NORTHAMPTON — The city’s Youth Performance Festival, which returns on Feb. 7 and 8, is gearing up for another year of showcasing some of the best and brightest young performing artists the region has to offer.
The Youth Performance Festival is a collaborative program courtesy of Play Incubation Collective and the Northampton Center for the Arts at 33 Hawley. Holyoke Media will also partner with them for the event.
Now in its 7th year, the YPF is a free opportunity for youth ages 8-18 to create original performance pieces with the guidance of mentor artists in the fields of music, dance, theater, poetry and spoken word, video and animation and more. YPF centers the creative agency of young artists and is committed to supporting them as they discover their own creative processes, according to organizers.
“The foundational value is, kids are creative. They can make art [and] we can support them making their own art instead of telling them what art they should be making,” said Center for the Arts Co-Director Kelly Silliman. “I was really fortunate in my own childhood to have a lot of adults who supported me in that way. I was the kind of kid who would say, ‘hey, I want to put on a play,’ and the principal would let me practice at recess and then put on a play for the school. And so I’ve always wanted to create spaces for young people that had a ‘yes’ mentality, so when Sarah approached me with this idea, I said yes.’”
The festival starts on Feb. 7 at 2 p.m. with performances by Cast A. Cast B will perform later at 6 p.m. Cast B will perform at 1 p.m. on Feb. 8, and Cast A will close out the festival at 4 p.m. The event is free, but tickets are sliding scale: $5 to $15 for kids and $10 to $25 for adults.
Sarah Marcus of Play Incubation Collective co-directs the festival with Silliman. Silliman explained to Reminder Publishing that the festival was born after Marcus approached her in early 2019 with the idea, which was loosely based on a program she had done when previously living in Brooklyn. Play Incubation Collective is an organization devoted primarily to supporting new and emerging theater works and is directed by Marcus and Rachel Hirsch, who also serve as mentors through the YPF program.
The work toward the festival begins each December with a trial session where kids meet with their mentors and learn what to expect over the course of the program. During the initial meeting, participants play games that encourage improvisation and thinking outside the box, which allows them to move past what they already know about performance.
The following week, the rehearsal process begins. Each child meets with their mentor once a week for a seven-week stretch to begin work on an original piece of art. All performances are original pieces of work, Silliman said.
“What I think is so important is that we live in an ageist society where kids are not listened to, and it’s really powerful and meaningful for us to create a platform where their voice is at the center and is the most important part of the creative process. That’s my belief and philosophy, but the feedback that we’ve gotten has been really incredible, even beyond that,” said Silliman.
She added that parents have said the program is beneficial because it addresses the youth mental health crisis.
“I think particularly post-pandemic, there are a lot of kids who are experiencing dysregulation, mental health issues. We have a greater understanding of neurodivergence now than we ever have, and this is a base where all of that is OK,” Silliman said.
Each year, the festival sees a mix of experiences from children in terms of live performances. Some children come in with a lot of experience, some with little to none. As long as they have a performance idea in mind, the mentors with the YPF are ready to guide them through their artistic expressions.
“We do not provide instruction. So, if somebody comes in and they say they want to write a song, but they’ve never written a song, and they don’t play any instruments, we can’t teach them guitar. But we can help them to write a song one way or another,” explained Silliman. “Something else I think is really important and exciting about it is, we have a lot of returning artists. And we have some kids who come in, and they’re just really into songwriting, so every year, they write a song … but then we have other kids who come in doing one thing, but in the next year, they’re looking for something new to try.”
Silliman said that through collaboration with the Play Incubation Collective, the event has taken off and is doing exactly what both organizations are aiming to do for youth artists in the area.
“What we’re doing is we’re really building an intergenerational creative community,” said Silliman. “All of the programming that we run for youth, both YPF itself — which we share — and also the things that we do separately as organizations, are all kind of coming from the same ethos of kids are fundamentally creative, and all we want to do is get out of the way for that. Provide a container so that they can fly.”
For YPF 2026, the collaboration extends further with the inclusion of Holyoke Media, which will offer a Holyoke-based youth cohort in addition to the Northampton cohort as part of an ongoing commitment to expand the festival in Western Massachusetts.
“Sarah and I have always imagined that there would be smaller cohorts in other cities and towns around the valley. We always wanted to grow it really sustainably so we’re not rushing out to start them everywhere,” said Silliman.
Silliman credited Holyoke Media Director of Media Engagement Iohann Vega for his role as not only a mentor artist through the program, but also for his leadership with Holyoke Media and making this collaboration a reality.
“Iohann Vega, who works at Holyoke Media, has been a mentor artist for us for a number of years now, and he has been a really wonderful artist to work with because he comes with all of this media experience, but he’s also a musician and has a lot of tech knowledge,” said Silliman. “Iohann was really excited to invite the Hampden Country cohort to Holyoke Media this year, and it’s been absolutely amazing. We love being there. That space is really beautiful, and they have a black box theater, and that allows the youth artist to be able to kind of perform big right away, which is really helpful in developing work.”
Silliman shouted out all the additional mentor artists who are the ones on the ground supporting youth directly through this program. She added that this experience for youth helps them grow as artists.
“I think that it’s fair to say that we are planting some really important seeds. One of the things that we always tell them is we are sharing ways of working,” Sillima said. “All of us are working artists, and we all have creative process practices, and when we share ideas with them, that’s what we’re sharing, is the stuff that really works for us. We really see them as almost equal creative beings, and I don’t think we can underestimate how powerful that is.”
To learn more about this festival, visit www.nohoarts.org/youth-performance-festival.
