Cabaret Night, a night celebrating the arts, is “the best night of the second semester,” said veteran English teacher Carolyn Brown. “The Academy Awards is the best all-school event of the fall semester, and if students enjoyed that night, they will also enjoy Cabaret.”
Performances in dance, music, theatrics, and, yes, even art, will fill performing areas in the Commons, the Auditorium, the Library and the halls of the school on Thursday, March 26, from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
And it’s totally free.
Students, parents, patrons of the school and anyone who wants to be here will wander from one place to another and enjoy surprising talent by NDA students and staff.
“From yo-yoing to singing to even stand-up comedy–there’s too much to see and hear. You can’t see or hear it all,” added Brown.
Coordinating the event is Jen Laaksonen, director of activities, art teacher Tina Harpold, choir director Maria Hinnendael and band director Steve Johnson.
“I always love hearing the art winners be cheered for at Cabaret Night. Typically art gallery exhibits don’t get that loud, but this makes it so much more exciting, and I also love seeing who all shows up to support the art students because it’s a lot more than you might think,” said Harpold.
Harpold has to do a copious number of things in coordinating Cabaret Night. Art students submit artwork to both display and be scored, and then she has to find three different art professionals every year that can attend as judges and score the work.
Harpold then makes notes about their observations and decisions and announces it in the auditorium that evening.
She also has to get prizes and coordinate the framing and display of the winning work.
“The art students and I design a layout that fits all of the student work and is visually appealing while taking into account the traffic patterns of all the attendees and the other performance spaces,” said Harpold.
She also has to pre-mount most of the work on board because she doesn’t have much time on the night of the event before the public starts arriving. Between cataloging and making accurate labels for all the pieces, curating the layout, mounting, setup, judging logistics, working with maintenance to get supplies, and publicizing the event, it is hours and hours of work to get things in place in time for the public to have a good experience.
“All this work doesn’t even include the two years of work that the IB art students have put into their exhibitions, curating the layout and viewer experience for each of their 8-11 piece collections, coordinating the locations and getting site permissions, installing work, preparing and practicing their art talks, and everything they put into getting ready to submit to the IB examiners for scoring,” said Harpold.
On the music side of the programming, Hinnendael is also rehearsing with ensembles and soloists to prepare for their performances. In the past she has performed by herself and watched other performances.
However, this year she unfortunately cannot attend since she is leading a rehearsal with over 200 musicians at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton parish in preparation for the performance of Handel’s Messiah on Palm Sunday.
“I am most excited to see kids that do not usually perform onstage express a new side of themselves and either sing, do art, perform, or more,” said Johnson, whose musical groups fill the Commons with music all evening.
