The annual Lenaea High School Theatre Festival, hosted at the Harris Center for the Arts at Folsom College, took place from February 6 to February 8 this year. Each year, a group of Irvington theater students pounce on the opportunity to spend three days at Lenaea, where they not only compete in a variety of performance categories — those pertaining to on-stage acting, such as monologues, one-act plays, and duo scenes, as well as those that test behind-the-scenes technical skills, playwriting, and direction — but also receive feedback from professional theater artists, called “respondents,” and attend lab-style workshops. Irvington has a legacy of success at Lenaea, and even with a relatively smaller team of only ten students this year, it was upheld; highlights included sweeps in the Technical Theatre Challenges by competitors Hanaa Azad (10) and Kate Sison (11), as well as a win of Respondents’ Choice in the Musical Theatre category by Kaia Liu (11), for her solo performance of a song from “Into the Woods.”
Lenaea is a massive festival — this year, 87 schools were present. Consequently, as Mr. Ballin, Irvington’s drama teacher and theater director, noted, “any success that anybody has is a big deal, because they’re competing against so many people.” But regardless of awards, Lenaea is invaluable as an opportunity for performers and tech crew members to develop their craft and build inter-school relationships. Students spend a lot of time preparing their acts before the festival, but small tweaks under the guidance of respondents facilitate significant learning over such a short period of time. Additionally, Mr. Ballin emphasized that the event helped build unity among Fremont Unified School District (FUSD) schools. Thespians from American, Washington, and John F. Kennedy High School, as well as from Mission San Jose — who did not have a teacher to represent them but were sponsored by Washington’s drama director, Mr. David Yick-Koppel, as universal performers — all attended, and Fremont schools as a whole performed exceptionally well.
According to Mr. Ballin, events like Lenaea, where students can appreciate the performances of other schools, underscore what “a nice theater community [has been] developed in Fremont.” But the diverse community at Lenaea also promotes more distant connections between thespians, which may span the West Coast. Liu, the Respondents’ Choice award winner, shared that attending workshops by herself, without friends from Irvington, was an important part of her experience because she ended up “meeting so many new people, and making a bunch of amazing bonds.”
Reflecting on the festival, Liu was unhesitant in saying “I would definitely want to do it again” — this is a common sentiment, and if Lenaea is on the table for next year, Irvington Theater will undoubtedly be looking forward to it. This year, monologues from “Romeo and Juliet,” duo scenes from “Pride and Prejudice” — featuring the double-casted Juliets, Claire Stanton (9) and Bhargavi Kumari (11), from the IHS fall production of “Romeo and Juliet” — and “Oedipus,” and a musical performance from “Jekyll and Hyde” were painstakingly practiced, refined, and delivered, earning each actor and actress their moment in the spotlight. To end the recap, it seems that a standing ovation for all the creative, dedicated competitors is in order.
