Lina Kourtrakos's MIDWEST CABARET CONFERENCE Celebrates 10th Anniversary

Award winning and rave reviewed singer/director Lina Koutrakos will be in Chicago to head up a group teaching/workshop weekend, "The Midwest Cabaret Conference," which has been running for the last 10 years, this June.

From cabaret to jazz and everything in between Koutrakos has guided 20 solo singers each year in one intensive weekend of song performance work. For a decade now, in Chicago, singers having been affording themselves this intensive weekend to dig in to both their art and their craft in order to become their more authentic selves center stage.

The Midwest Cabaret Conference and Lina herself are guests to Chicago annually and have been hosted by the piano bar/cabaret club Davenports every year. The generosity of the club (giving 2 pianos, 2 rooms, state of the art sound systems and coveted weekend show spots) is a fertile learning ground that can't be duplicated in a rehearsal space and makes the Chicago club experience very real for so many singers who now flock every summer to the windy city.

Over the years, the "staff" has consisted of 2 pianist/musical directors, Lina and another guest teacher. Until this year our Musical Directors have been Beckie Menzie and the late Rick Jensen. Guest teachers have included Amanda McBroom, Sally Mayes, KT Sullivan and Lucie Arnaz. This year, they welcome American Idol's Michael Orland!

In the past, they have done these intensive weekends with 20 singers in this format: All day Friday, day and night Saturday, all day Sunday with a show for the public showcasing the work the participants have done on Sunday evening at Davenports and a show on Saturday featuring the Master Teachers.

When the conference started, it was simply Koutrakos bringing this format to Chicago so she could offer what she does year round in New York City to the talented folks in Illinois. Going nearly yearly to Washington D.C, having many years doing similar intensives in St Louis and Santa Fe, even Vegas, Chicago was the town that morphed into a "Destination Weekend" for this kind of learning and creating.

This being the conference's 10th year and its first organized celebration, they have extended the invitation to their alumni (nearly 200 at this point!), and this summer, they are again coming together from everywhere: New York, St. Louis, Palm Springs, Los Angelis, Iowa, North Carolina, DC, and, of course, Chicago.

Lina was given the CCP (Chicago Cabaret Professionals) Gold Coast Award in a wonderful show and ceremony at The Park West Theater in 2019, where she thanked the Chicago cabaret community for making the Midwest Cabaret Conference something singers come back to on a yearly basis and from all over the United States.

The melding of the Cabaret Communities is worth the weekend itself. It's because of the participants who keep coming back to up their own performance game that we are indeed able to be a part of the hand holding we in cabaret across the country seem to be doing of late. Needless to say its exciting and offers so many more opportunities to do what we do for a much bigger and vaster audiences. Lina bills her workshops as "Advanced Workshops for solo Singers," so the caliber of these weekends and shows are a cut above and very worth knowing about.

Koutrakos herself is a singer based out of New York, and, with all her years straddling both the cabaret and rock and roll worlds in Manhattan, she has figured out a thing or two about making performance workshops that are not exclusive to just one particular genre. Koutrakos is a multi award winning Director, was a Master Teacher for years at Yale and the Eugene O'Neill. She has traveled the United States teaching Advanced workshops.

Because of the world these past few years, this 10th anniversary workshop in Chicago is what they are calling a "Hybrid". Since Koutrakos has mastered both the Zoom performance classes and the Jam Kazam sessions, she has been working with even more singers across the globe over these past 2 years. Combining this new knowledge and these expansive tools that have been thrust upon the conference, they are pioneering this hybrid this June.

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