Despite the participants meeting through computer screens instead of in person, the Midwest Writing Center's Young Emerging Writers (YEW) Summer Internship Program took place as planned, and the fruits of its interns' labors will be celebrated on October 1 with a virtual release party for their summer-long project The ATLAS.

Although the pandemic is currently depriving us of movie sequels, the professional talents of Ballet Quad Cities are at least ensuring that local audiences get a live one with the company's Ballet on the Lawn: Take Two – a September 20 follow-up to the dancers' hugely successful outdoor presentations of Ballet on the Lawn that took place, as this new one will, at Davenport's Outing Club.

Joedy Cook, founder and CEO of Ballet Quad Cities in Rock Island, discusses the company's operations during this period of social distancing. We previously spoke on March 25, and again on Sunday, August 30 … roughly four hours before her company performed its first post-pandemic performances of Ballet on the Lawn at the Davenport Outing Club.

Lauded by the New York Times as an “excellent company” whose “versatile cast ably draws on West African dance and Alvin Ailey-esque motions of struggle and striving,” the gifted Washington D.C. performers of Step Afrika! deliver a world premiere in the virtual presentation Stono – a movement- and music-filled September 9 event hosted by Iowa City's Hancher Auditorium, and one sure to demonstrate why DC Theatre Scene writes of the ensemble, “Arrive in anticipation. Leave in exhilaration.”