Virginia Children's Theatre Selects Fall Youth Professional Ensemble Participants

Virginia Children's Theatre has announced the ten performers that have been selected for the esteemed Youth Professional Ensemble at VCT for Fall 2021. The Youth Professional Ensemble is a conservatory-type instructional experience offering year-round, high quality music, theatre and dance instruction.

Youth Professional Ensemble (YPE) was revived during the Company's 2019-2020 Season. YPE is a prestigious and competitive ensemble that began masterclass instruction for the Fall Semester in August. Along with VCT's professional mainstage productions for schools and families, VCT also runs a Theatre Academy that offers young people in the community year-round high-quality theatre education. This professional ensemble consists of ten of the best performers in the Roanoke Valley and beyond. These young performers have been recognized for their talent, work ethic, growth, and commitment to VCT. The group was selected by invitation and audition only.

This year, the focus of YPE instruction is to encourage students to take complete ownership of the characters and roles that they are portraying. Students will be diving into scene and script study, with the goal of using their acquired knowledge to direct their own scenes. Students will also be spending time diving into musical scores, looking at the compositions of various composers, and how they use musicality to effectively convey a character, a plot line, and the overall story.

As a part of YPE, students also receive private coaching, a specialty masterclass each week led by different visiting theatre professionals and multiple performance opportunities throughout the community.

"Virginia Children's Theatre is proud to continue to offer Youth Professional Ensemble, an advanced educational program created to provide high-quality theatre education to ten of the Roanoke Valley's promising youth actors," says VCT Director of Education Brynn Scozzari. "Along with the work that these students will be doing in classes, many of these students have been given opportunities to portray various roles on the mainstage alongside professional adult actors. It is very exciting for us as an organization to see our students honing their craftsmanship in a way that allows them to be successful in a professional mainstage production."

THE 2021 FALL YOUTH PROFESSIONAL ENSEMBLE

Ben Armstrong- Magna Vista High School
Grace Eakin- Homeschooled
Jai Issac- Virginia Western Community College
Anna Locklear- Homeschooled
Charles Meidlinger- Patrick Henry High School
Carter Mullins- William Byrd High School
Mikayla Parker- Homeschooled
Jack Plogger- Patrick Henry High School
Ann Marie Thorell- Hidden Valley High School
Lilah Vanke- Patrick Henry High School