Since its founding in 1996, the South Hadley middle and high school Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School (PVPA) has trained students in a variety of disciplines related to the performing and visual arts. This school year, however, PVPA has expanded its reach with a new Technical Design and Production department. The program offers dozens of students hands-on experience in stage design, filmmaking, costuming, lighting and sound.
The seed for a dedicated technical theater and production department was planted more than a decade ago when the school introduced filmmaking to its curriculum. At the time, those skills were tucked into the theater department and taught “apprentice-style,” said Frank Newton, PVPA’s director of arts. Costuming was similarly housed under the Visual Arts department. While adult contractors were hired for technical design on shows, there wasn’t a formal curriculum to teach those professional skills to students.
When Newton stepped into his current role, he wanted to give a permanent, unified home to “the technology and the skills to support things that happen on stage or on screen,” as he put it, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed those plans.
“We never really thought about a fifth department until after 2020. We did a year remote, and then we came back, and then I was in this position all of a sudden. And over the years, we had come in and lost classes that were connected directly to technical theater — lights and sound had come and gone, stage management had come and gone — and I really wanted to find a way to keep it here,” he said.
Now, the department is a permanent fixture, with about 25 students choosing it as their concentration.
During a recent visit, the Gazette observed a sound design class taught by Michael Finke, where students were learning how to mix audio tracks, balancing guitar and saxophone levels on a soundboard.
A few floors above, Amanda Boggs’ introductory filmmaking students were writing and storyboarding scenes to make a short film for their end-of-semester project. One student’s storyboard began with a close-up of an eye, zooming out to a person on a bench who gets up and walks away; another student said he wanted to make a short film with cinematography inspired by classic Westerns.
Ninth-grade student Kyle Woodell said he likes technical theater because “you can go to see shows for free while also being able to work on them and see the other side of it. Instead of just seeing the acting, you get to see all the tech that goes on and all the work that everyone has to do to get it all put together.” Since arriving last year, Woodell has learned color mixing, hanging lights, operating soundboards, and assistant stage management.
Senior Alex Solis began as a props master during their freshman year to fill a schedule gap in their schedule and has continued working on a number of productions since. One of their favorite productions they’ve worked on was the February 2024 production of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” — a notable event, as PVPA was among the first schools to secure the rights after the show’s Broadway run.
Solis said doing technical theater has helped with their confidence as well as their maturity, in large part because of tech week, the final week in a theater production’s rehearsal process.
“Tech week can be a high-tension time, so being able to give people grace and assume best intentions [is valuable],” they said. “Because it’s such a collaborative process, it’s all about the communication … and making sure that the communication is good and clear and effective is a very important part of getting the show to happen.”
Department head Lauren Reuter, a 2014 PVPA alum, knows that journey well. “I actually came to this school for music, and I went down this path that a lot of our students go down, where I was like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to do music, maybe I want to do visual arts.’ And then I landed in a costuming class that I didn’t sign up for, and I fell in love with it,” she said. “I did every show from then on.”
When Reuter was younger, her parents wanted her to perform on stage, but it wasn’t quite right for her.
“I loved and had a draw for the stage, but I was never fulfilled by being on it,” she said. “It wasn’t until I got backstage working on a show that I got that fulfillment that all my performer friends had mentioned. And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is what I want to do.’”
When Reuter spoke to the Gazette, she was wearing a jacket that had the department’s logo on it: a skull with a pair of scissors in its mouth to represent costuming, “crossbones” behind it made of a wrench to represent lighting and a hammer to represent set design. The design originated as a flag for the school’s 2015 production of “The Pirates of Penzance.”
Why a skull logo, though?
“I really just think it’s because it’s just who we are,” Reuter said. “We’re tough. We build sets. I don’t know the real reason behind it … but I know that we take deep pride in it.”
For more information about Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School, visit pvpa.org.
