Association of Community Theatres - Central Ontario

Annual Theatre Festival

Our main focus is education, but we also provide various services to our member groups including input into Community Theatre at the provincial level through our membership in Theatre Ontario. Our bi-monthly newsletter, ACTION News, contains information about not only what is going on within this region of community Theatre, but also what is happening in the 4 other community theatre regions in the Province.

We provide workshops in various aspects of theatre such as set design, producing, audition techniques etc. Our most visible educational activity however, is our Festival. Our festival last year had 40 productions from 26 of our members entered in the musical, drama and comedy categories.

Each production entered receives a festival adjudication. Our adjudicators are working theatre professionals. The adjudicator for each category attends one evening's performance of each show in each of their categories. Following the performance they will spend approximately twenty minutes with the general audience in a public adjudication to give a high level overview of the production and some of their observations and highlights. The adjudicator will then have an in-depth dialogue with the members of the production and the company about the performance they just viewed. This is meant to give the group ideas and suggestions on ways to move their performances forward, and continue producing top-notch theatre for both theirs and their audience's benefit.

The festival culminates each year in April at our Annual Thea Awards Gala when the adjudicators are asked to select nominations and winners in a number of categories to recognize outstanding performances and achievements from this past year's season. These awards, or Theas, are presented at the Gala, which this year was at the Inn on the Park on April 13, 2002.

A further job of our adjudicators is to select what they consider to be the best production of our Festival. The group winning this award has the privilege to represent our region at the annual Theatre Ontario Festival in May. This year the Theatre Ontario Festival was hosted by Theatre Sarnia, from May 15th to May 19th, where the ACTCO festival winner competed against the winners from the other four Ontario Community Theatre Regions.

You can find more information on our upcoming 2002-2003 and past festivals through the following links:

2002-2003 Festival
Adjudicators