This year for my senior arts night, students worked in pairs to co-direct scenes. Both director and co-director worked together to find a scene to direct and then held auditions to form a cast. Since the beginning of the year, students have been taking turns in directing scenes, while also acting in other student’s scenes. Arts night took place on November 20th, 2014 at Beacon Charter High School for The Arts. This year, the theatre department put on two shows instead of one, that way more people were able to come and watch the show. The first perform ace began at 5:30 and ran until 6:30 and the second performance ran from 7:30 to 8:30. This worked well because more family and friends were able to come and watch the performance. The scene I directed was called Sad and Glad, which is from the play Almost Maine. I directed this scene with my fellow classmate Celia Velez. We worked very well together and shared our ideas with one another in order to develop a well constructed scene to showcase at arts night. When our actors and actresses were performing our scene at arts night, my co-director and I were able to sit in the audience and watch all of our hard work be presented on stage. It was such a wonderful feeling to see how the audience reacted to the scene that I have worked so hard on over the past few weeks.

           This year’s arts night was very difficult to put together. It took a lot of hard work and cooperation from all the students in order to put together such a wonderfully constructed show. Since there were so many scenes that needed to be performed, it was crucial that some groups cut their scenes in order to save time and to have the show run more smoothly. Also, many students including myself had difficulty remember our lines for the scenes we were in, because we hadn’t rehearsed in weeks since we were the last group of students to direct scenes. Actors who were in the first scenes that were directed at the beginning of the year had to rehearse lines on their own since there was absolutely no time in class to work on memorization. Theatre students only had a week to prepare for arts night, which made it very difficult and imposed a lot of stress on students. However, with hard work and determination we were able to put together a pretty fantastic show this year.

          Over the past four years that I have been at Beacon, it is truly amazing to see how much has changed throughout the years of participating in arts night.  It’s unbelievable to see how far all of the theatre students have come and how much they’ve improved. I learned so many valuable lessons while taking part in arts night. One being, that time is crucial and that you need to plan out your time wisely in order to get everything you need done. Also, I learned that communication is very important, especially when working with a co-director because you need to share your ideas and thoughts with them. If I could change anything, I would make sure to communicate more with my co-director and actors so that there was no miscommunication and that everyone understood what was expected of them. Other than that, I believe that everyone did a wonderful job. It has been a pleasure working with all of my fellow theatre classmates over the past four years, and I am very proud of everyone for putting together and outstanding senior arts night.