ACES 2021

Our winners for the Ottawa Grassroots Festival ACES (Algonquin College Emerging Stars) contest have been announced.

For the second year now, the college has partnered with the Ottawa Grassroots Festival to create a showcase of talent from the Performing Arts Program. This year’s winners feature a spoken word artist, a singer/songwriter, a rapper/writer, and an accomplished guitar player. They will not just be featuring their separate performances but working as a team to create a multi-disciplinary piece that will run as part of the Grassroots (Virtual) Festival, April 23rd to 25th.

We are so proud to be congratulating Rhi Vautrin, Melissa Labrecque, Joshua Jairus Porras, and Larse Mantilez. From diverse roots, these four will be pulling together to create a cohesive performance that we know will do the college proud.

I would also like to take the time to thank Alison, Grace and Grassroots for facilitating this. It was such an exciting part of the program this year. It motivated the students in a very tough time. Bob Nesbitt, the tireless founder of Grassroots, passed away just a few short weeks ago. He is sorely missed, and I know this partnership will be a lasting legacy of his commitment to youth. Alison has picked up the ACES mantle and made this such a positive experience.

Hannah Gibson-Fraser, the Live Performance professor is to be congratulated for keeping this on track and encouraging the students at every turn in the path. We had 100% participation in the exercise, from our small but mighty crew this year. She worked tirelessly to make this happen. Thank you, Hannah.

Danielle Allard provided invaluable feedback to the learners., both about singing and production. She was amazing!

More to come, and I hope you are all having a lovely sunny day. Let the music play!

Teri

Teri Loretto-Valentik
Coordinator for Scriptwriting and Performing Arts

View all the performances in this playlist:

NOTE: Videos will play in sequence, or you can manually click next to move to the next video.