This week on Great Art at Eastern, Jeff Gentry talks with Neil Rutland about the upcoming drama fest taking place on the Eastern New Mexico University campus.
Neil Rutland Talks about the Drama Fest that has been going on for more than 60 years and this year 18 Schools in the local area of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico will be bringing a total of 400 students to participate.
Some of the activities that Neil talks about: "The Main activity I suppose would be the High School One Act Play Festival. And there are One Act Play Festivals that are Competitive. This one is for comments only, it is basically for program- sometimes they use it actually for a warm up for a competitive festival. But also it its just for feedback. And we do a respondent session after each play and go into a room and talk about the play with the students and their teachers."
Neil also states that: This is meant for teachers and students to get better."
There are two student coordinators and this is mostly student run and this year there will be student and teacher workshops during the festival.
They will also be seeing a sneak peak of the ENMU production of Leonard Madrid’s world-premiere play Las Aranas.
Leonard Madrid being an Eastern alum was asked to be a guest speaker at Drama Fest and since he had works that he was going to be coming out with decided to premiere his work Las Aranas. at the festival.
ENMU’s 64th annual High School Drama Festival
February 20-23rd
University Theatre Center in Portales, New Mexico.