Backstage Pass: Students Attend State Theatre

While the rest of the student body returned from winter break on Thursday last week, theatre instructor Katie Funkey and 16 of her theatre students took an extra two days off to experience the 2018 Nebraska State Thespian Festival in Lincoln.

This annual celebration of all things theatre is an event Funkey consistently chaperons students to.

“This is my ninth year teaching, but actually my eighth year taking kids. There’s a long-running tradition of taking people and my first year we got snowed out so we couldn’t go,” Funkey said.

To help cover the $200 cost of attendance, the theatre department conducted fundraising.

“Our main fundraiser this year was the pop sockets you may have seen sold around the school,” Funkey said.

Another means of helping to pay for theatre students to attend this event was the Veburg scholarship. Ron Veburg, for whom the scholarship was named after, was a previous theatre director at Hastings High who passed away in 2016. Dianne Karol, a former student, reached out to Funkey. She told Funkey she was thinking of Veburg and wanted to make a donation to the school in a way that would be really impactful for students. Funkey told Karol about the Nebraska State Thespian Festival and how students want to go but sometimes the cost gets in the way.

“Last year she made a $500 donation to help kids go and she said that is going to be an annual contribution. It is something that as it grows we’d like to invite other alumni to donate to this scholarship,” Funkey said.

Thanks to Karol’s donation, several theatre students had most of their festival costs covered.

State Theatre is home to a plethora of activities that students can partake in during their stay in Lincoln. There are performances by professional adult actors that students can watch and be inspired by. Professionals in all fields of theatre, ranging from improvisation to theatre tech, come and help conduct competitions in their respective fields. Funkey believes that the benefits of going to this festival are limitless.

“It is one of the kid’s favorite things that they do all year. The biggest thing kids get from it is they’re energized for the upcoming year. It is such a great way to start our semester. We come back from break and it’s cold and always kind of dreary and then we go to the festival and it’s just such an energizing and inspiring experience,” Funkey said.

Students from Hastings competed in various events throughout the course of the convention. Senior Chandice Rogers and junior Audree Weeks both competed in solo musical while senior Kai Anderson and junior Taylor Bartos competed together in duet musical.

“I did okay I guess. I didn’t win obviously, but I just wanted to do it for fun,” Rogers said.

The improv team also competed in the state improv event making it to the preliminary round.

“There was some pretty tough competition this year. A lot of times we do make finals so that was a little disappointing, but the other schools really brought some strong teams,” Funkey said.

Aside from the competitions, the workshops were a major highlight of the event for the theatre troupe. Senior Haley Mazour, who has attended this festival all four years of high school, participated in a theatre for the oppressed workshop.

“We played this game where you had a partner and one person had to close their eyes and you had to touch fingertips together and you had to lead each other around the room. Your partner was a complete stranger and it was really interesting to give that trust,” Mazour said.

When Mazour and the group finished their game, the instructor of the workshop explained that they had created a sort of language with their fingers. The point of the workshop was to pinpoint how humans speak and communicate with one another.

Rogers participated in a workshop that taught her the art of stage fighting and had a fun time doing so.

“When we did stage fighting we all took turns practicing our skills and demonstrating what we learned in front of the rest of the workshop. These two guys were on stage and the one guy was supposed to fake punch but accidentally aimed too close and hit him, causing the other guy to start bleeding from his mouth,” Rogers said.

Funkey believes that the skills students pick up from the workshops can be used in their day to day theatre lives as they audition, prepare, and present shows.

Speaking from her four years of experience with the event, Mazour recommends the event to anyone on the fence about going.

“If you have the ability to go, I would say go. If you like any aspect of the arts you should definitely go.”