St. Anne's Belfield School to Host 2018 Junior Theater Celebration with Virginia Theatre Association

Charlottesville, VA, December 09, 2017 --(PR.com)-- Virginia Theatre Association announced the 2018 Junior Theater Celebration will take place at St. Anne’s Belfield School in Charlottesville March 24th. 450 of Central Virginia’s younger theatre people will gather for a day of theatre performance, community, workshops and fun, led by iTheatrics, creators of the massive Junior Theatre Festivals in Atlanta each January. VTA’s Junior Theater Celebration is a one-day event, celebrating youth theatre development and achievement for Virginia’s talented young performers.

iTheatrics’ mission is to ensure young people everywhere have access to quality musical theater programs, by:

- Adapting Broadway musicals including Aladdin Jr., The Jungle Book Jr., High School Musical, Jr., The Lion King, Jr., and many more, for performance by elementary, middle and high school students.
- Building intuitive teaching resources that guarantee educators have a successful experience producing Broadway Jr. shows.
- Creating study guides and innovative educational programs to enhance productions.
- Creating new musicals for family audiences including The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley, Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka and James and the Giant Peach, The Ant and the Elephant and Jim Henson’s Emmet Otter.
- Continually researching and developing the absolute best practices that allow educators to create successful, cost-effective and sustainable musical theater programs.

Here’s how it works:

School-based, extracurricular, and community theatre programs for youth aged 8-18 are brought together to celebrate accomplishments, share talents, and be fully immersed in theatre learning and experience.

Groups may come from churches, community theatres, recreation centers, performing arts centers and even schools; reservations are on a first come, first served basis. Registrants must be attending with one of these groups to participate.

Throughout the day, the iTheatrics team will guide participants as they rotate between performing, learning from theater professionals, watching their peers, and participating in workshops.

There are no sets or costumes allowed; performance groups are welcome to wear matching t-shirts as they perform their best ten minutes and receive feedback from the Broadway professionals, straight from Manhattan.

For their performances, groups present ten minutes from a play or musical in front of their peers and an adjudication panel of distinguished theater professionals. Following their performance, students receive valuable feedback from the adjudicators, who join the students onstage to work directly with them on a specific aspect of their performance, in front of other groups, and is designed to enlighten and educate teaching artists and students, on- and offstage.

These performances are interspersed with skill-building workshops for the students and professional development opportunities for teaching artists. After the performances and workshops have finished, each group is awarded a Certificate of Merit, and one boy and one girl from each group is selected as a Junior Theater Celebration All-Star. These All-Stars work with iTheatrics staff to learn a grand finale number, which they ultimately perform onstage, encouraging everyone in the audience to raise their voices in song.

Forms and information may be found at https://www.vtasite.org/junior-theater-celebration