Ten years ago, some Peace Corps Thailand volunteers in tandem with some British volunteers recognized the benefit of learning and confidence building through the performing arts. They worked with their Thai counterparts and students to adapt a Shakespearean play to be performed in their local communities. After the success of the local performances, they came together for the Bangkok Shakespeare Festival. That initial festival was such a success that they decided to make it an annual event and the Thai Youth Theatre Project was founded.
Each year, a couple volunteers are selected to be a part of the TYT Committee to organize the logistics of the festival, like securing the location, organizing the participants and fundraising. Last year’s festival took place during our Pre-Service Training, and the Resource Volunteers (currently serving volunteers that come to help train the new trainees), raved about their experience at the festival, saying that it was a highlight of their service. Last July, I found out I was selected as the Deputy Director of Public Relations for the committee.
Additionally, I am working with my co-teacher to prepare a group of students to attend the festival. We had chosen to do Snow White, but I discovered that two other groups would be performing that. We hadn’t started practicing yet, so we have decided to change to do a performance of the Ugly Duckling. We’ll be assigning parts sometime this week and buckling down to prepare our performance so that we are ready for the festival on February 21-23.
We’ll be going along with 150 other students from 15 rural communities, where each group will perform a play entirely in English and learn about different aspects of performing arts like mask making, singing, dancing, sword fighting and puppetry. My students are extremely excited about the play and even though I can only take 10 students, nearly 30 have expressed interest in being involved somehow.
Donate Today!
If you are able to, please help support the festival through a donation. Just $15 (US) would support one student in attending and a donation of any size is appreciated in helping us reach our goal. You can make a donation easily online by following this link. Please help us to make this festival a reality!
Update! We were able to reach our funding goal! You can read more about the festival here.