ACT-CO is the Association of Community Theatres -Central Ontario. We are a non-profit umbrella organization for over 40 member groups and our region stretches from Oakville in the West, to Bowmanville in the East, the Muskokas in the North, and Lake Ontario in the South.

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.** [April 08, 2011: The newletter is currently being reconsidered and possibly discontinued in its present form. Standby.]

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 usually has about 40 productions entered in the musical, drama and comedy categories.

Each production entered in the festival receives an adjudication. Our adjudicators are working theatre professionals. The adjudicators attend one performance of each show in their category. 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, called THEAs, are presented at the Gala.

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 ACT-CO region at the annual Theatre Ontario Festival in May.