The halls of R.D. Parker Collegiate will be bustling this weekend as the school plays host to the first-ever Manitoba Northern Schools One-Act Play Festival.
The festival gets underway Friday evening and runs all day Saturday, concluding with a Sunday morning awards ceremony. In addition to R.D. Parker students, Margaret Barbour Collegiate Institute in The Pas and Gillam School will be sending students into Thompson for the weekend - about 70 students are expected to participate
"We've got a total of five official shows and two theatre sports going on for the public," says R.D. Parker drama teacher David Boyce, who describes theatre sports as "like Whose Line is it Anyway? except the points do matter. It's a competitive theatre game - it's all improvised."
"There's workshops Saturday and Sunday morning," continues Boyce. "We've got workshops in directing, lighting, puppetry, and improvisation. On the Saturday morning we're also doing one huge keynote address on how to manage your money as a performing artist. James Crouch is doing that one. It's a simple matter of artists' money not being a steady flow of income, so you need to learn to manage what you do between paychecks."
Other workshop leaders include Boyce himself, Mike Peterson, a puppeteer who has worked with Jim Henson and last visited R.D. Parker in the fall, actress and producer Rebecca Johnson, and B.C.-based theatre artistic director Robert Garfat.
Boyce notes that the students coming in from Gillam and The Pas are particularly deserving of commendation as neither of their schools offer drama classes during the regular school day - drama exists only as an after-school club.
"There's no stopping these kids," he says. "This could be the future of television or movies in 15 years. These kids are every bit as talented as anything you see on Glee or any of these other shows - it's just that they're in the North and those automatic discovery opportunities aren't there like if you were living in Vancouver or Toronto or New York."
Tickets for the festival are $5 per show, or $20 for a weekend pass, and are available at TD Canada Trust and R.D. Parker.
