Every year, theatre students around the state are united by Texas Thespians. Texas Thespians is a festival where students participate in theater-like activities across the state. The festival includes over 10,000 delegates, and is one of the largest annual Thespian Festivals. Students and their troupe directors spend a weekend in Corpus Christi, Tx and make memories not only with their troupes, but from the experience.
From November 14-17, HSPVA's Theatre department traveled to Corpus Christi to participate in the Thespian Festivals. In order to be able to travel to the festival, students must be inducted into the Thespian society. For that to happen, students must have 100 volunteer hours for working or helping in either after school crew, productions, and more. Once a student has tracked their hours and has gained that amount, they are able to be inducted in May and become a Thespian. As a result of this, freshmen are not able to participate since they are still working to reach 100 hours, while sophomores, juniors, and seniors with the hours can travel to the festival as Thespians.
While HSPVA was there, they competed in multiple different competitions such as team production, group lip sync, improv, ensemble acting, duet musical, scenic design, and more. These competitions challenged the students throughout the tech portion of theater, as well as the performance portion. They also participated in many different workshops. A student named Frances Beserra talked about what competitions and workshops she participated in. “I competed in group lip sync, ensemble musical theatre dance, and team production, all of which were team events. I mostly did dance workshops, we learned a bunch of combos from different musicals. We also got to audition for a scholarship to Open Jr Institute in some workshops, which is a theatre summer program in NYC.”
Throughout this weekend over 40 students qualified for nationals and moved on to the next level. Some of these students include Bianca Ramirez, Enzo Han, Madaline Turbiville, Gerardo Mendez, Samaya Holmes, Abigail Freedmen, Peter Theurer, Charlotte Garrison, Elliot Zider, and even more. The students mentioned are juniors and seniors who participated in the all school production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella.
While at the festival competing the students did not forget to have fun and make incredible memories to look back at. Frances Beserra said that the most memorable part of Thespians to her was, “Probably lip sync, basically if any sound is made out of the performers mouth you’re disqualified…someone from the audience or backstage (we don't know) screamed and the performers from onstage heard it so we were really worried we would be disqualified if the judges thought it was us, but it was okay in the end, and it was just a really stressful couple of hours.”
Overall these students not only got to participate in theatre-related activities, but were still able to be kids, have fun, make memories, and have an incredible experience.
