April 21, 2005
Annual German Theaterfest
Set for Thursday, April 28
The
Department of German Studies at MHC is getting ready for the annual
German theatre festival and competition,
Deutsches Theaterfest, which will take place Thursday, April 28,
from 9 am to 5 pm in Chapin Auditorium.
The
twenty-eighth annual competition will feature middle school,
high school, and college-level
students
of German from 16 schools
in New England, New York, and New Jersey. The students will perform
short dramatic scenes (in German) before a jury of German instructors
and theatre professionals, including a playwright/film producer
and the artistic director of the Massachusetts International
Festival
of the Arts. Representatives of the festival’s cosponsors,
the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Boston
and the Goethe Institute Boston, will also be represented on
the panel of judges. Prizes, including special acting awards,
will
be awarded to participating theatre groups.
Theatrical
offerings will include adaptations of fairytales, such as Cinderella
and
The Emperor’s New Clothes; original plays;
adaptations of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Wagner’s
The Ring of the Nibelungen; and excerpts from plays, such as
Bertolt Brecht’s The Petit Bourgeois Wedding and Friedrich
Dürrenmatt’s
Romulus the Great. Mount Holyoke students will participate
in the festival as stage managers, lighting technicians, stagehands,
greeters,
and prop coordinators. In addition to more than 100 participants,
approximately 200 middle and high school students will come
to
watch the performances.
Donna
Van Handle, senior lecturer in the Department of German Studies
and dean of international
students, is organizing the
event, as
she has for the past 18 years. “Every spring German
language students from all over the Northeast look forward
with great
anticipation
to their annual trip to Mount Holyoke to participate in the
Deutsches Theaterfest,” Van Handle said. “I think
the Theaterfest has become so popular and well known around
the country because it
offers students the opportunity to use the language they’ve
learned in a contextually meaningful way. At the same time
they also realize that language learning can be lots of fun.”
Mount
Holyoke faculty who will serve as jury members are Vanessa
James, professor of theatre arts; Gabriele Davis,
professor
of German studies; and Holly Liu and Gary Schmidt, both
visiting assistant professors in the German studies department.
Joining
them from
the
Five Colleges will be Hiltrud Schulz from the DEFA Film
Library at the University of Massachusetts. Also on the panel
are
Marc and Susan
Smith, cofounders of the award-winning Foothills Theatre
Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, and William E. O’Brien,
president of the Associated German Societies of New England.
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