A Message from the Footloose Staff

Our History: "Why are we Footloose?"

Our summer program grew out of a summer camp that Liam started in 2021 at The Doane Stuart School where he taught at the time. He and his drama club students came up with the idea for this in January of that year which as you may recall was a challenging time for most people. It was the worst part of the Covid-19 pandemic. Covid cases were reaching their highest levels, vaccines were only just starting to come out, and after being able to gather a bit outside seeing each other again, we were all thrown back into the isolation of our houses in the dark winter. Theater was still shut down everywhere and we were starved for some kind of “normal” production. Planning for the summer gave us all so much hope during those hard times. We were going to do the musical Footloose.

We never actually performed Footloose (we did Little Shop of Horrors instead), but the hope that we had all found that winter in planning for Footloose continued to live on in all of us as well as the idea of being able to escape the stresses and chaos of the outside world through theater.

And that became our mission for this group: To give all kids the opportunity to escape the stresses of everyday life, to build confidence in themselves, to discover their passions, and help them to forge meaningful relationships with each other. The formal definition of the word “footloose” is “to travel freely and do as one pleases without the responsibilities and commitments.” We want theater to be a place where kids can escape the rest of the world and just be themselves.

And in the famous words of our namesake movie, "Everybody cut loose, footloose..."

~Liam, James, Michael, Icesis, Susan, and Lily

The Footloose Staff