AVPA Theater Wins Big at DTASC
In addition to intense rehearsals for the fall play, many members of the AVPA School of Theater have been working hard on scenes for the annual DTASC Fall Festival. They have devoted almost 60 hours since August to rehearsing and preparing, some days with back-to-back stacked afterschool rehearsals for DTASC and the play. The Festival finally took place on October 19 at Calabasas High School, and this year, all those hours paid off. Team Culver City High School came 5th out of 52 high schools in the overall sweepstakes, with a monumental 1st place in the Open Drama category.
For decades, DTASC, or the Drama Teachers Association of Southern California, has run 2 competitive theater festivals every school year, the Fall Festival, which features any plays students choose, and the Shakespeare Festival in the spring. At a festival, students from high school theater programs across the greater LA area meet at a high school and compete in a variety of categories where they are evaluated by judges. These performances range from individual monologues to short scenes with up to 10 actors to presentations on theater tech.
At a DTASC festival, like-minded student actors from different schools get to connect and watch each other perform. For senior Anabelle Andreone, watching scenes that other people have put so much love and time into is “half the joy” of the whole experience. Unlike any other performance, a DTASC scene is not about the audience, it is about the actors, giving them an opportunity to simply enjoy theater.
CCHS’ AVPA Theater Program has, in recent years, been very passionate about DTASC. And though a performance of Macbeth they put on last year came 1st at the 2025 Shakespeare Festival, they didn’t place at all in last year’s Fall Festival. This year, they sent a whole school bus of competitors, competing in 7 different events, and their success was a happy surprise. They earned Honorable Mentions in Open Musical and Open Comedy categories, won the Open Drama category, came 3rd place in the Marketing and Publicity presentation event, and received several other Honorable Mentions in theater tech categories.
A DTASC performance is vastly different from the fall play or spring musical. For one, though you are in full costume, the only props you are allowed to use are four chairs, which actors have to use creatively. In the Open Musical category, you are not allowed to play any music—everything is acapella. And, all these scenes have student directors, allowing students who have spent their entire high school careers acting to get a feel for what it is like to direct. Ella Kendall, a senior who co-directed CCHS’ Open Musical entry, said that the experience “sparked things [she] didn’t even know [she] was passionate about,” and that she “gained so much respect for every director everywhere.”
The performance Kendall co-directed, along with fellow senior Annie Francuz, was a very-shortened version of the acclaimed musical SIX, which is a retelling of the lives of the six wives of King Henry VIII of England. The show features only 6 characters, the six wives, who each get a song in the spotlight. For Kendall and Francuz, this was a large part of why they chose SIX as their scene—it allowed all the actors time to shine.
The first-place Open Drama performance was an adaptation of the 1934 play The Children’s Hour, which centers around the lives of two women who run a boarding school and whose lives are destroyed by a rumor that they are in a relationship. The scene starred juniors Iris Harmon and Soledad Kirk and senior Ryan Vermette and was directed by senior Catherine LaBorde. LaBorde, like many seniors who participated in DTASC, has competed every year since she was a freshman, and she said that she had been waiting her entire high school career to put on this scene. When she was a freshman, the CCHS seniors who helped her find her feet in DTASC had performed the same scene and enjoyed it. For LaBorde, winning with this scene reminded her of them and the tight-knit community DTASC helps create.
The Shakespeare Festival will take place on April 25, 2026, and at CCHS, preparations have already begun.