Artistic Director, Lon Church, with more than 30 years of directorial and choreographic experience, is a freelance director, teacher, and writer, based in Minnesota.
In Maine, he premiered Winterblue Theatre, with a production of Miss Julie, in the fall of 2009. His goal is to produce ‘great works old and new’, with an emphasis on plays that offer audiences passionate, poetic language, as well as distinctive movement and music elements in each production.
In Minnesota, he is the founder and director of the award-winning, Summerblue Arts, a visual and performing arts program for youth, now in its 25th season. He directed Winterblue Theatre’s second production, Romeo and Juliet, in Two Harbors, Minnesota in the winter of 2010. He directed Macbeth, in collaboration with the Freeport (Maine) Shakespeare Festival, in the fall of 2011, and his own adaptation of Homer's classic, entitled Odyssey for Peace, in 2012. In 2013, his production of two of William Butler Yeats' verse plays, The Only Jealousy of Emer and The Death of Cuchulain, was chosen as a "Critic's Choice" to see in Madison, Wisconsin. Returning to Minnesota he remounted Odyssey For Peace, adding original songs that were scored by composer, Tom Patterson. This spring he brings another of his originals, Treasure to Treasure, to a Minneapolis audience.
Mr. Church wrote and produced his first dance play, Letters For My Daughter, at the University of Michigan – Flint campus; and with The Michigan Shakespeare Festival, he played the lead role of Christy in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. He danced with The Jamaica School of Dance in Kingston, Jamaica; and for five years as a principal dancer with Brosseau Danceworks, based in Charlotte, NC, touring the southeast. He has performed, directed, or created original theatre and dance works from Seattle to New Jersey, from Memphis to Milwaukee. He continues to teach students of all ages, most recently leading movement workshops for a Philosophy of the Mind class as part of a two-year grant at Vassar College.
Some of the many plays he has directed include The Birds, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Antigone, Thieves’ Carnival, The Liar, Nicholas Nickleby, Mother Courage, The Crucible, Blithe Spirit, The Miracle Worker, Twelve Angry Men, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, You Can't Take It With You, The Government Inspector, and John Lennon and Me; and many musicals, from well-known classics like Anything Goes, The Pirates of Penzance,
Oliver, Godspell, and West Side Story, to the lesser-known Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope.
