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Middle School Festival 2013

The Middle School RESULTS are in.  If you’d like to see how your favorite school performed, CLICK HERE!

2013 Middle School Logo Design Winner

Congratulations to all the participants!

1st Place

Sara Axson

John W. Wrynn Middle School, Tewksbury

Honorable Mention

Vanessa Lorusso

St. Jerome School, Weymouth

Honorable Mention

Lara Williams

Fuller Middle School, Framingham

DramaFest Final Results

Congratulations to all the finalists who performed beautifully this weekend.  And the winners are…..Bourne High School – “The Children’s Hour” ,  Westford Academy – “Sonia Flew”,  St. John’s Preparatory School – “Metamorphoses”.  All State Company Awards will be posted soon.

Finals Recap

Wow.  What an incredible weekend of theater!  I hope that everyone who was involved with finals had the experience of a lifetime, and I hope that some of you who weren’t performing were able to come watch and be a part of the fun too!

All of us on the executive council were talking all weekend about how this group of 14 schools was one of the most friendly, supportive, respectful, and FUN groups we’ve seen at finals in a long time.  You truly embodied the Spirit of Festival this weekend.

In keeping with (very recent) tradition, here are some of my favorite tweets from this weekend:

Favorite tweets from Semis!

Hello again!  Semis was just as much fun as prelims, and I LOVED reading all of your tweets!  Here are a few of my favorites:

Festival Finals Schedule Complete

The 14 Finalists are all scheduled for the METG State Festival in Boston on March 21st – 23rd.  Tickets can be purchased online.   We hope to see you all joining in the fun sometime during the weekend. To see the final schedule and ticket info, CLICK HERE

Semi Final DramaFest This Saturday!

ALL SEMI FINAL SITES ARE DEFINITELY RUNNING ON SATURDAY!  The Massachusetts High School Drama Festival continues its 2013 season with 42 schools at the Semi Final Level at 7 sites across the state.  To see where your favorite school is located or to check out the shows at your site, CLICK HERE

Thoughts from prelims…

I know, I know… it’s been a while since I’ve posted.  I just got so caught up in getting ready for festival!  Now that prelims are behind us, I felt like I had to share some of the wonderful things I’ve seen and heard so far this festival season.  The spirit of festival is alive and well!

I heard great stories about kids who waited to do their tech because another school was having issues.  I heard about kids from different schools raving about someone else’s show.  I heard about new friendships, amazing experiences, and unforgettable memories.

I loved seeing all of these stories come to life on Twitter, too!  Here are some of my favorite tweets from last weekend:

High School DramaFest Begins!

All the sites, participants and productions are now listed for the Preliminary Round of the 2013 METG High School State Drama Festival. To find your favorite schools and where they’re performing, CLICK HERE

Alumni Stories Series – Jarret Kerr, Norwell HS

Jarret Kerr is an actor, playwright and screenwriter living in New York City.  He is also a METG Alum, having participated in the high school festival as a student at Norwell High School.  He graduated in 2006 and has gone on to have a very successful career thus far!  Read about his experiences in high school and beyond in our first post of our Alumni Stories Series.

“When I first stepped out onto the stage in high school, although it was not my first foray into theater, I knew something was different. Now that I was older, yet still at the tender age of fourteen, I knew that my performance mattered. I had moved beyond the simple novelty of cute children stumbling through a class performance of The Wizard Of Oz. It was now expected of me to remember my lines, my cast mates were actually counting on me for something.

In high school, one creates an identity through one’s interests: future politicians start investing their time in the social life of the school, running for treasurer or class president; the up and coming computer geniuses start tinkering around with robotics; the budding writers out there join the newspaper staff or the poetry club. I aligned myself with the drama club and quickly discovered that drama might really be the thing for me. I had suspected before that moment that I wanted to be an actor but it wasn’t until I began to feel the sense of community the theater fosters, and that I was truly integral to that community, that I realized I was an actor. I was no longer a little kid thinking “when I grow up I wanna be…”. I had grown up. And it was the theater that helped me take that step.

The realization of what my true passion was couldn’t have come to me without the help of The Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild. For over eighty years the Guild has provided the young people of Massachusetts with an outlet through which they may explore their inner passions, whether those passions lie in costume design, lighting, makeup, or set building.  It accomplishes this through its yearly, statewide theater festival. I was fortunate enough to attend the festival all four years of my high school education. Twice as an actor, and twice as an admirer. Every year, I looked forward to festival like I would Christmas. Running into familiar faces from faraway schools, designing my school’s festival shirt, and of course, performing in front of an audience ten times the size of any audience I’d ever performed for, the festival was a dream come true.

