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The two main times for recruitment events are during Fall REX/Rush in late August/early September and during CPW in April. Your job is to plan all recruitment activities and events that take place during these two times, as well as any events that may occur at other points during the year! Remember to avoid other popular or official REX/CPW events when scheduling.
Calendar
The typical year of recruitment events, listed in rough chronological order, for the past few years has been as follows, but feel free to mix it up!
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Talk to prefrosh! Some things to emphasize are that we are a community of largely undergraduates who alternate hiring outside directors and having our own members and alums direct shows.
24 Hour Show
Shockingly, a 24 Hour Show takes more than just 24 hours to put on. Each of the steps below take some time to process, so be sure to plan ahead. Follow the steps below for a successful 24 Hour Show!
- Pick a time and reserve a room. You’ll need a room reserved for an entire Saturday. In the past we have had 24 Hour Shows at 6-120 and 4-270, depending on room availability. Any similarly sized lecture hall will do.
- Announce the show. Email out to ensemble@, ensemble-dartes@, and if you so choose the mailing list for the current show to tell everyone that a 24 Hour Show is happening. State where and when it will be. Remind everyone that there will be a mandatory kickoff meeting at 8pm the Friday before in the Office, and that actors will be expected at 8am the next day.
- Shortly after your announcement, begin an email thread for title nominations! Simply ask folks to reply-all with their suggestions. Remind people not to discuss the plot associated with any particular title, or else the title will be immediately disqualified. At this stage, you should encourage people to send in as many suggestions as possible! This usually isn’t too difficult, as members tend to get very excited about 24 Hour Shows. Keep up the hype, and the suggestions will start streaming in.
- Close title nominations after about a week or so, and compile all the suggestions into a single form you’ll be sending out for approval voting. You may wish to clean up the titles a little for capitalization, obvious spelling errors, etc., or you can leave titles as they are—up to you! Remember to ask for people’s names, and use checkboxes to allow for approval votes. Email out the form in a new thread (people are bound to have started ignoring the title nomination thread by now) and invite all members and Dartes to vote for any titles they like.
- At the same time, send out a general interest form to get a sense of how many actors and tech ninjas you’ll have. The form will be non-binding—after all, you can’t really know if you’re going to be working on the 24 Hour Show until 24 hours before the 24 Hour Show! So it can help to ask people to give an estimate of the probability that they’ll actually be available. Writers must be available Friday night; actors and the director should be available all day Saturday; everyone else helping will be needed Saturday afternoon. It is vehemently suggested that writers, actors, and the director are all different people. See below for a list of people you’ll need and tasks they’ll need to complete. Here’s a sample interest form.
- Over the next week or so, based on the results of the interest form that are coming in, you’ll be able to gauge which roles won’t be hard to fill and which roles might be a little more troublesome. This is where you may need to nudge people individually to see if you can’t persuade them to fill out the roles you’re still looking for.
- Close title approval voting a week or so after it gets sent out, and compile the top ten or so titles. The exact number of titles you’ll keep in contention is up to your discretion. Then prepare a form for the final vote. During REX, as mentioned previously, you’ll open up the title voting to the prefrosh! During IAP, title voting will remain within the Ensemble, but this means you can choose to employ a fancier voting method like ranked choice—still, however you want to count votes is up to you.
- A couple days before the show, send out dormspam announcing the show to the general public! If you’ve never sent dormspam on behalf of the Ensemble before, be sure to check in with someone who has. Here’s a sample; note the copious amounts of question marks.
- Hold the mandatory kickoff meeting at 8pm Friday night before the show in the office! Be sure to send out a reminder to the Ensemble a few days beforehand that attendance to this meeting is mandatory for anyone involved, barring extraordinary circumstances. This is where you’ll announce the title (be sure to have it decided, or at least narrowed down to a couple of options, beforehand). If for whatever reason you can’t decide whether to allow one title or another from the election results, feel free to hold a vote amongst the people who show up to the kickoff meeting.
- Now get everyone to commit to either acting, writing, directing, or doing tech. Pass around a spreadsheet like this one for everyone to fill out, and share it with the director/producer. Check in with the director/producer to make sure they know what needs to happen (see below). Remind writers to include a suggested props and costumes list as well as notes on double-casting and such. Remind actors that they should get a good night’s sleep and meet at the performance space at 8am the next morning. Then off they’ll go!
Here’s a list of people you’ll need for a 24 Hour Show:
- Writers
- Actors
- A Director
- A Producer (if this has to
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- be the same person as the director, sad, but sometimes it be like that)
- Tech Ninjas
The Producer should ensure that the Tech Ninjas complete the following:
- Make or gather props, set pieces, costume pieces, etc.
- Design a show image (for posters and dormspam)
- Send out dormspam
- Print and hang posters
- Design programs (you may wish to look over these to ensure they contain a blurb about the Ensemble and a link to our website)
- Print and fold programs
- Pass out programs at the door
- FILM THE SHOW
Scene Night
Start planning for Scene Night well in advance—five weeks ahead is good, or right after the spring shows’ first weekend.
Begin by starting a thread asking members, Dartes, and participants of the current show for scene suggestions. Ask people to reply-all so that everyone can see the suggestions. You may wish to recommend some guidelines for scenes: they should be 1-10 minutes long and can cover a wide range of genres and styles. Don’t worry about rights, as long as someone can find a script to work off of.
After about a week, or when you think there are enough suggestions, compile them all into a form much like this one. It helps to include links to the script for every scene, for reference. Feel free to trim down the list of suggestions a bit at your discretion, although you can also just include to gauge how much interest there is in each one. A general rule of thumb is that if one of the scenes up for consideration is a scene that the Ensemble has performed before, you should check in with the people who acted in those roles originally before offering it to someone else if they say no or don’t reply.
Send out the form and set a deadline for people to fill it out. Once the deadline comes, you’ll have to go through the results and decide which scenes to do. This is the hard part.
Sadly, you probably won’t be able to make everyone happy. That’s okay—just do the best you can. Aim for a 60-90 minute show; ten scenes is okay and twelve is probably pushing out. Keep in mind which scenes can be cut down and which scenes cannot. Keep in mind which scenes are feasible in the little rehearsal time we have and which are not. (Scenes we have done recently are easy to do if most original actors are available!) If there’s not enough interest in a scene, don’t force it. If there’s too much interest in a scene, try to give the people who couldn’t get it something else to do. Respect people’s limits. Watch out for people who might be overestimating how much they can take on. Try to keep a balance of Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare. Think about who would be fun to see in which role. Once you’ve locked down a director, feel free to check in with them to see if they are satisfied with the cast you’re giving them, or if they have any casting ideas of their own. Use your best judgment, and don't hesitate to ask other officers for assistance or sanity checks.
(to be continued
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Scene Night
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Theater Arts Open House
This is like Activities Midway, but at W97. There is less of a pressing need to bring silly hats. The location is more intimate, and there are snacks (yay!), and since W97 is (a) specifically the theater building and (b) so far out of the way, generally anyone who shows up is actually invested in doing theater. Therefore, use this opportunity to get a conversation going with people about what kind of theater the Ensemble actually gets up to! As well as to snack.
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