after executing a difficult piece successfully in a performance.

The BRAVO program includes full scale theatrical productions, stage crew, and dance studio in conjunction with a coordination of other performing arts after school activities designed to allow all Brooks students a diverse opportunity for involvement in the arts through drama, voice, dance, stage crew and other forms of artistic instruction.

Under the guidance of professional artists, performances arts is used to teach, mentor and empower students. In addition, BRAVO collaborates with our elementary schools and provides outreach programs throughout the year. Annually BRAVO participates in the Junior Theater Festival. Through the festival, BRAVO has built a collaborative relationship with Music Theater International and iTheatrics, piloting new Jr. adaptations of Broadway musicals. BRAVO offers two performing arts camps for 4th through 9th grade students during the summer. Auditions for the Bravo Performing Arts Academy are held the first week of March each year.