Livingstone College glowed with the talent of some of the state’s brightest and most creative young people last week.
On Nov. 17 and 18, in Tubman Little Theatre, Livingstone was, once again, the preliminary site of the North Carolina Theatre Conference’s Regional Secondary School Theatre Festival.
Intended to “foster collaboration, corroboration and communication among theater arts programs … and help students explore … the word ‘theater,’ ” the festival also serves as a showcase and encourages improvement of theater arts programs in the state’s middle and secondary schools.
The event was entirely student-run. All productions were performed, produced, directed and stage managed by the students. Livingstone’s Tameka Howie and Fredrick Robinson served as student coordinators.
“Mr. Robinson and Ms. Howie did a terrific job running the whole festival and I was really impressed,” said department of theatre head and festival coordinator Daniel Wynne Jr.
Wynne also had the task of choosing the festival’s two judges.
Maureen Shay, one of the judges, has been involved in theater since high school and graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Catawba College. She has served on the board of directors of Piedmont Players, directed plays and musicals, and now teaches college preparatory English to juniors, all theatre arts classes, and directs plays at Salisbury High School.
A graduate of South Carolina State University and North Carolina A&T University, Ramona Barnes-Pate served as the other judge. She has promoted and taught in the area of educational theater, toured for the South Carolina Arts Commission, founded the Laura Josephs’ Childrens’ Theater Workshop and is now on the humanities-theater faculty at Livingstone.
“Ichose Ms. Pate (because) she is on the faculty … and I know Ms. Shay has worked with high school plays before,”Wynne said. “And I really wanted to have one black judge and one white judge so people can realize that, even though we’re an all-black college, we can have a balance. I’m about opening things up. I’m not into separatism.”
The hundreds of students who presented were judged on a number of categories including believability, ensemble acting, best actor and actress and excellence in directing. Ranking, highest to lowest, ranged from superior, excellent, good and fair. Only four of the 15 performances were rated “superior”: “Nunsense,”performed by West Rowan High; “Sightings,” by Union Pines High; Southern Guilford High’s “Plaza Suite”; and “Anniversary,” presented by Weaver Educational Center of Greensboro.
Of the four, only two performances — “Sightings” and “Anniversary” — were chosen to advance to the next level of performance on Dec. 15 and 16 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
“The production of ‘Anniversary’ was unbelievable and better than any professional production I’ve seen,” Wynne said
After the competition in Greensboro, the winners will advance again, this time to the Southeastern Theater Conference March 14-18, 2001, in Jacksonville, Fla.
Wynne said the experience helps students understand how serious their passion for theater —whether it be acting, producing, stage managing, lighting or acting as a make-up artist — is.
“And it helps them get more involved in theater … they are inspired to move on to an undergraduate theater program or go directly into the field.”
There is also the possibility, at the state level and above, that the aspiring thespians will be noticed by college theater arts programs or groups that are looking for upcoming performers for summer stock productions.
Wynne wanted to have the festival at Livingstone for another year because it has been held there for the past two, and he did not want to break the tradition.
It also serves as a recruiting tool for the school.
Although the pool of festival participants was not quite as diverse as Wynne might have hoped, he said he wants to continue to show African American students that there are theater programs they can be involved in, as well.
“That’s a mission of mine,” he said, “for traditional schools to have African American theater put in their curriculum. In a traditional program, there are only certain plays you can get into because they are written that way. But, at an historically black college, you get more of a chance to do all the work.”
“That’s not to say I don’t like working with the people at Catawba College, for instance,”Wynne continued. “We do different types of work, but we’re all involved in the arts. So we should work together.”
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