In my last year of high school I had the opportunity to perform in and be part of the creative team behind our school dance program's original summer production. The show was called "Give My Regards to Broadway", and was inspired by the history of musical theatre.
I was involved in as many aspects of the show as possible. As part of the production team I was involved in
- Selecting which songs to include in the show
- Assigning choreographers to numbers
- Casting each routine
- Designing our set and costumes
I also worked closely with the artistic director, creating our show order, tracking down hard to find props, and even recruiting the school's baseball team to perform a number, one of our teacher's dreams.
I taught myself to use Photoshop and created the show's poster, programs, and logo. You can see the poster I created that was used to advertise our show here. When we were at risk of losing our matinee performances, cutting our run from 6 shows to 3, I launched a campaign to get local schools and retirement homes to come see us perform, successfully filling all 3 matinee performances in the 400+ seat theatre. Knowing some of the residents of the retirement homes I heard all about how much they loved the show for months after the run ended.
After this show's closing our teacher offered to give us credit for doing this work as a class. In order to be eligible for credit, the team needed to create their own original show on our own. As a team, we decided to format our show as a "coffee house". By invitation only, our audience would sit at tables we brought into our studio and enjoy refreshments, and we would perform throughout the evening.
My responsibilities for this event included:
- Creating our logo and invitations
- Scheduling rehearsals and creative meetings
- Organizing refreshments and seating arrangements
- Designing and building our set
We were each asked to choreograph our own dances as well. This was a first for me, and a daunting task, but my teacher was very impressed with the maturity and grace my solo showed.
This dance production experience was my passion project for my last semester of high school. I was able to use my organizational, communication, and artistic skills and put them towards one big end result. For our opening night, I was liaison with our student council president and arranged for them to host reception to celebrate all the students' hard work. This was one of my proudest achievements in my high school career.