In late November, for four days, the theatre program and its majors attended the Texas State Thespians festival in Dallas. The festival is attended by students all around Texas who come to participate in competitions, workshops, and master classes. The festival allows theatre students to develop their skills and learn new techniques that will help them in their future performances. Junior Finley McBride went to this year’s festival, competing in two competitions and visiting several workshops. 

“I competed in both ‘Group Musical’, an event where a group of three or more people perform a five-minute musical number, and ‘DemocracyWorks’, an essay competition about how democracy fits into theatre advocacy,” McBride said. “I went to about 11 workshops total, all teaching different things such as dance combinations, monologue techniques and even one about the college audition process for theatre.”

McBride and her group of five other friends performed a musical number from the musical ‘Baby’, winning enough points to send their group to the national competition.

“The competition doesn’t necessarily have winners and losers,” McBride said. “But there are scores that are better than others. Each piece is assessed on a 20-point scale by three judges, and the average of those scores determines whether or not you qualify for nationals. My group got two 18s and a 17, meaning we got what is known as a “superior” score, and we qualify for nationals.”

McBride’s group wasn’t the only McCallum theatre group to qualify for nationals. Eight other groups also received enough points to reach nationals for their performances in duets, ensembles, stage management and scenic design. The next step for these groups is to perform again at the international level.

“We go and perform again for different judges at the international festival,” McBride said. “If we were to get a perfect score there, we would get what is known as a ‘Thespy’ award, which is really hard to achieve.”

Not everyone goes to the Thespians festival to earn national awards, though. Junior Hallie Cooper claims she focuses more on having fun than receiving awards.

“Whenever I go, some people take it really seriously, and they’re trying to go to the workshops where they talk for an hour and a half about stuff, but I’m kind of just there to have fun,” Cooper said. 

Cooper competed in the ‘Group Musical’ category alongside McBride, but she also competed in the ‘Hair and Makeup’ competition, in which teams are instructed to design a look based on a musical. This year’s theme was ‘Mr. Burns, a Post-electric Play’. 

“I learned a lot because it was our first year doing hair and makeup,” Cooper said. “They didn’t actually tell us what we needed, so we showed up, and we had the basics, and then we looked over at the team next to us, and they have an airbrush tent, and they were airbrushing this person yellow.”

Cooper didn’t spend all her time competing, though. She attended several dance workshops with her friends to improve her technique.

“I think I learned a lot, dancing skills-wise,” Cooper said. “I’m always kind of weird when it comes to dancing because I’ll learn the first half and I’ll know exactly what I’m doing, and then once I get to the second half, it starts to get tricky to remember the whole thing. But I think going to multiple workshops about dancing helps you retain the information and learn how to learn those moves and everything.”

Junior Cecilia Valentin-Osborn attended the festival for the first time since joining the theatre program. 

“I thought it was a really good opportunity because there’s such a variety of workshops and things to do there,” Valentin-Osborn said. “It was really fun to hang out with my friends and go and learn all these interesting dances and songs, and skills.”

Valentin-Osborn learned a lot from her time at the festival, especially in terms of her dance skills.

“I feel like I mainly focused on dance when I went this time,” she said. “So I feel I learned some tricks to picking up choreography quicker and just feeling more confident in aspects of my performance.”

Valentin-Osborn especially found the community of theatre-loving students to be inspiring.

“It’s a hobby of all of ours, we all like doing it, so getting to hang out and go to a place where that’s the main thing that everyone’s doing was really fun,” Valentin-Osborn said. 

Dance workshops are not the only thing the Thespians festival had to offer students. McBride attended several other kinds of workshops and masterclasses on varying topics. 

“I went to one about Shakespeare acting to prepare for our upcoming shows,” McBride said. “One about analyzing characters through MBTI and Enneagram types, a vocal masterclass, one that talked about how to decide whether or not to major in musical theatre in college, one about ‘cold reads’ that we have to do in auditions and an improv workshop.”

Even with all that the festival has to offer, at the end of the day, Cooper most enjoyed unwinding with her friends after a long day of competition. 

“I think my favorite part was after having a fun day interacting with all these different people, just coming back to the hotel and hanging out with friends and talking,” Cooper said.