By: STO Gabriel Brock, Goose Creek Memorial High School, Troupe 8132; STO Talya Hammerman Ridge Point High School, Troupe 7678; STO Folarin Oyeleye Foster High school Troupe 7961

We have reached the final week for Theatre In Our Schools Month! While the moment may be bitter-sweet, seeing as we are coming to a close on the month, hopefully, you’ve enjoyed these past three weeks advertising, reaching out, and teaching. This week, we’re focusing on social media and its relationship to theatre. Social Media is an ever-important aspect of theatre culture, and it ties in the other three points of ARTS:

Advertising 

• Provides more ways of advertising your shows and troupe events
• Interactive and always to a diverse audience
• Advocate at the personal, troupe, school, and even state/national levels.
• Showcases theatre to the new generation of young thespians

Reaching Out

• Provides thespians with an outlet with other thespians and troupes and building a local theatre network
• It makes communicating with representatives, legislators, theatre professionals, and others involved in the arts easier.
• A great way of advocating to a broader audience
• It is interactive; you can comment on/support other troupes, connect with local troupes/alumni, and so much more!

Teaching

• It helps provide a wider spread of educational resources (such as articles or anecdotes from industry professionals) to those who may not have access to them locally.
• Create and share not only theatre educational videos but recordings of monologues, scenes from plays/musicals.
• Diversifies the education thespians receive by exposing them to multiple ideas, stories, circumstances, etc.
• Social media has created an outlet for the arts to be better distributed, allowing students to learn more about the arts from younger ages, allowing them to develop their potential.  

Challenges

• Utilize social media and the skills you’ve learned over the past month and complete these four challenges;

• Post 5 emojis that describe your current show on your social media story and see who can guess it right! 
• Repost graphics promoting shows happening in your community. If no performances are happening at the moment, you can repost anything theatre-related.
• Comment on five theatre socials media pages (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Create a Graphic for your troupe and share it with us by tagging @TexasThespians on on any platform.

    
Have a phenomenal rest of your Theatre In Our Schools Month, and continue to use the skills you’ve learned over the past three weeks throughout the rest of the school. Hope to see you all again next year!

Sincerely,
Your 2020 & 2021 Texas State Thespian Officers

By: STO Jarrett Stewart, Sunnyvale HS, Troupe 7532

Hello Texas Thespians! As many of you know, this past month theatre students across the country celebrated Theatre In Our Schools Month; an entire month dedicated to theatre students supporting each other, raising awareness about the impact of theatre education, and drawing attention to the importance of all students having access to educational theatre. As this month comes to a close we wanted to share 3 major takeaways from Theatre in Our Schools Month that you can take into the rest of the year.

1. Connect With Your Administrators. You are going to want the support of your administrators to grow your theatre program, here are a few ideas that can help them feel connected to your program.
   1. Show them what you’re doing at rehearsal. If your department has a twitter, post rehearsal updates with pictures and tag your administrators. If your school does not typically use twitter you could also have your president or director email your admins a small paragraph about how rehearsals are going (Don’t forget to attach pictures!).
   2. Personally invite them to shows. If you go to a smaller school, you may be able to walk up to your admins in the hallway and ask them to come see your show, but if not, you can always email them an invitation. If you are going to email an invitation, make sure to send it a few weeks in advance, as it may take your administrators a while to get around to reading your email. 
   3. Thank your administrators. Whether it is for coming to a show, or just for being supportive of your program, you should always thank your administrators. A great way to do this is to have your troupe make cards at one of your meetings, nothing makes someone feel more appreciated than handwritten cards!
2. Support other Theatre Programs. As thespians, we can’t expect anyone to support us if we do not support each other. Be sure to follow troupes from surrounding schools so that you can stay updated on when they are putting on shows. 
3. Contact Your Representative. Getting March declared as Theatre in Our Schools on a statewide level is one of the STO’s biggest goals this year, but we can’t do this without the statewide support of every thespian, here are three steps you can take to make sure TIOSM is a topic on the Texas Legislature's table this year.
   1. Find out who your representative is. Using This link you can enter your address to find out who represents you. Each Texas resident has both a Texas senator and Texas house representative, we recommend contacting each of them.
   2. Write out a letter or email to your representatives. Be sure you include facts on how theatre education supports students' academics (Grades, Test scores, Etc.). You can find statistics to use Here, and explain why getting TIOSM declared is important to theatre students. Expect a letter template from the STO’s to come out in the next few months.
   3. If you are able to get a meeting, prepare! Make sure you have a packet with all the statistics and information you may need. It may be nerve wracking, but relax. You are just going to be sitting down, talking about what you are passionate about, Theatre!

