It’s here we come, Moscow, for a group of Christopher High School drama students who have been invited to participate in a Shakespeare festival.
The teens received an enthusiastic go-ahead from the Gilroy Unified School District Board of Trustees for a 12-day trip that includes a short stay in London and most of 2017 spring break in the land of the Bolshoi and borscht.
“It’s an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” CHS principal Paul Winslow told trustees before they voted at their Oct. 6 meeting to approve the March-April field trip.
And there wasn’t a nyet among them.
“It’s a fabulous and wonderful opportunity for students, I wholeheartedly approve of this,” said trustee Linda Piceno.
Colleague Mark Good echoed her sentiments. He added that his son spent three months studying the Stanislavsky acting method in the same Moscow program while earning a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Harvard.
Gilroy High School grad Steven Good is now a working actor, singer and musician in Los Angeles. He has performed at the famed Mark Taper Forum and in a feature-length movie for Lifetime television, among other roles.
CHS drama director Kate Booth and Gretchen Yoder Schrock, CHS Sister City/International Club Advisor and Spanish teacher, will accompany the 14 teens to London and Russia. Twelve of the students are seniors, one is a junior and one is a sophomore.
They are: Jacob Yoder Schrock, Grant Schaper, Jacob Flores Lopez, Owen Emerson, Devan Corini, Brandon Quirke, Annemarie Hayes and Cassidy Andrews.
Also traveling to Russia are Samantha Drews, Melinda Colbert, Adaline McCaw, Michaela Hawkins, Brenda O’Connor and Sabine Yoder Schrock.
Booth outlined for the board a busy schedule for the eight girls and six boys who auditioned for and won roles in the production being readied for the trip—Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
“Aside from an extraordinary opportunity to grow as artists and learn history, language, literature and culture from a unique perspective, the trip to Moscow is a true exchange,” she wrote in the 18-page application for student travel.
“I am jazzed that they approved us,” she later said. Because the board has denied closer trips, including to Oregon, there was worry that Moscow might not be approved.
Booth and Winslow said that rather than seeing the trip as missing four days of instruction, they view it as an opportunity for unique instruction during the spring break and of a nature that can only be had by a cultural exchange.
The trip could have been undertaken under the auspices of the theater group’s booster club, but it has more weight and is better for both cities and schools for it to be an officially sanctioned GUSD field trip because “the whole point is to do a student exchange,” Booth said.
The host school in Moscow is called the Slavic Anglo-American School Marina. Specializing in graduating students who are fluent in English, it hosts an annual international high school Shakespeare festival with all-English performances.
CHS will represent the United States and there’s a Canadian school in the festival, too, Booth said.
It’s not the first meeting of the Russian and CHS students. Marina students have visited CHS twice and are keen to create a long-term sister-school relationship, according the field trip supporters.
In addition to attending a performance at the famed Globe Theater in London, CHS students in Moscow will participate in theater workshops, shadow their Russian hosts to classes, spend two days at the Moscow Art Theater Conservatory and attend a theater festival and four stage performances.
Twenty-two advanced theater students in the Catamount Actor’s Theater (CAT) at Christopher High School auditioned for the slots. The number who can travel was limited by the host’s ability to transport the group around Moscow—their bus is too small for a larger group, Booth said.
As it is, CHS will send one more person than they originally thought could be accommodated, she said.
Of the performances CHS students will see, one will be either a ballet or opera at the renowned Bolshoi Theater, another will be an avant garde drama and one will be what Booth said provides a “new twist” on Stanislavski.
Constantin Stanislavski was a Russian actor and director who created a naturalistic acting technique commonly known as method acting.
Trustees said that their overarching concern in reviewing the proposal was student safety.
Their approval includes a condition that if the U.S. State Department issues a travel warning for Russia, the trip will be off.
Insurance and liability issues also were reviewed and not considered an obstacle. CHS officials assured trustees that students will be responsible for all classroom work missed during their absence.
And cost is not an issue, either. By law, Superintendent Debbie Flores pointed out, students cannot be charged for such field trips, assuring equality in access to educational opportunity regardless of ability to pay.
In this case, the CAT booster’s club has raised in excess of $27,000 for travel expenses, more than enough for tickets, and the host school will cover many Moscow expenses.
Per-student expenses are estimated between $1,500 and $2,500, which includes round-trip airline tickets between $700 and $800, according to the field trip application.
