After a two-year hiatus the school system's "Identity" arts festival has returned.
The performance is scheduled April 3 at The Bushnell in Hartford.
Titled "Identity2 — We Are All Flowers Of The Same Tree," the festival will feature radio personality Brad Davis and Billy Mitchell, historian for the Apollo Theatre in New York City, as emcees. The festival features contributions from students and the community.
Mitchell who conducts guided tours of the Apollo Theatre, said he got to know Bloomfield students when they visited him there and took a tour.
"They really enjoyed themselves, so when Joe [Olzcacki] told me the kids wanted me to come, I said 'sure, it would be my absolute pleasure,'" Mitchell said Friday.
The arts festival was discontinued in 2010, but $20,000 in funding was restored in the 2011-12 school budget.
"The arts festival has been historically significant for the community," Superintendent James Thompson said Wednesday. "It is very important to showcase the many talents of our students."
Olzacki, director of visual and performing arts for Bloomfield schools, said Wednesday that the performance would be "intergenerational, interdistrict and intercultural."
The festival will be the culmination of a yearlong project in which students contemplate their personal identity and how they protect it from being taken.
"They ask themselves the fundamental question, 'What happens if someone takes your identity?'" Olzacki said.
Olzacki, founder of the Identity Project, which teaches students about genocide and the Holocaust, has been an advocate for mandating teaching of the subject in Connecticut high schools.
Raymond Clark, a Bloomfield High School graduate and student at the Hartt School of Music has written the opening number for the performance. Visual and written projects for "Identity2" will be featured at Union Station in Hartford March 26.
Tickets for the Bushnell performance will be $7 for adults, $5 for children and seniors and $24 for a family of four.
