As of today, November 21, 2024, I have been involved in running 3 schoolwide assemblies, 1 music concert, orchestrated the haunted house, all while being present and in charge of stagecraft and rehearsals. We have had a successful opening of our MetFest the setup for which included running build-in, tech and cue, dress rehearsals and calling the opening night performance of Me Among Them.
I am only as good as my crew, so when referencing the events and actions we have taken so far, I will be using “we”. Without a crew, I would not have been able to accomplish all I have managed to do so far this school year. I am grateful for the dedicated crew and the relationship of trust we all have in one another.
We have had great success in what we have accomplished. The assemblies were well run on the stagecraft side of things, all the technological help we could give was given. The haunted house was widely regarded as a success, and we managed to raise roughly $480 for charity. The opening night performances went off with minimal hitches and we had a decent sized crowd for opening night of MetFest.
Along the way we faced challenges and worked to solve them as a team.
A reoccurring challenge is the respect we are given while setting up or running schoolwide assemblies. The students and staff are not often respectful towards the crew working to make their assembly happen. To continue to work towards overcoming this lack of respect, I will work on advocating for myself and the rest of my crew working to set up assemblies, while staying respectful and mindful of the fact that we are not the primary organizers of the event.
Another challenge we have faced was the schools sound system malfunctioning in a way that is out of our control to fix. An electrician or technician would have to come to the school and fix the system. We pivoted and used our band performance speaker setup for the Remembrance Day assembly.
The final technical challenge was during setup for the MetFest Performances where I along with the sound and lighting crew had to figure out how to send images from one laptop to two projectors at once when we were given a splitter that can only send a signal to one projector at once. Our solution was to use one HDMI cord and one VGA cord.
I hope you enjoyed my update on the happenings of stagecraft from the perspective of the Stage Manager.
Melea Chew Roberts