My sophomore year, 2004, I was playing the role of Artie in Norwell High School’s production of Personal Effects. This was what I would call my first big role, and I was onstage at the semi finals, having mustered every ounce of courage I had, performing in front of hundreds. We were chosen that night, along with two other plays, to attend the festival finals in Boston at the John Hancock Hall. I also won an acting award for my performance. I remember calling my mother from the bus on the way home, whooping and hollering with youthful ebullience along with the rest of our cast and crew. “We won!” I shouted at my mother’s answering machine. She saved it and likes to play it sometimes to remind me why I got into this business. But I didn’t get into the acting game because I had won an award and felt puffed up and grandiose, rather because that night I felt the power of being a part of something bigger than myself and our little play. I felt the importance of storytelling, the sense of history, and most of all, I felt the joy that theater brings.

From that day on it was never a question. I stayed on my path as an actor for the rest of high school. Even when I got a bit of teasing from friends and family for not being like everybody else, I did not waver. I applied early decision to NYU’s Tisch School of Arts, placing all my bets on one horse. I traveled to Manhattan to audition. Along with a hundred or so other nervous actors. They were all drinking honey, stretching. I was sitting, wringing my hands. I was accepted by NYU and sent to the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. I was asked to do free form movement exercises and monastic chanting my first day in class. A year later I was devouring Shakespeare and playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A year after that I was living in London, training and performing at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I did my vocal warm-ups looking over portraits of greats who had trained there in the past; Anthony Hopkins, Kenneth Branagh, Alan Rickman, the list goes on and on. On returning to New York I worked with two time Tony winner Mark Rylance. I played a landscape artist with a mean temper and a penchant for posing nude. Which I had to do and did. Another thing the theater taught me – fearlessness.

Since graduating, I have written and performed in my own play, Percival’s Big Night, off-Broadway. I adapted that play into a film. It was accepted into numerous festivals here in the States, as well as premiering abroad at the Raindance Film Festival, smack dab in the center of Piccadilly Circus in foggy Londontown. Raindance is the very same festival that birthed The Blair Witch Project, and introduced director Christopher Nolan to the world. If you haven’t heard of him, he directed the most recent Batman trilogy. We won best of Raindance, and in doing so, sent our film to Berlin! The director of my film and I traveled to the Cannes Film Festival. Our film was being represented there as part of the festival’s yearly film market. We rubbed elbows with Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox. We were not granted admission to the waterfront Weinstein Company brunch. Back in America, film underarm, we won best actress and producer at The Brooklyn Film Festival. We impressed a local theater owner enough that he played our film for two weeks in downtown Brooklyn at the highly reputable Brooklyn Heights Cinema. In the theater next door, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom played.  

I have just finished the seventh draft of my newest screenplay. I have two producers circling the script, both talking relatively big money – twenty times my first film’s budget which was a little under twenty thousand dollars, a low figure made possible by using a cast of four, a crew of seven, a set which was in fact my own apartment, and a shoot which comprised just a single continuous shot start to finish. Now they actually want to pay me upwards of five grand just for my script, something I never thought possible. I highlight my recent successes, as small as they may be, not to brag but to make an important point: if you’re truly passionate about what you do, if it is really the path you want to take, there is nothing that can stop you carving out the life you want. I was fortunate enough, thanks significantly to the METG festival, to realize I wanted to be an actor and writer when I was only fifteen. Some may not know what they want to be, even once they’ve graduated college. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing, but it is a very fulfilling discovery once you make it. Theater and the METG helped me uncover who I am.

My first day at Stella Adler, in orientation, I saw a beautiful girl across the room. She looked so familiar. After the teachers had spoken, and we were all encouraged to meet and greet, I timidly approached and asked how I knew her. As I asked I realized I had seen her my high school sophomore year in Weston High’s original productionEscaping Alcestis. She was fantastic, and here she was, standing in the same room as me, ready to train.

“I remember you, you were the guy eating the chips,” she said. I did in fact consume a whole bowl of Frito Lays on stage in my role as Artie, the one I had won an award for. Three years later, we still knew each other.

Of course we did. We were both part of the same community.”