Thank you all so much for an amazing Theatre in Our Schools Month. As we transition into the rest of our year, we don’t want to leave everything we’ve learned behind, always keep advocating for the arts, no matter what month it is. If every thespian does these three things, The rest of the year is going to be great for Texas Thespians. 

Keep it up,
Your 2020 Texas State Thespian Officers!

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Hey Kids! It’s a new March! The first and only one of 2018! And I’m very sure that we all know what that means….

THEATRE IN OUR SCHOOLS!

Woooooooooooo! A whole month of advocating sounds absolutely fantastic, and just what we need to keep advancing educational theatre all around the state, or at least it feels that way until you stop to think about all that advocating and how exactly you’re going to do it…. 

Don’t worry, we all can feel like that sometimes. Fighting for the cause can be a daunting task, and when you try to tackle it head on without a plan, you can get a little lost. FEAR NOT, however, because we’re here to do the best we can to help you keep that fighting spirit!

The first step is to give you guys the tools for advocating, so keep up with the blog during March to get some nice and easy ways to spread awareness and love for educational theatre. See, I’ll start us off!
IDEA #1:
One of the cool things about educational theatre is that one of it’s many uses is to.. You know… educate! So take the initiative to spread some amazing and kind of weird facts about theatre around your school! Maybe your school has an announcements broadcast, get it on there! Or Maybe find an empty space on the wall to tape them up daily for all passerby to see!

Here’s a couple facts to get you started:
DID YOU KNOW THAT...
1. ‘Theatre’ comes from a Greek verb meaning ‘to behold’
2. Shakespeare's Globe is the only building in London allowed to have a thatched roof since the Great Fire in 1666
3. Two seats are permanently bolted open at the Palace Theatre for the theatre ghosts to sit in
4. William Shakespeare once had to play Lady Macbeth when Hal Berridge, the boy playing her, died suddenly
5. Walt Disney World, Florida, has a record 1.2 million costumes in its theatrical wardrobes
6. Theatre has a longstanding history in America. The first theatre here was built in Virginia in 1716, 60 years before the Declaration of Independence
7. When Shakespeare’s Globe burned down in 1613, the one casualty was a man whose breeches caught fire; they were put out with a bottle of ale.
8. Thespis is the man first credited with the role of an actor, he stepped forward from the greek chorus to portray a character (giving us the name thespians!)
9. In May 1849 the Astor Place riot broke out in New York and it was caused by two actors arguing over who was better at performing Shakespeare.
10. The word ‘tragedy’ comes from a Greek expression translating roughly to ‘goat song’
11. Ancient Greek audiences stamped their feet rather than clapping their hands to applaud
12. The oldest play still in existence is The Persians by Aeschylus, written in 472 BC.
13. World Theatre Day has been held on March 27 every year since 1962 when it was the opening day of the “Theatre of Nations” season in Paris.
14. The original concept for West Side Story was East Side Story where a Jew and a Catholic fall in love.
15. Saying "Break A Leg" in the theatre didn't start until the 1920s.
16. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s iconic The Phantom of the Opera is the longest running Broadway show of all time.

Best of luck, and remember - ADVOCATE AND APPRECIATE

Please be sure to tell us all about your ways of advocating by posting about it and tagging us or contacting us directly!