Congressional District: 6

Presented as part of our 100th Anniversary Season, the Juneteenth Festival of New Plays will offer playwriting and acting workshops facilitated by professional teaching artists, culminating in public performances of new works. The project will promote racial healing, remove economic barriers to the arts, and empower local artists with the tools to advance their artistic expression.

The Great Lakes Hula Retreat will once again be providing an opportunity for local Polynesian dance and cultural arts students to learn directly from Hawaii based Kumu Hula (master instructors) during a full weekend of classes and workshops.

Charlie Reynolds is one of nine winners of the 2024 Midwest Award for Artists with Disabilities. This award is designed to support accessibility in the arts and celebrate the exceptional work of disabled Midwestern visual artists.

"Our Towns, Our Gateway" is a community-created showcase of our contiguous rural Kentucky counties through the lens of Thornton Wilder's play "Our Town" with a multilingual staged production, book discussions, and a multidisciplinary arts exhibition. The program celebrates our area's diversity and cultural contributions, encouraging citizens to appreciate unique beauties in everyday life.

Massanutten Regional Library (MRL) will bring our community of 160,000 in the City of Harrisonburg, Rockingham County, and Page County together to celebrate the themes of cultural identity, family and place, belonging, and more through a 2025 Big Read focused on Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing. Previous Big Read successes in 2007, 2008, 2009, & 2010 have our community asking us to reignite this program.

"Shakespeare: In Appalachia & Beyond" will engage youth with status offenses housed at Gateway Children's Services, a residential court-appointed treatment and foster care center, in the works of the Bard in both local and global contexts. Through weekly classes tying his work to modern rural Appalachian dialects & scenarios, the program will culminate in a performance at Shakespeare in the Park.

Drama Club will bring Shakespeare's text to life in ELA classes in 2 District 79 schools for adjudicated youth in NYC. Students will explore the language and themes of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest, or Julius Caesar through improvisation as they build a culminating performance demonstrating their grasp of the material and its relevance to their lives.

Project Optimist will launch its Biophilia program, a series of features—commissioned and community-sourced—that celebrate the beauty of the natural world. They plan to work with artists, naturalists, scientists, folk schools, and other thought leaders to explore our affinity with nature.

We have contracted with BeauSoleil, for a public, ticketed performance at Thrasher. For the past 42 years, BeauSoleil Avec Michael Doucet has been making some of the most popular Cajun...

For our AAPI Month Spring Workshop, we will be bringing in master instructors in various styles of Polynesian dance, language, and music. Over the course of the weekend we will...