WELCOME to our newly renamed MTDA!
A Note from the Director, Dr. Amy Osatinski
I am thrilled to welcome you as the inaugural Director of the newly formed Music Theatre Dance Association! As you may be aware, through a bylaws change in the recent election, we are now an independent professional association: MTDA. We still maintain our status as the Music Theatre/Dance Focus Group under the umbrella of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), but our new status will allow us to continue to grow and expand the programming, support, and resources that we have been building over the past few years. I am honored to serve you all and to continue the work that my predecessors have done with an eye toward the future and toward building new programming and growing our membership.
Please join us by signing up for our email listserv below. If you have any questions about the focus group’s latest activities or how to get involved, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me at [email protected] or any one of the other MTDA officers.
WHO WE ARE
The Music Theatre Dance Association was founded in 1993 as the MTD Focus Group of ATHE and has grown into an inclusive, international coalition of more than two hundred theatre scholars, practitioners, post-secondary educators, and graduate students. The leadership team and I are dedicated to keeping MTDA free and open to all professionals who work at the intersections of music, theatre, and dance. It is my hope that as we begin to offer more programming and community connection, our ranks will expand.
A central tenet of MTDA's mission is to foreground equity and anti-racist practices and to elevate the work of BIPOC and global-majority artists and scholars. We also encourage all members to explore ways to be inclusive of LGBTQIA+, Disabled and Deaf/deaf, and Women artists and scholars, and beyond. By pushing, by expanding, the boundaries of studies in music theatre and dance, we make greater room for more voices, with new perspectives on new topics of inquiry, with new perspectives on old topics.
HOW TO JOIN
Membership to MTDA is free and our digital events are open to all. MTDA also oversees the Music Theatre/Dance Focus Group at ATHE, which does require a membership. Sign up for notifiations to all of our upcoming events by joining our listserv through Google groups. Need help getting started with the MTDA email Listserv? Click here for a step by step guide.
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If you already have a gmail account, join our listserv on Google groups here. If you do not, please use the above link to see the steps to join.
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MTDA Mission Statement
The Music Theatre Dance Association supports and produces collaborations of performance, practice, and scholarship in the intersecting fields of Music + Theatre + Dance. MTDA and MTDA@ATHE encompasses such art forms as: operas, operettas, musicals, dance, dance theatre and performance art. It encourages new research in the field, helps with the curriculum development of new programs, and supports the performative and scholarly development of these disciplines in academia. MTDA also provides a community where teaching techniques can be shared, networking strategies can be reinforced, and connections between the professional world and various institutions can be established and solidified.
ATHE 2024
ATHE 2024 will be held from August 1-4 in Atlanta, GA. CFP and more information TBD.
