Mid rehearsals for Cinderella, on Thursday, March 12, at around 5 pm: we were given an alert that we wouldn’t be going back to school for a week. Soon, a week quickly became eight months of us wearing masks and struggling with the pandemic. We didn’t know that we wouldn’t be performing our spring musical Rodger and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. We left out sets in the B- building hallway, the drama room was a mess, and everything was ready for opening night the next week. It was upsetting to find out that the amount of work we put into this production wouldn’t even have an opening night.
Cinderella was postponed on various occasions as the Napa County officials prohibited large gatherings, closed non-essential businesses, and stopped everything. We knew that we really couldn’t perform or do anything with the show. Being the spontaneous person I am, I talked to Ms. Heartt about creating a virtual performance for our show, which premiered on June 20th. Over the summer, our season’s theme was announced, “Out of the Box.” Senior Gianna Valencia designed the logo for our theme creating a retro design that features a vintage computer. This adds a nice touch where as with a modern computer you wouldn’t get the same effect you are getting with this design. “This would have been perfect for last year’s season.” said Mrs. Heartt.
When we started school, we knew that we wouldn’t be performing in person anytime soon. It’s very upsetting because drama is a very physical class; things are complicated now that we are online. Angelica Albarran claimed,
“I think our hopes kept getting up only to be let down again.”
It took us around a month or two to figure out how to take our yearly headshots outside of school, and it is something that we still haven’t finished. We had to make sure that we followed the Covid-19 protocols, making sure that we disinfected everything that people touched, and wore masks.
On Monday, October 26, some students returned in person. Gianna Valencia, co-president of the drama club said, “My first initial thought was, how are things going to work? It’s weird not being able to do the things we did in drama, like claiming the couches. It’s weird not spending most of my school day in drama and preparing for a show. Drama feels like a regular class, not what it was.” As we continued moving forward with hybrid schooling, we still didn’t have a solid plan of what we wanted to do moving forward for our fall show.
As an officer for our drama club, I talked to the other officers about doing something we haven’t done: a film festival. We brought our pitch over to Mrs. Heartt, then we spoke to the advanced drama students in the class about it. Everyone seems to be on board and likes the idea. Every year we try to top our previous production and go bigger, creating more elaborate sets and costumes. This is going to be a very different experience for all of us.
Daniela Wilder, shown on the left said,
“I'm actually really excited to start working on the film because I know we have a lot of creative people in the class who can help make it great. It does seem like a lot of work considering we haven't settled on a theme yet but I think it's going to go well and we never did anything like it before since we usually do live performances. This is a good chance to work on our filmmaking skills and acting on camera instead of onstage”.
As of now, our film festival and films are in pre production. Little Town, a working title, will be compiled with many short stories. Each story is combined through a theme and little easter eggs. As we continue to work to get this produced, we are having assignments such as a brain dump, group discussions, and small journals to figure out our theme. This year, Mrs. Heartt is giving students the creative freedom to act, direct, write, film, and choose the group you will be working with. On Friday, November 20th, our theme was selected which is the Butterfly effect. This was chosen as a theme because we wanted to create a storytelling experience where one story lead to another. This will be a new experience for all of us and I hope you can support our theatre program by watching what we will create.
Comments