Dr. Phillips Center honors John Lewis, Central Florida students in 2 online events
The Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, which this week premiered a recorded version of its annual Applause Awards, is also helping present a film honoring the late civil-rights activist and congressman John Lewis.
The two initiatives represent something of a public re-awakening for the downtown arts center. Although its education and summer-camp programs have successfully continued, the center has gone months without presenting live shows to the public because of coronavirus.
“When the pandemic hit, we realized that there was no way we were going to be able to do a live performance,” said Foster Cronin, vice president of programming and education, in the Applause Awards video. “So we re-imagined the entire thing, then went to a virtual awards ceremony so that we could still have something to celebrate the talent that’s here in Central Florida.”
The Applause Awards, which were established six years ago, award college scholarships to students in the arts and honor excellence in high-school theater programs. For this year’s program, the center recorded students performing showtune medleys on the stage of the Walt Disney Theater, using careful choreography and physical distancing among the performers.
The show is hosted by Broadway star and Central Floridian Michael James Scott, who has starred in “Aladdin,” The Book of Mormon” and “Something Rotten!” Numerous other Broadway performers offer recorded tributes to the students, as well. Watch the presentation, along with a featurette on how the show came together, at youtube.com/DrPhillipsCenterOrg/videos.
To watch the film honoring John Lewis, the U.S. congressman who died in July, go to drphillipscenter.org and look under Shows & Events.
The arts center is collaborating with more than 60 of the nation’s arts and cultural institutions to promote the new documentary, titled “John Lewis: Good Trouble.
Using rare archival footage and interviews, the movie celebrates Lewis’ more than 60 years of activism and legislative action on civil rights, voting rights, gun control, healthcare reform and immigration. Lewis, whose congressional district included much of Atlanta and its suburbs, was a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient who famously described his activism for racial equality as getting into “good trouble, necessary trouble.”
Renting the movie will cost $12, of which $5 goes to the Dr. Phillips Center.
Bonus features with the documentary rental include a recorded interview that Lewis gave to Oprah Winfrey shortly before his death and a onehour panel discussion with Dawn Porter, the film’s director, and Bernard Lafayette and Rip Patton, two of Lewis’ fellow activists who participated in the Freedom Riders movement of the 1960s.
In addition, viewers will have the opportunity to join a live, interactive panel discussion about Lewis’ history and impact on today’s social-justice movement. That conversation takes place on Zoom at 7 p.m. Monday. Among the participants; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project; Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who worked extensively with Lewis to establish the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture; and Porter.