By: Grace Fitzgibbon and Ramey Vachal | Staff Writers
Southeast’s tech team, a crew of students with a love of technical theatre, rejoiced at the conclusion of 2016’s Nebraska Thespian Festival when they were awarded first place in the annual tech challenge.
Heather Hillhouse, Southeast’s technical director, helped the team to work more efficiently. “As a group we met over a total of six times to work through all of the events, to practice to make sure everybody knew how everything went. Everybody learned to do all of the events, and then we picked the people who seemed to be most comfortable with each event to do the ones that weren’t the whole group.”
The tech challenge is a compilation of tasks designed to have teams from across the state demonstrate their knowledge of what it takes to run the technical side of a live stage show. This includes folding a stage curtain, focusing a light to fit a shape on the wall, detaching a cable from the ground and coiling it, striking and setting up props from a set, and sewing a button onto a sleeve.
Along the way, the team faced some hurdles. “The actual challenge was difficult but not as difficult as the preparation we had to do,” said Megan Covert, a junior on the tech team. “We had multiple rehearsals for it, and we’d spend a couple hours going over one individual event. During each rehearsal we would go over the rules and penalties for each event and then spend the entire rehearsal doing one event each time.”
“Because the competition was right after we came back, trying to get everybody in one place at one time over winter break was definitely a challenge,” Hillhouse said. “Some of the events just require a lot of work and a lot of practice and you know that when you’re competing sometimes nerves get the better of you a little bit. So it’s pulling it back and staying calm and staying focused. Everybody had the specific skills down. They learned what the particular skills they needed to do were, it was just refining them and how efficient they could be.”
The rehearsals definitely helped the cause, but it seems what really pushed the team to achieve their goal was the leadership and responsibility that everyone had to take on.
“The tech director, Heather, was our source of adult supervision, and she really helped us a lot, not only by helping us organize everything but also teaching us,” said Covert. “Generally, it was really self lead. We all decided when to rehearse and who would be best for which events, and we organized our plan of attack.”
The hard work paid off January 9 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. During closing ceremonies of the Nebraska Thespian Festival, Southeast was announced as the top team.
“I was incredibly proud of them.” Hillhouse said. “They did a great job.”