Welcome to the middle! This weekend marked the midpoint of the school year, with 1½ intensives and 1 semester complete and 1½  intensives and 1 semester to go.

Would you like to celebrate with us this Thursday night?

Last week, while the majority of students studied Photography w/ Melissa for the first half of the Winter Intensive, a small crew learned playwriting w/ Ryan. Students wrote 7 plays in 3 days! Their plays will be performed Thursday and y’all are invited. We aren’t advertising widely to the public (mostly because our performance space is so small and partly because, well, performing can be terrifying and starting small can make it less so).

A Whirlwind Theatre Festival is just that — a whirlwind. It has a long history across the country and is usually called a “24-hour Theatre Festival” in which participants write, direct, act, and perform new plays within a 24-hour window. Illinois Valley artists have created 10 Whirlwind Theatre Festivals (some of you have participated as creators and/or audience members, as y’all well know!). This is the first time the festival is staged at a local school. We’re slowing the pace considerably, yet creating and performing brand new plays within a 2-week window is still quite a challenge!

Tomorrow, students will decide who will act, direct, design lighting, create sound effects, write the playbill, collect props, sew costumes, paint backdrops, and stage manage. And come Thursday at 6pm a performance it shall be! The theme is “Not From Around Here.” To throw in a bit of a teaser, two of the requirements (all decided by the kids) are to include an egg and an epiphany expressed in alliteration.

Doors open at 5:45pm, Performance at 6pm, followed by an Audience Talk-Back with students. If possible, please bring a $5-10 donation to help students fund a dance (will it be a prom? A morp? An anti-prom? That’ll be up to the kids + our budget).

Check out the Photography class photos while you’re here! They are awesome.

Final thought of the day: We sure hope report cards land in your mailbox within the next day or so. We mailed them last Thursday. Students were also given a student copy of their report card, so hopefully they’ve shared it with you. Let us know if yours didn’t arrive: kaci@kcahs.org.

The complete newsletter is HERE.