Quad City Arts Visiting Artist Series Has New Format Online
Quad City Arts launched its new collection of online educational materials for the 47th-annual Visiting Artist Series on Wednesday, Oct. 28.
The site, https://www.quadcityarts.com/vas-educational-resources.html, offers exclusive content from a wide variety professional artists and ensembles, such as ballet fusion company Hiplet, pianist Barron Ryan, steel pan artist John Patti, Mexican folk/rock quartet Jarabe Mexicano, and National Players theatre company.
Margot Day is performing arts director at Quad City Arts.
Their contributions include brief demonstration videos, study guides, workshop-style videos, and more. This collection of resources replaces the traditional in-person educational residency activities for this fall and spring 2021.
Access to the Educational Resources site is free and open to teachers, parents, and other educators looking for supplementary arts materials and content, Margot Day, performing arts director for Quad City Arts, said this week.
“It was really a huge team effort and a lot of experimentation, doing new work, just because you’ve got to…We’ve got to,” she said. Two of the previously scheduled artists last spring (concluding the 2019-20 school year) had to be canceled because of Covid, and they are among the ones featured on the new site – John Patti and Harabe Mexicano.
“We decided to include them, to tide them over until hopefully they can see us in person in the future,” Day said. The videos on the site were made for the series, and are in shorter segments than a typical in-person visit.
“We were really specific about what we wanted – we wanted to make sure it was educational, and it was pretty brief so it fits in with the new condensed schedule for teachers,” Day said. She asked for three videos under 10 minutes each (usually 5-8 minutes).
And she asked for two supporting educational documents or study guides. People who use the site (including homeschooling parents) have to
The new Visiting Artist Series website went live Wednesday, Oct. 28.
register for free.
“Everything on the site right now is meant for students, meant for an educational purpose,” Day said.
In the last two years, she’s asked for more educational materials from artists, including biographies and study guides.
“The primary focus has always been the performances,” Day said. “Now it’s really flipped because if you’ve got a study guide piece that looks really empty, it’s not engaging, it really does stand out because that’s what you see first. The videos are meant to be complementary, but we don’t have a way to have them on the screen at the same time.”
What they normally have is a 45-minute, in-person performance and engagement with students, and now they had to have something captivating and engaging in 5 to 8 minutes, she said.
“Everything we asked for is nothing we anticipated asking for,” Day said. “This is all new.”
Moxie Strings at Bettendorf Middle School, January 2019.
Instead of having artists staggered throughout the year, now all the content is available online at the same time. Quad City Arts didn’t consider doing a livestreamed concert, similar to the public concert that would typically conclude each residency.
“It wouldn’t work,” Day said. “My husband’s a teacher and I also have two kids. I’ve got a first-grader this year and I have a seventh-grader, so I knew way ahead of time, starting last spring that there was going to be a vast difference between how one classroom would work compared to another classroom, let alone one school versus another school and one district versus another district.”
“We serve six counties,” she said, noting the series was in 14 school districts last year, serving 24,649 K-12 students. “That wasn’t even a possibility for us.”
The residency has been about serving the students first, and the concerts have been a culminating piece. Day looked at how do they best replicate it, with resources for teachers and students. There’s a lot of other people streaming concerts, which are very tech-heavy, which is
Steel drum artist John Patti gave a special Oct. 15 performance for PASS.
not the forte of Quad City Arts, she said.
“When we do concerts, they’re in person, they’re smaller events and it’s the secondary event for us,” Day said. “We want to make sure we do the residency right first before we do extra new, strange things with streaming concerts.”
She sent out a public survey to get input on the new direction for Visiting Artist Series, and about 100 people responded to the survey (teachers and community members).
The new site continues to give students access to high-quality arts programming with added flexibility. Videos are captioned in both English and Spanish. The entire season of artists in residence is available, from musicians to actors, dancers to storytellers. Teachers, students, and parents can access performing artists’ resources on any device connected to the internet, anytime, anywhere.
The roster of artists is as follows:
- John Patti, steel pan artist
- Sultans of String, world/jazz band
- Ho Etsu Taiko, Japanese drum ensemble
- Barron Ryan, composer/pianist
- Reggie Harris, songwriter and storyteller
- Jarabe Mexicano, Mexican folk/rock quintet
- LP and The Vinyl, multi-genre jazz band
- Chicago Dance Crash, hip hop/contemporary dance company
- Hiplet, classical/hip hop ballet fusion
- National Players, ensemble from the Olney Theatre Center
- Stick & Bow, marimba and cello duo
Many of the artists included in the Educational Resources site were originally scheduled for an in-person residency in the Quad-Cities for this season.
Since 1974, the Visiting Artist Series has engaged Quad-City residents of all ages in quality arts experiences with professional performing
The home page for the new Visiting Artist Series Educational Resources page.
artists. Artists of various disciplines present demonstrations, workshops, and master classes at pre-K sites, elementary, intermediate, and high schools as well as college campuses and community organizations.
The Visiting Artist Series brings world-class artists and ensembles to present educational outreach and public performance, enriching the quality of life in the region through the performing arts.
Quad City Arts offered captioning in Spanish since they haven’t had a consistent way in the past to reach Spanish-speaking students (a growing segment for years in the Q-C), Day said. “If we were able to do it in English, it was very easy to add Spanish as an option, so we decided to go for it.”
This resource will continue in future seasons as a complement to the traditional in-person residency activities as well as an opportunity to improve local students’ access to the performing arts.
Visiting Artist Series won the 1999 William Dawson Award for Programmatic Excellence awarded by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. The residency has brought distinguished artists and ensembles to Scott, Clinton and Muscatine counties in Iowa, and Henry, Mercer and Rock Island counties in Illinois.
For more information, visit https://www.quadcityarts.com/vas-educational-resources.html. For more information on this residency program, visit www.quadcityarts.com/vas.
First PASS concert a success
Related to the Visiting Artist Series, the Performing Arts Signature Series, or PASS, will not have in-person events for the fall. The series will instead offer a unique experience with take-out from a premium local restaurant paired with access to an online performance by a visiting artist who recorded a performance specifically for this event.
Quad City Arts is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
The following performers are scheduled to appear:
Thursday, Oct. 15: John Patti, steel pans (drums)
Thursday, Nov. 5: Ho Etsu Taiko, Japanese drumming
Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021: Sultans of String, folk/rock string trio
There were about 50 viewers for the first PASS performance, Oct. 15, and Day said they got positive feedback about it, and many watched it on their regular TV.
“People seemed to like the carry-out option for dinner,” she said.
Tickets include a digital link to the performance and take-out dinner from either Crust in Bettendorf or Combine in East Moline using a “prix fixe” menu created for this event. A link to the menus with instructions for placing orders will be provided in advance.
Access to the performance will be sent to subscribers by 4 p.m. the day of the event and all orders placed in advance will be available at 5:30 p.m. for pickup. Subscribers can purchase the series of three parties for a discount ($140 per person), as well as single dinner and show for $50 or a “show only” option for $20.
In the past, PASS events were $50 per person, typically held at venues throughout the Quad-Cities, where guests can enjoy complimentary cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and a spotlight performance with a world-class visiting artist in residence through the Visiting Artist Series, and an opportunity for guests to mingle with the artists.
The full season usually consists of six parties from September to April. Quad City Arts remains committed to finding new ways of bringing arts experiences to the community, until the time when we can safely gather again for in-person events, executive director Kevin Maynard said.
The virtual PASS shows won’t be livestreamed performances, but pre-recorded.
For more information on that series, visit https://www.quadcityarts.com/pass.html.
