Andrea Diaz
Staff Writer
The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) is a festival that comes with many responsibilities. Vanessa Ballam, an associate professor of theatre at Idaho State University, was named vice chair of the festival and will take over as chair when her tenure as vice chair ends.
Bellam overseers all the stages of planning, running the event and all the other aspects of the festival. She details some of the other responsibilities by saying, “…choosing a virtual platform, determining the fee structure for participation, inter-viewing and vetting potential keynote speakers, creating an up to date contact list for our entire region, examining our practices and scrutinizing them through the lens of equity, diversity and inclusion, addressing how every aspect of the festival will translate to a virtual forum, over-seeing the budget, looking for corporate sponsors, recruiting new faculty volunteers to serve in leadership positions with-in KCACTF etc.”
COVID-19 has also affected how Ballam plans to do the festival, her responsibilities and how students and the public will participate in the program. Everything will take place virtually and as such it will look different from the years past, but Ballam is optimistic about the program.
“Most everything will look different this year,” Ballam said. “But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We’ve been able to get down to the basic question of ‘what’s our mission’ and ‘why do we offer these aspects of the festival?”
Students will also pay lower registration fees due to not needing to travel and pay for hotel expenses.
KCACTF is a program that seeks to accomplish and improve many aspects involving theater programs and students across the nation. Since the program start-ed, over 400,000 theater students have been involved, with an average of 18,000 theater students per year. According to Ballam, KCACTF aims to:
“Encourage, recognize, and celebrate the finest and most diverse work produced in university and college theater programs, provide opportunities for participants to develop their theater skills and insight, and achieve professionalism, improve the quality of college and university theater in the United States and en-courage colleges and universities to give distinguished productions of new plays, especially those written by students; the classics, revitalized or newly conceived; and experimental works.”
KCACTF isn’t just for theater students exclusively. The festival is open to the public and will be taking place online.
All of the regional festivals will be in January and February. Because ISU is in region seven, the festival will run from February 17 to February 20, 2021. The national festival will take place the week of April 12, 2021.
“More than 16 million theatergoers have attended approximately 10,000 festival productions nationwide,” Ballam said.
Many shows were canceled due to COVID-19, but that hasn’t stopped Ballam from moving forward with a positive out-look and attitude. When the nation moved into quarantine last spring semester many shows nationwide were canceled and the national festival was canceled for 2020. The 2021 festival will take place entirely online, which Ballam said she hopes will bring in a larger audience due to easier access to the shows.
“The virtual festival will also allow all of the regions to offer some mountaintop conversations wherein we bring together the students and faculty from across the nation to learn and grow together,” Ballam said.
