GHS Theatre Program is happy to announce they will be participating in a High School Festival hosted by Wellesley High School!
This winter, GHS theatre students will tackle adapting Eurpities’s Medea to an Inside Out-inspired analysis of Medea's monologues and choices.
This festival allows students to present their work and receive feedback from judges. Additionally, students will have the chance to participate in workshops lead by local professionals!
Auditions and Tech Crew Info
This production will be a collaborative proccess. Students interested in acting or participating in tech *must* be part of the collective editing and developing of the show. Cast and Crew members will be chosen from the collaborative group.
Cast List and Performance Date will be announced at a later date
A note from Ms. Ruggles on our removal from the competitive METG Festival:
As many of you know, I have a love/hate relationship with festival. I love the community of high school programs from around the state coming together to share the work they are all doing in the theater arts. I love that festival is a day of watching theater. I love that festival is a way for students to meet other students with similar interests. However, I do not like the current structure of the METG High School Festival.
For those who have never participated, high schools from around the state compete against each other by presenting various theatrical productions. There are obviously very specific rules that go into this type of competition. Some examples being: sets must be set up and struck in a five (5) minute window, performances will be timed an cannot exceed forty (40) minutes, etc. The Rule book alone is almost 10 pages long. After students perform, they will be given a written critique by adjudicators (aka judges.) While these adjudicators go through training and other application processes, it is not required they have a background in theater or education to participate. Each festival site has two (2) adjudicators, with the final level of competition having three (3.) The adjudicators are given guidelines on how to provide feedback and rank the shows. The judges alone decide which schools advance onto the next round.
Theater, like all art, lives in the eye of the beholder. While a show may be one person's favorite, another may despise it. However, METG Festival does not take into account the whole audience's opinions. Students are not ranked by their peers, nor are they ranked by the teachers, directors, and advisors who work in the field of high school theater on a regular basis. The opinion of two random judges decides which shows are good enough to continue competing and which shows will not move forward. If the length of a run of professional productions relied solely on the opinion of two reviewers, many productions would not get to share their version of a story with more than that one audience.
I believe that theater is an art to be shared with as many people as we can invite into the world we've created. Theater is a community experience. Theater is often a family. I believe that the Gloucester High School Drama Club and Theater Arts Program would benefit more from a focus on the Gloucester community experience. By collaborating within the community, theater arts can become an important pillar of what Gloucester High School has to offer its students and adults. Building a program that is strong within our own community will allows us to showcase the best of all our talents in all aspects of theater arts.
While I enjoy the community that the METG festival sometimes helps to create, I think that the current competition structure removes a large part of that sense of community. I believe that METG would benefit from a more democratic judging system. Perhaps have a student choice(s) and director/advisor choice(s) be the shows that move on? Instead, many schools and students go into the competition "knowing" who will be one of the schools to make it to finals, causing jealousy, resentment, bitterness, and a division within a community that instead should be celebrating an art form that is not easily accessible to many high school students, locally, nationally, or globally. As we work toward building a solid foundation for GHS Drama, I would love to explore non-competitive festivals in the area that would allow us to showcase our work without feeling like "failures" for not moving on to the next round.
I have personally attended a very well organized and educational festival held at Emerson College in January that emphasizes community building and appreciation for each others work, while giving the students the opportunity to have adjudicated feedback, recognition awards, and educational workshops lead by Boston-area theater artists. I believe that the Emerson College High School Drama festival does an excellent job fostering the high school theater community experience as well as appreciation for the work each school does.
