Used to working under pressure for the school’s theater productions, members of the tech crew showcased their quick-change skills in statewide victories in technical challenges.
On Jan. 6 the theater department traveled to Kansas City, Mo., to participate in the State Thespian Conference. Students attended workshops on various aspects of theater and competed in various events for scholarships and bragging rights.
Fort the first time, students entered technical challenge competitions at the conference, showcasing their skills in impromptu tech theater situations.
Senior Joanna Kolker and junior Jessie Goldberg competed in a quick-change costume competition where they had to put different articles of clothing on a girl.
“We had to change an actress from one outfit to another while being timed. We couldn’t make noise except to ask her to do simple tasks such as ‘Please put your arm in this sleeve’ or ‘Can you step into this?’” Goldberg said. “The goal was to change her outfit in the fastest time possible.”
In another tech contest sophomore Jonathan Scully and senior Adam Cohen had to do the quick change but with props to create a different scene.
“We basically had to change from one scene to another,” Scully said. “The first scene had three place settings and a couple cups and stuff, and we had to change that to other scene with new plates new cups and stuff like that.”
Goldberg and Kolker said they had been practicing for weeks before the conference to ensure they did decent in the competition.
“We spent about three or four weeks practicing, and we asked actors within the department to come in and we found random clothing items from Voss’s collection of stuff,” Kolker said. “We just practiced putting on as many challenging things as we could — as fast as we could — and we did it over and over again.”
Unlike Goldberg and Kolker, Cohen and Scully hadn’t practiced at all before their event and tried as best they could to prepare themselves while in line to enter the competition.
“We talked about it, while watching others do it, and we were prepared in that sense,” Cohen said. “But short of just reading ‘these are your penalties, be sure not to do it,’ other than that, we weren’t ready.”
The students competing in the event were originally supposed to be Scully and Goldberg, but a conflict arose when Cohen went to go hold Goldberg’s spot in line and the event she was doing prior hadn’t ended yet.
“I was going to line up for props,” Cohen said. “But when it came down to the line and Jessie wasn’t ready, we went, ‘Guess we’re doing it.’”
Cohen and Scully said they had performed their very best with what they knew how to do.
Little did they know that they would take first place in a competition that neither of them were originally prepared for.
“After we did our time, the person told us it was the fastest they had seen so far, so we knew we did pretty good but we didn’t know we had gotten first place,” Scully said. “We were shocked by that because we had never done this before and some people train for this all year.”
Both teams ended up taking first place, and both were just as surprised they had won.
“As soon as we finished the competition, the timekeepers seemed very shocked by our time because it was so fast,” Goldberg said. “But when our name was announced in the evening, I was definitely surprised.”