Reply to Peggy Cooper Cafritz, grande dame of the Washington arts and education scene, dies at 70

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ellington should be featured all over DC. [/quote]

This is a great point. I see many promos for Wilson and Deal musicals (which are really impressive!). Five (six) months into the school year - no play? Art show? Fall dance production? Either they have really bad promotion channels are appealing only to their pipeline funders. I live four blocks from the palace, I mean "place." My single encounter with DE students was Halloween when they came my door. Super-nice kids, loved my 9yos costume an in-character acting and won my heart with appreciation for our piano visible from the front door. But where are the performances at EVERY SINGLE public gathering? [/quote]

May sound counter-intuitive, but Ellington is a not a performance-based program. It is for instrumental, but for theater in particular it is a pre-professional training program focused more on the foundation of the craft for performance/directing/playwriting. The freshman year for example is more focused on theater history and learning how to understand character than playing those characters. The students do juried performances in-house to progress, but you should not be thinking of a school of the arts the same way you do your local neighborhood theater.[/quote]

Yes, this.

Also please remember- this is a school with about 600 students.  The majors include visual arts, museum studies, technical design and production, and literary media and communications in addition to the voice, instrumental, dance, and theater that might be foremost on your mind when you imagine a school of the arts.

My kid is in a classroom full of budding journalists and filmmakers, not like the kids from "Fame" or the Deal / Wilson musicals (which are really impressive, IMO). [/quote]

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