By Vivian Dyer.
Theater students traveled to Grapevine, Texas the weekend before Thanksgiving break to attend the annual Texas Thespian Festival.
“The thespian festival is this big convention where our troop 1818 goes and takes a bunch of workshops and watches a bunch of shows,” sophomore Grace Eason said.
While at the convention, students are given the opportunity to partake in competitions.
“Everyone in production does a competition thing, and you could do a duet, a scene, or a monologue, or a song or something like that,” senior Caleb Irwin said.
If they perform well in the competitions, they are able to also perform in front of people attending the festival.
“I performed with Jackson Riley,” Irwin said. “We did a duet scene. It was from an Ethan Coen play called ‘The Talking Cure.’ We actually did really well. We got perfect scores on the first round, and then we got called back for main stage, which is like in front of everyone at the festival, so it’s like 2000 people.”
Along with being able to perform in competitions, attendees are also able to participate in workshops.
“I took a clown workshop, and I took a bunch of dancing workshops, and we took this one acrobatic one,” Eason said. “It was really fun.”
The long weekend with each other allows many times to create memories according to Irwin.
“There was one time, we were watching a mainstage show, and we got bored, so me and Barrett pretended that we were football coaches, and we were coaching the people on stage, and we ended up winning the game so that was pretty good,” Irwin said.
At the end of the day, Eason feels that being with her friends is the best part.
“My favorite part was at night getting to just sit down with my friends and eat dinner,” Eason said.
Even after a memory filled trip, there are still other things they wished they could have done.
“I wish I could have done some fight workshops,” Irwin said. “Fight workshops are really fun. You get to get physical and dance sometimes.”
All the things they learned at the festival excited Eason for the upcoming performances.
“We took some warmup classes, and I think I’ll use those before shows because they help get rid of your anxiety,” Eason said.
Irwin said such a memorable trip is what makes theater fun. “When I was a kid, I was in ‘The Nutcracker’, the ballet, and I thought that was kinda fun, so I was like why don’t I do this more because my older siblings did it,” Irwin said. “Once I got to high school, I just fell in love with it.”
