Every May, Northwest Academy holds ArtsWeek, a celebration of students’ art. This year, ArtsWeek will be held from Monday, May 19 to Friday, May 23 and will include a presentation by a visiting poet, senior Capstone project presentations, various workshops and two performances, Esprit and Dynamo. The two shows comprise all performing arts classes in high school and middle school respectively, each with two performances in the Newmark Theater, once during the day for students and another in the evening for families.
“Everybody piles up into [the theatre], all the performing arts classes,” said LouAnne Steele, NWA sophomore. “Then they do a couple of full runs of the show, with tech stuff to space it out on the stage, lighting and that sort of stuff.”
Additionally, student work from visual arts classes will be displayed in the lobby of the Newmark for performance attendees to peruse.
Students who are not participating in performances will attend workshops, which are specific art-related classes taught by faculty, staff and parents about topics such as embroidery, pop-up cards, focaccia bread decorating or indigo dyeing. Students can choose from a wide variety of workshops, which can range from 30 minutes to three hours and focus on learning an entirely new skill or improve on their preexisting interests. In early May, emails will be sent out for students to sign up for those workshops.
“I like ArtsWeek because I just get to try a bunch of new stuff and see what I like,” said Gus Hardman, a senior. “I’ve liked doing musical improv. I’ve liked making Xlibris prints for the library. There’s a lot of things that I’ve done that I’ve liked.”
Esprit and Dynamo have been hosted by Northwest Academy on the same week for years, long before ArtsWeek. Julie Ellington, senior project and thesis teacher, came up with the idea for ArtsWeek after she saw how inefficient classes were in the week leading up to the performances.
“I proposed that instead we could just cancel all classes and think of the week as an opportunity to engage in making art together and observing art together and generally just having the opportunity to work with people we don’t work with usually, and to do some artistic discovery together,” said Ellington.
The ArtsWeek committee, comprised of Ellington, Rachael Torchia, Sharon Weir, Lisa Higgins and Hadley Pack works all year making preparations, such as scheduling a poet, planning the workshops and setting up Dynamo and Esprit.
On Monday of ArtsWeek, the seniors will be presenting their Capstone projects to the entire student body. These projects are over a year in the making and give seniors the opportunity to learn about and make a project on a topic they enjoy. Students can choose to attend either a handful of shorter presentations or one or two longer presentations.
“It’s pretty exciting and it’s really cool to see what our seniors do,” said Weir, Assistant Head of Middle School. “They always blow my mind. I’m like, wow, I didn’t know you could do that, or what a great way to approach that.”
On Tuesday, Daniela Naomi Molnar will be coming to Northwest Academy to talk about her collection Chorus, which won the 2024 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her all-school event will be followed by smaller workshops hosted by Molnar for students who are interested in learning more about poetry or painting, another of her specialties.
On Wednesday and Thursday, students in performing arts will be practicing for the performance in the Newmark Theatre, while the rest of high school students will go to their choice of workshops. On Wednesday afternoon, after workshops conclude for the day, high schoolers will attend the middle school performance, Dynamo.
On Friday, the high school performance Esprit will be at 1pm and will be attended by students of all grades after their workshops in the morning. This performance will conclude Northwest Academy’s 2025 ArtsWeek and mark the eight years of this school tradition.
