Open Forum

Hello fellow Arts Advocates

This last weekend the Minnesota Conference took place. We had been working hard all year and it finally took place!! So I thought that i would post a blog for others to see and kinda get an idea of what the Minnesota conference looks like. It is a two day event this year taking place on Feb 19th and 20th, this year was also our conferences 9th year. The theme this year was #whatsyOURstory it uses your and our "whats y(our) story. We focused on being the director, actor, the light tech, stage crew, stage manager, choreographer , etc. and I will get more into this later but will begin by talking about the prep up to Sunday Day 1.

Saturday I arrived at Chaska High School (the location of day 1 of the conference) shortly before 4 pm and joined the other STOs and Executive board members that were already hard at work. We had to put up flyers everywhere ( flyers included duck sales ads, all of the #'s we planed to use, and Ads on applying to be an STO for next year). We also had to go over the opening ceremonies for the next day and assign who was going to announce what during the ceremonies. I sorted all of the T-shirts into schools. And then we set  up an assembly line of people for putting all of the name tags into the clear sleeves. We finally finished everything around 9:40ish and started an almost hour ride home for rest for the next day.

Sunday me and a few other STOs carpooled back down to Chaska High School arriving by 8 am registration opened at 9 and ceremonies started 10. Throughout the day us STOs all sold ducks and helped others apply to be an STO and answered any questions they had. Also throughout the day all of the STOs and one Former ITO had buttons that they wore; the object of the buttons are as an attendee is to collect them all. The way to receive a button is to go up to an STO/ITO and they would then ask you to do something such as do a wacky dance or do a fake proposal. Whoever receives one button from every STO/ITO then they received a prize. After a long day of workshops, NIES and the Tech Challenge we had dinner and discussion about the show they were about to watch called MTO(Minnesota Thespian Originals). This is where #whatsyOURstory takes place. MTO is a collection of short plays or performances. How it worked is that students submitted playworks and we picked 5 different short stories and had others direct the show. The cast of the shows had most of their lines memorized before sunday but the only rehearsal they had was a 50 minute session that day.

Monday the last and second day of Conference is held at the Guthrie Theatre in minneapolis. Arriving at 7 AM we set up the registration table and the judges lounge and the theatre took care of the rest. After the Open ceremonies of general announcements workshops began as well as the One Act chapter select competition. After this long day of events the Awards ceremonies took place announcing all of the NIES with superior ratings the Chapter select winner, the tech challenge winners and the Scholarship winners.

This was my Conference in a "short" blog (haha). If you have any questions or want to know more let me know! Thanks for the read!