Kenya runs the biggest schools performing-arts circuit most software vendors have never heard of. What began as a drama festival now covers stage plays, dance, poetry, comedy and film — judged in five languages of performance, cascading through five levels, from a single classroom in a Zonal round to a national stage. If you coordinate a school, sub-county or county leg of this festival, the logistics problem is not “who can act” — it is keeping a hundred entries across a dozen genres straight from Zonal to National without losing a single adjudication sheet along the way.

What the festival actually judges

The festival runs under the Ministry of Education through the Kenya National Drama Committee, and its scope is far wider than “drama” alone. On stage, entries are adjudicated in Play (with separate Play in French and Play in Kenyan Sign Language strands), Cultural Creative Dance, Modern Creative Dance, Solo Verse, Choral Verse, Spoken Word, Narrative, Solo Dance, Mime and Stand-up Comedy. Off stage, a full Film strand covers Short Film, Screen Dance, Screen Narrative, Screen Verse, Documentary and Advert. That is eleven-plus distinct judged genres feeding into one festival calendar, each with its own entry, its own adjudicator brief and its own result.

Categories, not ages

Entries are grouped into five categories that map onto the school system rather than a raw age band: Pre-primary, Primary, Junior School, Secondary and Tertiary. A Play entered by a Pre-primary class is judged separately from a Play entered by a Secondary school, and each category runs its own version of every genre it offers — the same “Play” item exists as eleven or more separate competitions once you multiply it across categories. This is exactly the kind of structure that turns into a spreadsheet nightmare by hand: eleven-plus genres × five categories is enough distinct entries that a coordinator tracking it on paper will eventually merge two schools’ scores or misfile an adjudication sheet.

How the festival is set up in eTalenter

In eTalenter this maps cleanly onto the platform’s own model: each of the five categories becomes an Age Group, each genre (Play, Solo Verse, Mime, Screen Dance, and so on) becomes a Competition Item, and Assign Competitions to Groups is where you decide which genres run in which category, whether an entry is Individual (Solo Verse, Solo Dance, Mime, Stand-up Comedy) or Team (Play, Choral Verse, Spoken Word, Narrative, the Film strand), and what language it runs in. Because the same genre repeats across five categories with different rules possible at each — a Secondary Play may run longer than a Junior School one, a Tertiary Mime entry may allow a different cast size — each category’s version of a genre gets its own row rather than one blanket rule copied everywhere. That flexibility is the same mechanic that lets a Kerala kalolsavam run four age categories of the same item with different time limits, or a church talent test run one item for Juniors and a harder one for Seniors — one product, any level structure.

Five levels, one cascade

The festival progresses through five tiers: Zonal → Sub-County → County → Regional → National. A school-level entry that wins its genre and category at Zonal is promoted to Sub-County, then County, and so on — the same performer or team is not re-registering fresh at each stage, they are being carried upward with their result attached. This is the multi-level cascade eTalenter’s Event Levels and sub-coordinator promotion model is built for: a coordinator at each tier submits qualified entries upward rather than every participant re-entering from scratch, and results roll up level by level exactly the way a district kalolsavam moves from sub-district to district to state.

A real marking scheme, genre by genre

Unlike a vague “creativity and presentation” rubric, the festival publishes an actual adjudication scheme for its flagship genre. A Play is marked out of 100: Choice of Play and Scripting 30, Acting 30, Production 20, Costume and Decor 10, and Achievement 10. Scripting and acting together carry 60 of the 100 marks — deliberately weighted so a lavishly produced but weakly written or poorly acted entry cannot out-score a simple staging of a genuinely strong script. Every other genre carries its own separate scheme reflecting what that genre actually rewards — a Solo Verse or Spoken Word piece is not marked the same way as a Film entry, and a coordinator setting up Scoring Setup for each genre should build a scheme suited to that genre rather than reusing the Play rubric everywhere.

Sample marking scheme — Play (100 marks)

Adjudicator signature: ______________________    Category / Level: ______________________

Sample festival lineup by category

• Pre-primary & Primary: Solo Verse, Solo Dance, Mime, Cultural/Modern Creative Dance, Choral Verse — short individual and small-team items suited to younger performers
• Junior School: the full genre list opens up, including Play and the Narrative/Spoken Word items
• Secondary: Play, Play in French, Play in Kenyan Sign Language, Stand-up Comedy, Screen genres — the category with the deepest entry pool nationally
• Tertiary: the same genre list, run for colleges and universities feeding into the same national ladder

Every school does not need to enter every genre — most build a lineup suited to their strengths and grow it year on year, the same way an arts-fest coordinator picks a manageable item list before scaling up.

Why this needs more than a spreadsheet

Once you multiply eleven-plus genres by five categories by five levels, a Zonal round with even a modest number of schools generates hundreds of individual judged entries in a single day, each needing an adjudicator, a mark sheet, a time slot and a promoted-or-not decision. eTalenter’s chest numbers, judge-scoring panel, real-time tabulation and results publishing exist for precisely this scale: judges score on a tablet or laptop against the scheme you configure, scores tabulate live instead of being retyped from paper after the fact, and the promoted list for the next level is a filter on results rather than a re-typed shortlist. Certificates and trophy stickers print straight from the same data once a category’s genre is finished.

FAQ

Is the festival only drama?
No — despite the name, the current genre list spans dance, poetry, comedy and film alongside stage plays. A school entering only its strongest dancers or a single Solo Verse performer is still competing in the same festival.

Do all schools compete against each other regardless of size?
Entries are grouped by category (Pre-primary through Tertiary), so a school’s Junior School Play is judged against other Junior School Plays, not against Secondary or Tertiary entries.

How does a school move from Zonal to National?
Through the five-level cascade — Zonal, Sub-County, County, Regional, National — with qualifying entries promoted upward at each stage rather than re-registering fresh.

Set this up on eTalenter

Whether you’re coordinating a single school’s Zonal entries or running a Sub-County or County round with dozens of schools, eTalenter’s school arts fest software and judging & tabulation engine adapt to any category structure and genre list — build your own age groups, competition items and scoring schemes exactly as your festival runs them. See how results move from stage score to published result in a few clicks.

Talk to us on WhatsApp at +91 96056 56508 or email support@etalenter.com to set up your schools drama and performing arts festival on eTalenter.