Deborah Asante shares a story with a group of young children.

Deborah Asante, founder of the Asante Children's Theatre.

Deborah Asante grew up an Army brat in the San Francisco Bay area. She left college to pursue acting in Los Angeles, but gave it up to return to the Bay area, where she became involved in producing theater and radio while working at an inner-city cultural center.

Two decades ago, she moved to Indianapolis on a trial basis, and ended up staying. She founded the Asante Children's Theatre in 1990 in part to give her son a way to learn about black history and culture. He's now 25 and a counselor at a local juvenile center. ACT has grown to encompass several educational and performance groups: ACT Academy, which is for students ages 12 to 21; ACT Prep, for children ages 8 to 11; the ACT Touring Company, made up of high school graduates age 18 and up; and the Kwanzaa Community Choir. In addition to being artistic director of ACT, Asante is also a renowned storyteller who performs all over the country.

The next auditions for ACT Academy and Touring Company are Jan. 5. Information: www.asantechildrenstheatre.org or (317) 632-7211, ext. 228.

When someone asks you your profession, what do you tell them? Storyteller, teacher, actor?

I say I'm a storyteller because that's what I am foremost. And through my storytelling I have become an actor, director, writer. I feel if you know the dynamic of a good story, you can do all that. It's our first art.

Tell me how your early family experiences shaped your desire to tell stories.

I used to tell stories to my brother and sisters to get them to do dishes. I'm the oldest. There were four of us, my brother and two sisters. ..... I have always loved stories, from (when I was) a little girl who was read to. !I come from a family of storytellers. I started to tell stories, and I noticed that my brother and sisters liked it. So when my mom told me I had to do dishes, I didn't like it. I asked them, "Hey, if I tell you a story, will you guys do the dishes?" And they said, "Yeah!" And that's when I realized stories had power.

What sort of stories would you tell them?

I would make them up on the spot. ..... I couldn't use the same stories my mom had told us. So I would sit on the counter. One would wash, one would rinse, and one would dry. We had chairs pulled up to the sink because they were so little. And I would sit there watching their eyes and making it up. If they got bored, I would jazz it up, like, "Suddenly ....."!

What drove you to found the Asante Children's Theatre?

I was working with a (church) group that asked me to do an after-school program in drama, and I did. When that ended, the kids kept calling me and asking when we were going to meet again. And I started thinking, "Wow, it really does benefit." My !son was too young to be an actual part of it. But I could see what it was doing with the other children.

Sometimes we would put on shows where there were more kids onstage than parents in the audience. And that was very painful to do -- all that work and barely anybody showing up. But the kids, man, the kids really grabbed ahold to it. They discovered things about themselves. I could see that. And I just kept with it. And I can be a big kid, too. It was playtime for me.

You previously said you started !the troupe in part to give your son exposure to black poetry, plays and music.

Yeah, but that was just me as a parent knowing how important art is, not so much the reason for the theater. But I wanted my son to be in touch with history and culture and art. And particularly coming up in America as an African-American child, I wanted him to have a balanced look. And I know you have to work at that. You don't just sit down at the television. You have to expose yourself and your family to different events.

Do you feel modern children aren't getting enough connection with African-American cultural roots?

I don't think any of us are getting enough, not any culture. We're moving in the direction of technology so fast. I'm not downgrading that. But I think that we are not always paying attention and embracing the humanistic themes in our past or in our present.

In addition to performing, ACT also strives to give children important life skills.

We do a lot of that in our preparation for them to be artists and embrace the artist in themselves. We are helping them to understand life choices and management. Because not every child that comes through ACT goes on to be an actor. But so many of them have said to us how important it was for the confidence and sense of self to explore the things that we take them through.

Since 2000, you've been tracking the youths who go through your program. The numbers are pretty impressive. (Of 44 youths tracked, all graduated high school, seven went into the military, seven entered the work force, and 30 enrolled in college.)

I see children who are grown and I go, "Wow." A lot of them come back, and that's why we started the touring company because they wouldn't go away. I say, "Go to Chicago, go to New York." They say, "No, we want to be here, but we want to work." So I know we have made a contribution to Indianapolis from this work. On my down days, that's what I tell myself. No matter how hard it gets, no matter how much money we don't have, nothing can dispute we have made a contribution.

ACT is housed in the Near-Westside's Christamore House Multi-Service Center. Do you have any plans to pursue your own performance space?

That's our dream, to have our own space. It takes a lot of money to do that. We struggle to get regular funding. So we look for ways to make ourselves self-sufficient. We're 17 years old. But for a very long time it was an artist doing work with children and not building the organization. So the program is strong, but the organization itself I would say it's only in the last seven years that we've started to really build that. And that's thanks to Keesha Dixon as our executive director. She's one of those people who can straddle the fence between being an artist and detailed administrator.

What are your immediate goals?

This year is the year of the dancer. Because of the issues of obesity and how kids are less and less active, we are trying to make movement a centerpiece of our program. And this year we've really focused on that. For our second production of the season, we're about to do "Hip Hop Be-Bop Do-Wop," a dance, song and spoken-word review. Our third production will be "Romeo and Juliet" as a dance musical set in colonial west Africa. We're bringing in an (ACT) alumnus from Los Angeles, Jeffrey Page. He's an Emmy-nominated!choreographer.