Kindleberger Festival Alumni & Friends Anniversary Celebration

Kindleberger Alumni and Friends are coming together to celebrate the past, present, and future of the Kindleberger Summer Festival of the Performing Arts in Parchment, MI.  In contributing to the celebration of the Festival's 40th anniversary on July 9, 2022, we seek to bring participants together and to thank the residents of Parchment and greater Kalamazoo for 40 years of support for public art in community.

     This fundraising campaign will support a performance developed by our visiting artist, Festival alum and Parchment graduate, Elizabeth Keiser, who will lead local actors of all ages in a workshop to create “A Play in a Day” on July 9. Additionally, we seek to include the performance art troupe Big Nazo characters, along with local volunteers, in the Festival parade. And we will showcase the history of the Festival with the creation of a pop-up museum.  Selected features of the Museum include a timeline of Festival plays and events, art making, a museum shop, a photo booth, and the creation of community oral histories via StoryCorps interviews, to be digitally archived at the Parchment Community Library and the Library of Congress.

• Fall 2021 - Festival Anniversary Committee formed, including Festival founder and several former and current directors.
• November 2021 - Parchment Arts Commission approves proposed Anniversary Celebration.
• December 2021 - begin outreach. Create Facebook Group for Alumni and Friends; in January 2022, contact non-Facebook users via local newsletters and bulletins, Library interviews/podcasts, and Kalamazoo-area radio broadcasts.
• February 15 - March 31, 2022 - Fundraising.  Ioby campaign.  With a successful campaign, we will contract with Big Nazo and Elizabeth Keiser. 
• April - begin to produce items needed for the Pop-up Museum and begin to source materials from community members.  We plan to reprint and enlarge selected historical photos for display; and create vintage-inspired Festival items for sale in our “shop,” including a poster and an Anniversary art print of Kathleen Keckler’s watercolor of the 1987 production of Fiddler on the Roof. If possible, we would like to rent equipment for showing a slide show of shared photos from the 40 year history of plays, concerts, and other Festival activities.
• Throughout the spring - in collaboration with Parchment Community Library, we will be conducting interviews with Festival Alumni to build out our oral history archive.
• July 9 - Festival Anniversary Celebration as part of the larger Kindleberger Summer Festival! Parade including Big Nazo, Play in a Day, Pop-up Museum, and Story Corps interview booth open and public to all.

Forty years of community arts engagement and support is remarkable for a town of 2000 people.  Thousands of children and adults have benefited from participation in and exposure to the arts as presented in the Kindleberger Summer Festival.  We wish to thank Parchment residents and the greater Kalamazoo community for their commitment to this project, in all its varied and distinctive versions. All Kindleberger Festival participants have fostered their love of the arts and some alumni have become professional artists in music, theatre, film and television, with roots nurtured within the hills and fields of Kindleberger Park.