This year, NVU-Johnson students participated in The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, an annual event for over 1800 students. They presented an original show called “The Monument,” which, due to COVID-19, was performed virtually.
Every year, the organization holds eight different festivals for regions across the US. NVU was a part of region one, which consisted of other colleges and universities across New England and northeastern New York.
“It’s a fostering environment,” Assistant Professor and Chair of Performing Arts, Isaac Eddy said. “We are here to help the next generation of theater artists grow.”
Eddy started to train to be a respondent for KCACTF last year. Respondents are typically theater professors who go to other colleges and universities to watch their shows. They then give students feedback on the show, and the show is considered for presentation at the regional festival.
“Typically, the regional festivals are a week long,” Eddy says, “which is much longer than a high school festival. They are usually held in a venue that can house almost a 1000 people. The last few years have been in Cape Cod, and we take over two conference centers.
“Students get to stay in hotel rooms, and then all of the workshops and auditions and showcases are held in these conference centers, and then in the evenings, students get to see the shows that are put up.”
This is what a KCACTF festival typically looks like, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, things had to drastically change. The festival held this year was entirely remote.
“Other than that, it was pretty much the same,” Eddy says. “There were workshops that were offered throughout the day, and different shows were presented in the evening. Only three of the shows were presented live, and our show was one of them.”
When asked how the experience was compared to previous festivals, Addison White, a sophomore Performing Arts major, said, “I feel like it would have been more disorienting if Zoom wasn’t already the new norm. It was a bit of a bummer to not be in person of course, but all of the good things about being at a theater festival were still intact.”
“The Monument,” was made by NVU Performing Arts students. They focused on the 100-year anniversary of the suffrage movement, reading all the history they could on this important part of American history, and created an entirely original show based around it.
“Performing for a Zoom-based show is similar to, but also different from, a regular show. One important aspect that is similar is the creative process,” James Stowell, a junior Musical Theater major, said. “It’s still preparing for a show and getting into character like most shows offline would be. The main difference is really the space in which you have to act and how it limits character interaction.”
“The Monument” takes place in a fictional Vermont town where the students perform as members of the select board.
“The town is voting on all of the stuff, and the audience is the town members,” Eddy said. “They vote on what happens, and at the end, they have to vote on whether or not to take down the monument on the town green, which is of the governor Percival Clement, who voted against the suffrage movement, and replace it with a suffragist. It’s a hard choice for the audience, because the suffragist we want to replace it with has some dubious history too.”
The show is available for viewing at https://youtu.be/J4YTA8z4ED4.