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Your monthly news & updates
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As we begin the new year, we want to provide you with some updates regarding Festival, the state of community theatre, and the DASH program. Please continue to communicate with the EMACT Board and all the theatres in Eastern Mass regarding ways we can help each other continue to produce quality theatre.
See you at the theatre,
Jean MacFarland
EMACT President
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Lifetime Achievement Award
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Nominations for the EMACT Lifetime Achievement Award are due by
February 15, 2016.
If there is someone in your organization that your Board feels should be considered for this honor, please submit a letter to the Board of Directors of EMACT stating the name of this individual and the reasons you believe he or she is eligible for such an award. We have extended the deadline to February 15, 2016.
EMACT has awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in the past, but it has been some time since it has been given. We hope that you will nominate individuals who have served their own groups and the theatre community as a whole in an exceptional way so that EMACT may recognize their contributions.
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Please submit your nominations for award recipients to:
EMACT Lifetime Achievement Award
c/o Harriet Friedman
116 Bishops Forest Drive
Waltham, MA 02452
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Festival
Due to the low interest and difficulty in finding an appropriate venue for the Festival, EMACT has decided to skip the regional cycle (2016-2017) and hold a festival in June of 2017. We will hopefully return to our previous location at Tewksbury High School. It does, mean, however that we may have to be a bit more flexible with dates and timing. If we do hold a festival in 2017, it will be an Eastern MA festival only. We hope to entice groups to participate and enjoy a festival environment without the added concern about going on. We would also run this festival with AACT rules governing festivals in place. We hope that by exposing more groups to learning “how” to prepare for a festival, we will have more interest when we again participate in the next cycle in 2018-2019.
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Community Theatre in Eastern Mass
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roups in our demographic continue to struggle with putting butts in seats and meeting financial commitments. As a result, we have seen many theatre groups in our demographic area close up shop. EMACT is in the process of watching the formation of a theatre alliance.
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Celia Couture, our Vice President, is the liaison from EMACT. We are hoping to use an alliance scenario currently in the experimentation phase between the Longwood Players and the Wellesley Players as an example of how to create opportunities for groups without their own homes to share resources, performance venues as well as storage and build space. These groups are also looking at joint marketing in order to get better pricing for rental of a performance space.
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The DASH program has been very busy this season. So far we have received applications for over 80 productions, submitted by 36 different member groups.
We are delighted that nearly half of the productions submitted to the DASH program this year have been DASH Pluses. Thanks to the feedback from many of our member groups who participated in DASH Plus “debut” season last year, as well as discussions with our panel of DASH consultants, we have been able to make the DASH Plus results more useful for our members and more streamlined for our consultants.
We continue to strive to improve the program, and we welcome additional feedback from our members on how we can make both the DASH and DASH Plus programs serve your needs better. Feel free to email Mark and Sandy at dash@emact.org with any questions, concerns, or suggestions regarding both programs.
Our DASH GALA where we celebrate the accomplishments of all groups who have participated in the program will be held at the Mosesian Theatre on August 27 with a cocktail hour followed by the awards program.
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In other DASH news, we are holding our first Annual DASH Consultant Thank-You Dinner later this month. Each of our 20+ consultants spends many hours driving to and attending productions and even more hours writing up and scoring each show that they adjudicate over the course of the season (which, for some of them, is over 20 productions – and that doesn’t even include the ones they see on their own time). Their hard work allows your productions to be publicly recognized and rewarded, and we decided it was high time we recognized and rewarded them in a more tangible way. Special thanks to Harriet Friedman for organizing and coordinating the event, as well as to the entire EMACT Board for supporting it.
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EMACT | membership@emact.org | http://www.emact.org
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