Performance Arts

Our “Performance Arts” program encompasses theater, dance, and the many activities related to stagework. Instructor Bridget Mitchell works with each student as they explore performance, its historical role, and its contemporary significance. Whether researching and writing a script, designing costumes, performing on stage, building set materials, or participating in a dance performance, students have the opportunity to refine old talents or awaken new interests.

Renaissance performing arts are active and thriving and have gained an excellent reputation in Charlottesville, quite a feat for a small school with limited resources. All ninth and tenth graders participate in performance arts classes and, by junior year, students who plan to study performance beyond high school may choose an “arts emphasis” curriculum, allowing scheduled time for audition preparation and consultation with faculty. Our graduating seniors have been admitted to some of the finest performing arts colleges in the country and with generous scholarships.

Consistent with Renaissance pedagogy, Ms. Mitchell ensures that content is interdisciplinary and she frequently works with other instructors to enrich her classes. While preparing a production of Moliere’s, The Imaginary Invalid, students studied French history and comic style. Students studying Shakespeare’s, Henry IV, worked with history instructor, Lou Tanner, to develop the historical background of the play and enjoyed a performance at Staunton’s famous theater, the American Shakespeare Center.

In the fall of 2009, students spent many weeks researching the history of our historic building, which was completed in 1826. Each student studied specific aspects of the lives of children in Charlottesville during that time – education, politics, family life, health. After comparing notes during lively roundtable discussions, students created a scene for the Historical Society’s “Spirit Walk” – a yearly community event that attracts over 1,000 community audience members to watch local actors and musicians play ghosts of actual community members from the past. Performing the skit over 45 times outdoors and oftimes in the rain did not wear out these theater students, and they left ready to do it again! This project represents perfectly the type of full-bodied education students and staff members receive at Renaissance School.

More recently, students entertained a crowd with, “An Evening of One Acts”, performing two one act plays, Lucille Fletcher’s, Sorry Wrong Number, and Anton Checkhov’s, The Proposal.   Funds raised benefitted the Haven at First & Market, a new daytime resource for the homeless.

Bridget Mitchell, majored in Theater at Otterbein College, as well as Adelphi University. She has studied with a variety of actors, locally and in New York and continues to teach and study acting and dance here in Charlottesville.  Read her detailed bio on the “Faculty” page of this website, but enjoy her endorsement of a Renaissance Education here:

“Being a part of the Renaissance School staff has been one the most exhilarating teaching experiences I’ve had. I have, perhaps, too many interests but the cross-disciplinary quality of the Renaissance School education encourages staff and students to approach learning from various angles and connect subjects that fuse naturally beyond classroom walls that segregate Math from English, History from Drama.”