MAD I S ON
Pandemic provides a pause to reflect, be creative and reimagine the future By Shari Gasper When it’s your mission to support and elevate the community’s creative culture, economy and quality of life through the arts but you can’t welcome guests into your facility or gather in person, you’ve got to get creative. But that’s not so difficult for the artistic staff at Overture Center for the Arts in Madison.
high school musical theater throughout the state. The annual show brings a full house of excited students, families and friends to Overture Hall year after year. This spring, with schools closed and Overture closed, some may have considered canceling the event. Not Overture.
“We understood how much work went into these school productions and how much our students were looking forward to this night Overture Center was about to publicly recognizing their achievements,” said announce its 2020/21 season when Tim Sauers, Overture’s vice president the arts industry—and nation—shut of programming and community down this past spring due to COVID-19. engagement. “We wanted to give them Overture’s creative teams quickly turned the honors and recognitions they their season announcement into a virtual deserved.” show via Facebook Live. Featuring an indepth overview of the season along with Overture collected performance videos videos from the season’s featured artists from participating schools and students and created a virtual awards show. In and special guests, the show attracted 2019/20, 101 schools and community thousands of viewers across the region theater groups from 32 counties across versus the several hundred they usually Wisconsin participated in the program bring in for the onsite season launch. with 85 productions adjudicated by At the same time, the programming trained Jerry Awards reviewers. Twentyteam was preparing for its annual five of the musical theater programs Jerry Awards show, which encourages, were affected by school closures and recognizes and honors excellence in could not be reviewed. More than 250
Digital successes
20 | artsscene
