By Quinta Goines

Students attending the Summer Spotlight camp at Troy University are getting a hands-on experience in fine and performing arts.

The Theatre and Dance department have been putting on the Spotlight program since 2009.

When the program started it offered only the creative drama camp, but now it has expanded to Performance Intensive and Tech Management Intensive and Spotlight on Dance.

Nearly 200 students ages 4-13 from Pike and surrounding counties are registered for the camps.

Adena Moree and Tori Averett started the spotlight program and have watched it grow over the past seven years.

“There was a great demand in this community for fine and performing arts for young people,” Averett said. We wanted to create something that would focus on the arts for the youth.

Averett said this fine arts camp gives children who are in Troy for the summer a chance to get involved in something they normally wouldn’t do back home.

“A lot of times we will get out-of-town kids that are visiting their grandparents for the summer as participants for the camp,” she said.

University students majoring in any of the fine arts act as instructors for the camp and theater education majors play a huge part in teaching and supervising the students.

“It is important to me because it is good first-hand experience for me working with the younger kids,” said Cody Ward, a theatre education major.

In addition to the student workers, highly qualified and experienced artists come into the camp as guest instructors.

Tucker Knox, a “So You Think You Can Dance” finalist, Jessie Graham who just finished a Broadway tour of “Guys and Dolls,” Cody Green a Broadway, film and TV performer and Tamiko Washington a movement specialist from California will be in attendance next week.