My Turn Performing Arts Collective LLC
My Turn Performing Arts Collective LLC is located in Alma Michigan. We are a group of people who loves the performing arts and the creative process that goes along with performing. We perform varied arts such as poetry, dance, and music as My Turn, and perform theater under the name Blush Theater Company, affiliated with Highland Blush Café in downtown Alma.
The purpose of My Turn Performing Arts Collective LLC is to give opportunities for inspiration, growth, and catharsis for member of our community through performing arts.
The mission of Blush Theater Company is to strive to multiply local opportunities for creative growth and theatrical engagement as a way of expanding our concept of community.
We do this by promoting performing arts in our community by presenting a variety of performance and workshop experiences.
History
My Turn Performing Arts Collective LLC is the convergence of different experiences, each with a history of its own, but creating a whole.
First, in September of 2018, Michelle Lucchesi partnered with Alma High School Theater Department, under the direction of Elizabeth Campbell, to produce an educational drama dance for the schools in Gratiot County Michigan called My Turn. Based on the music of Rhiannon Giddons, written by Michelle Lucchesi, and choreographed by Eli Lucchesi, Damian Sanderson and Michelle Lucchesi, it told the story of a young woman growing in her confidence through the support of friends to overcome a history of abuse. It was performed for over 500 high school students. This beginning illustrates the foundation and goal of using the power of the performing arts to challenge and encouraged personal growth.
Secondly, Blush Theater Company began as a collaboration between venue owner Damian Sanderson and a group of volunteers. Producing their first Festival of Short Plays for the Small Stage in May of 2019. This festival of short plays has become an annual event that features local and Michigan playwrights. The company has focused on simple small productions to match the intimate performance space of the café in which they are housed. The unique performance venue is part of the creative approach BTC has toward performing arts, producing small productions, solo performances and original dinner theater experiences.
In the summer of 2020 Blush Theater Company put together a board of directors with an eye toward creating a non-profit, but after much deliberation it was decided to create an LLC instead. Collective members work with LLC owner/members to make decisions and create the magic of live theater and performing arts in an unique intimate venue.
Shortly after the closing of Highland Blush in February of 2023 the group decided to drop the name of Blush Theater and use only the official name, My Turn Performing Arts Collective LLC. Besides the loss of the namesake venue, the change also reflects an expansion from a focus on theater to the conscious inclusion of a wider variety of performing arts, which reflect the interests of its members, including dance, music and spoken word.
Collective’s Board Members, September 2022: Michelle Lucchesi (Artistic Director/Chair), Jeff Howell (Technical Director), Kat Zettel (Social Media Director), Terry LaForge, Carolann Plank.
Michelle Lucchesi
Michelle Lucchesi has been involved in the arts from an early age with training and experience in music since elementary school, theater since high school, writing and dance since college and visual arts peppered throughout. Her dance, theater and writing experience includes five years with Inside Out Music and Dance in Midland Michigan, twenty years with Northeast Michigan Art Council in Standish Michigan as performing arts instructor, twenty years with Academy of Performing Arts in Alma Michigan as student and instructor, thirty years in community theater and church theater, where she also shared her skills as vocalist, playwright, choreographer and director. Michelle has acted or directed in over twenty plays and written over thirty original scripts or adaptations for the stage, with one being published in 2004 in Standard Publishing’s Easter Programs for the Church. She has worked with Blush Theater Company since 2019 as one of the inaugural members, and acted as coordinator of Highland Blush’s Fine Arts and Speaker Showcase for two years. She has studied and performed modern, ballet, tap, clogging, and a variety social dances, and has taught and choreographed creative movement, musical theater and liturgical dance, and performed as a vocalist and musician for numerous performance over thirty years. As a generalist artist she is highly collaborative and integrative in modalities and loves to experiment in combining element of various arts to see the power and surprise they can offer when they play off each other. She holds a Master’s degree in Humanities with a focus on the Arts and Religion and a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology. She has worked as a psychologist in Alma Michigan since 1996.
