The Arizona Renaissance Festival in Gold Canyon has been held annually since 1989. The festival is filled with knights, maidens, and jousting tournaments.

Our drama students went on their second field trip there, last year being their first, and our theater teacher, Mrs. Strong, plans to make it a tradition. The intermediate theater department goes on this trip because they did a Renaissance project that teaches the students about the different characters portrayed by various acting troupes or groups of theatrical performers working together.

“…they learn about the different stock characters and then they take some time to make masks.” Impressively, with masked and unmasked characters, the students “…would be acting with each other like there were no differences,” said Mrs. Strong.

In the project, drama students created a story with Renaissance acting interpretations and performed it for the class.

They went to see how professional Renaissance actors performed afterward and used it as a self-reflection on their own acting performances.

The advanced theater students also tagged along on the trip, mostly because they had already done the Renaissance project in their intermediate year. Jasmine Shryock, an advanced theater student, says that the highlight of the trip was going to see the jousting because there was a horse in the show named Jasmine. She thinks that this trip is important and helps bring together Sahuaro’s theater department.

“We get to like just be in our little world for a day because we get to dress up and play pretend for a whole day and we get to do all of our little nerdy stuff at the Renaissance Festival,” said Jasmine.  She was in beginning theater last year and then was jumped up to advanced because of her amazing work in the class.

Charlotte Bol, a band student and aspiring fashion designer who got specially invited on the trip because of how often she helps out in theater said that the best part of the trip was seeing everyone’s outfits and creativity while also learning about fashion from that era. Charlotte thinks that the trip helps the theater department by encouraging kids to get to know each other better, having more time outside of school to find each other’s interests, and teaching these kids responsibility in a new place. This trip brought theater as a whole together and helped the student expand their knowledge of new studies.