Among the six high schools who came to visit were South Albany High School, West Albany High School, South Salem High School, Crescent Valley High School, Corvallis High School, and South Eugene High School. South Salem High School even brought an entire bus full of spectators from South Salem to cheer on their improv group.
Each of the six schools volunteers a few people from their school to put on a show and perform a random routine of improvisational acting before 265 people.
When I was spectating the event, I felt utterly scared for each performer. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to absolutely embarrass yourself in front of that many people. High school seems to be a time where some people experience fragility when they’re faced with social issues. If that was the case, then these group of kids were certainly the anomaly of the entire room.
Not a single performer was embarrassed of what they said. They all seemed to say exactly what was on their minds when performing a random act.
One instance during the first act, Corvallis High School played a game called “who's counting?”. In this game, each of the three selected students are limited to a given amount of words to create dialogue with.
Corvallis High School had to perform a scene with dialogue consisting of only two, five and 12 words. While one of the students struggled with coming up with a reply that had 12 words, the others could only respond to the other in two words or five words.
The struggle with sentence structure made a very funny scene about a family who had to catch crabs to feed their baby daughter. When the scene didn't stop soon enough, they opted to kill the daughter with absolutely no time to orate the scene.
“Every school seemed to have a moment where I was over on the side trying not to laugh too much.” Michael Winder, the production coordinator for the Russell Trip says.
Winder says “the nature of this spontaneous form of theater is it happens in the moment and never happens again.”
With that being said, that was the most enjoyable aspect of the event. I saw scenes that I thought I would never see. Also, to see the students just have fun and act together is a really nice experience.
“Seeing them immediately start playing games together and doing warm up exercises together and just acting like they're great friends and known each other for a long time is just really cool to see” says Winder.
I wasn't sure what to expect when I sat down before the first act started, but I had a really fun time!
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