Venue View: Hailey Schmidt
By Hailey Schmidt
Visual & Performing Arts Admissions
University of Sioux Falls
At the University of Sioux Falls, the Jeschke Fine Arts Center is one of the busiest places on campus. On any given day, students can be found in class, in rehearsal, making movies, studying, playing piano, doing yoga, practicing CPR or any number of activities that one may or may not expect to find people doing in the fine arts center on a college campus.
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Our performers are happy to share this space with the nursing students, whose simulation lab is on the second floor, or anyone else who is trying to complete their liberal arts credits. This year, though, even more of the arts “outsiders” have found their way in. The Meredith Auditorium, a beautiful 800-seat theater housed in Jeschke, is working overtime. With social distancing guidelines in place, 84 people can safely gather there. That’s the largest indoor space on campus, and, for that reason, it’s acting as a lecture hall, a chapel, a rehearsal room and more, along with its typical duties as a performance space when necessary. So while many theaters around the world have been dark for a while, our lights are ON and burning bright (seriously, the house lights are so bright in there).
While the weather was nice, rehearsals for choir, band and orchestra moved to the patio spaces and the directors made plans for outdoor performances. For the first time in his career, Director of Choral Activities, Dr. David DeHoogh-Kliewer, decided to host a Homecoming Lawn Chair Concert. With no football game, public coronation, tailgating or any typical homecoming activities on the schedule, it was a bit of a long shot to assume there’d be much of a crowd. However, on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in October, more than 300 people with lawn chairs in tow came to support our singers in the Campus Quad.
Similarly, Director of Instrumental Music, Dr. Jonathan Neiderhiser, scheduled a series of outdoor pop-up concerts with instrumentalists being broken up into small chamber groups for the semester. The ensembles varied from string quartets to jazz workshops to the drumline, Purple Thunder. On Friday afternoons, they took turns performing for their peers and any other USF community member that heard their sweet music and stopped by to listen for a bit.
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As the days got darker and colder, rehearsals moved inside. Students masked up and spread out and began to prepare for a number of recording projects. The large vocal ensembles performed a Christmas concert, which was recorded at the St. Joseph Cathedral and shared virtually with the USF community. The chamber singers performed the 57th Annual Madrigal Dinners for a very small audience—a three-person camera crew. For the first time in its decades-old history, the cherished holiday tradition was recorded and shared via South Dakota Public Broadcasting over the week of Christmas.
Before sending students home for the holiday break, Dr. Neiderhiser recorded some classic pep band songs with the band to be played at the basketball games this spring. It’s not quite the same as being up in the student section of a USF Cougars athletic event, but it’s their way of letting the athletes on campus know they understand how difficult this year has been. No performance—athletic or artistic—feels quite right without a crowd of supporters.
Over in the Theatre Department, Professor Joe Obermueller began the fall semester working with students on a new work called The Shakers of Mount Lebanon Will Hold A Peace Conference This Month. The department was able to invest in high-quality live-streaming equipment and partner with the Coo Cinema Club to put together a professional-level production. In many ways, Obermueller was simultaneously directing a play and a film. Our student actors not only adjusted to performing to an empty house, but a novel lighting format and a quickened pace necessary for a filmed production. They had mastered it.
However, in early November, just days before opening, a positive COVID case immediately halted the process. With the actors in quarantine, the aforementioned Madrigal Dinners scheduled to utilize the performance space and the semester finishing up before Thanksgiving, there was no way to squeeze Shakers back into the calendar. Not wanting students to feel the same devastation from unfinished performances that still lingered from last spring, Obermueller got creative and found a way to get it produced.
With interim classes happening online and no travel courses heading out, there was just enough time in January 2021 for a quick week and a half to rebuild the set, rehearse and coordinate with the crews before a short, three-day run of live-streamed performances. And this time? It was a success! Hundreds of people tuned in to the live stream and our students had the satisfaction of finishing what they started so many months prior.
No one on campus would call this a typical year. Every possible process and project has been reconsidered and revamped in a way that prioritizes the health and safety of our community. Students have remained flexible and forgiving as faculty work tirelessly to organize as many opportunities as possible to keep our performers doing the things that feed their souls. With every bump and snag along the way, the students stay optimistic and are grateful to have the chance to even try to put on a show in a season where so many students just like them around the world do not.
Overall, the mood is hopeful on campus. With the current trajectory of the virus trending downward, the university is planning to host an in-person commencement ceremony this spring, with a virtual plan in place if things should not go as projected. Over in the Visual and Performing Arts Department, administration has given us the go ahead to host an in-person audience—small, masked and distanced, of course—for some performances this spring. The choirs will be utilizing the outdoor concert format that was so successful last fall for a Mother’s Day concert in May.
As things get back to normal (are we sick of that phrase yet?), I’m hopeful that the energy of Jeschke we feel right now continues to expand and that maybe a few students who inadvertently found themselves in the Fine Arts Center this semester might choose to stick around, because I truly believe it’s the best place on campus. And I’m only a little biased.