Modern, stylish and funky logo for a youth theatre project

Mishmak Youth Theatre

We are a highly professional outfit, staffed by active professionals who currently work within the acting/theatre/music world. So, the children get the benefit of working with and being taught by great actors and singers with valid and current experience. There are 3 main class types that they can benefit from - Drama, Singing and Dance. We will allow every single child the opportunity to grow and shine. There will be no favourites. This is very different from a lot of stage schools, where they basically pick their favourites and then everyone else has to wait for a chorus number! We are looking to nurture talent; self confidence; public speaking; pride; social and spacial awareness; self esteem; respect and respectful behaviour; following dreams; realising individual goals; working as part of a team; creating a safe and happy environment; examining and exploring emotions and motivations; fitness and wellbeing and learning through active fun, so if any (Obviously not all) of these attributes or values can be reflected through the logo design that would be perfect.
Visual cues that symbolise theatre/stage/dance & drama like lights, shadows and stars are what we envisage being used to bring the logo to life, but you may have other ideas to wow us with. We'd like to avoid anything stereotypical like the Theatre masks, rolls of film and Shakespeare skulls etc....

The school is aimed at children aged 6 to 17 years and so the logo has to appeal to children in their teens, so, nothing too childish or cheesy please! Funky, dynamic and colourful is the direction we'd like you to use. The logo has also got to be non-gender specific as the school is open to both boys and girls.

At launch there will be two age catagories: Juniors and Seniors. The Juniors will be aged 6-10 years and the Seniors will be 11+. There is scope to create a third category; Intermediates, if demand requires. This would break down as Juniors 6-9 years; Intermediates 10-12 years and Seniors 13+.

We need:
1) A logo design that reflects as much of the above as possible.
FUNKY - COLOURFUL - IMPLIES PERFORMANCE, STAGE, DANCE & SINGING
The logo needs to have two levels of Hierarchy. The main element is the word 'Mishmak', the secondary element for now is 'Youth Theatre' but we will want to be able to change this depending on circumstance, for example if we were holding a summer school: MISHMAK - Summer School

Colours: Our main concern is that we don't want to be gender specific, so please bear this in mind when creating your palettes. Blacks/Purples/Oranges are perfect.

Fonts: We will leave this up to you.
We have attached a graphic with some examples of logos that are heading in the right direction of what we want and a couple that are definitely not what were after!!

(Once the logo is decided upon we will be posting a website design competition on here too.)