RIYADH — Saudi Arabia's ministries of Education and Culture jointly announced the launch of the school theater initiative to create a generation interested in theater activities. The school theater initiative, which was also launched in cooperation with the Australian Monash University, is a national initiative that works to achieve a cultural movement and to develop school theatrical activities. The initiative aims to develop a support system for empowering national talents and inspiring them to create theatrical content. It also aims to generate new job opportunities in performance arts by activating a theater culture, and strengthen its role in molding coming generations by developing students' capabilities and providing them with specialized skills in the theater field. The school theater initiative is targeting 19,647 government schools in Saudi Arabia, and training 25,540 trainees of both sexes. This will lead to creating a competition in which the best plays will be honored. The competition will be in accordance with a time plan. There will be five competition stages, which effectively started in October last year and will run for 27 months until December 2024, making it one of the most important national initiatives in the theatre and performance arts sector. The initiative seeks to achieve several outputs during its various stages. In the first stage, reconnaissance visits will be made by the training team to a number of boys and girls schools in Riyadh to conduct interviews and meetings that bring together the concerned parties. In the second phase, the target is to train 60 trainees, whose number will raise to 160 in the third phase and 3,200 in the fourth phase. In the fifth phase, the target is to train 22,160 children, bringing the total number of trainees to 25,540. The initiative comes under the umbrella of the strategy of developing cultural capabilities launched by the ministries of education and culture earlier with the aim of linking the education outputs to meet the needs of the culture market, which is one of the goals the Theater and Performing Arts Authority is working to achieve through its strategy for developing talents to stimulate the theatrical sector in Saudi Arabia.
