Hello! My name is Cali, I’m the Executive Director and Founder of Playhouse Performing Arts, our nationwide virtual arts company. What started as a one-off Zoom talent show has turned into a caring community of young artists from all across the US.
Me and my friend decided to start up a small idea back in Summer of 2020, just getting a few friends together to perform virtually. A few weeks later, another friend of mine brought me the idea of doing a virtual play-reading. I was so inspired by this and immediately wanted to take it up a notch.
From this spark, I decided that I wanted to create something more innovative and unique, something that had never been done before. Over the last year, we’ve gone on to pioneer a completely-virtual, incredibly-accessible style of entertainment, bringing performances into the homes of so many supportive patrons nationwide.
Lately I’ve seen and heard from so many talented young actors and artists, about how little access to the arts so many of them have now and how, in most cases, little is being done to help that. It makes me so sad to see so much creative spirit bottled up without an outlet and too many kids feeling like there isn’t much of a community there for them.
This community of ours has truly inspired me to expand this little playhouse, pushing boundaries to curate a safe, hopeful, joyful space where young people can be creative, express themselves, make friends, experiment, go on adventures, and just have fun being a kid or a teen.
We are bigger than one stage or one place, our artists’ hearts are so open and so magical, our stories and our emotions can carry to each other no matter what the circumstances. Virtual theater doesn’t have to be a painful stand-in for real-life theater. Virtual theater is an innovation, an adventure, a solution and a hope. An emotion can be captured in a movie scene, a story can be printed on a page, a piece of music can be saved in a recorded song. So why can’t theater be transcended above a building? It can. It can and it does. We are.
I hope you’ll come along for the ride as we explore and create this cutting-edge online world for kids in the real one.
All the world’s a stage, our stage is all the world.™
Playhouse Performing Arts 