Almira/Coulee-Hartline drama students shift spring performance online

COULEE CITY — The May 7 premiere of “Schoolhouse Rock Live!” wasn’t quite what Almira/Coulee-Hartline drama class students expected when they began preparing for the musical earlier in the school year.

Clifford Bresee, music teacher at Almira/Coulee-Hartline High School, said they held out hope of returning and holding a performance at some point, before learning the school was done for the year after spring break. Bresee has assisted ACH drama teacher Sean Matthewson for the past three years with productions, officially joining the department this year.

“I knew it’d be disappointing to some students, and, at that point, everything we’d been working on was really geared to having a performance,” Bresee said. So I began thinking about what we could do to try and create a virtual performance.”

Bresee said he knew it would be a huge learning curve for everyone, but tried to put together the best plan he could for their drama students. A nine-song musical ultimately became a two-song virtual performance when it premiered online on May 7, on what would have been the date of the final live performance.

Students recorded their parts remotely and Bresee edited the clips together.

Ruth Bresee, a junior at ACH, didn’t have to go far to find a love for music and the performing arts with a music teacher at home.

“My dad is the music teacher at our school, so theater has been part of my whole childhood,” she said. “I’ve done community theater around our area, but I’ve always been super excited to do theater in high school, especially watching and wanting to be involved in the theater with my sisters being involved in it.”

Ruth Bresee said she believes theater is something that’s often under-appreciated, especially when music is involved. Knowing how music-heavy their spring performance was this year, she said, they knew it would was going to be a very different experience putting the performance together virtually.

“As someone who loves to sing and perform and dance, I was really looking forward to performing on stage and showing it to our peers, especially since a lot of us grew up watching ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’” she said. “It was going to be so exciting.”

Losing their final performance of the year, she said, was difficult for a lot of people to deal with, especially with so much else going on with music performances as well. Everything kind of shut down all at once, she added.

“All of us that are involved with the theaters and the arts part of everything, it was super disappointing,” Ruth Bresee said. “I know I had mental breakdowns myself because I felt like everything I enjoyed about the activities in school was just stripped away from me way too soon, before my brain could even catch up with everything that was happening.”

Ruth Bresee said she feels especially bad for the seniors in both departments who lost their last chance at doing something like this with the spring performances. Ruth Bresee said it was “truly heartbreaking” and added she’s not sure there’s a real way to cope with it.

While the show may not have been the one they prepared for, Ruth Bresee said it was important for her to have the chance to still share their performance online.

“We’re still doing the show, but it’s just in a way that’s a little bit different,” she said. “And different doesn’t always have to be bad.”

Ruth Bresee, who played the role of Dina in the show, said one bright note of releasing the performance online was that it hopefully reminded community members of, watching the cartoons when they were younger.

Ruth Bresee said the support for the drama students at ACH is always encouraging, and seeing that same encouragement through messages and comments this past week has been heartwarming.

“We knew that we were still making people happy and sharing our hard work with people, and they were still watching it and enjoying it,” she said.

Madelynn Syth, a junior drama student at ACH, said she was shocked when she heard they wouldn’t be able to do their performance this year. Syth said the hardest part for her in putting together her part for the online performance was not being able to be with the rest of the cast on stage.

“It was really unusual performing the videos all by myself and not having the rest of the cast dancing and performing around me,” she said.

Syth was a part of the ensemble in the heavily choir-themed show, and said she felt the performance turned out great. Being able to share their work with a community that is always excited for each year’s show was great, Syth said.

“It was awesome that we were still able to find a way to perform for the community, because I know it was really disappointing to them knowing there wasn’t going to be an ACH drama performance,” Syth said. “Just seeing us all together, still doing the songs, it still felt like we were able to do some part of the show.”

After this year’s cancellation, Syth said, she knows everyone’s excited and eager to get to work on their next performance, whenever that may be.

Clifford Bresee said he knew there’d be difficulties getting the performance together after working with the remote teaching and learning. Having students be able to record usable, quality performances was a obstacle-laden challenge, he added.

Three main challenges arose. First, Clifford Bresee said, their drama class consisted of primarily underclassmen this year, with only one senior, so experience and expectations varied.

“Typically working collaboratively, it was difficult getting that quality performance from individuals isolated,” Clifford Bresee said.

With his wife on the keyboard, Clifford Bresee said, he sang a lot of the parts himself to give students so they would have rehearsal material to work from.

Second, access to quality internet and technology varied for students creating challenges in recording, he said. The final obstacle, he added, was time.

Clifford Bresee said that since closures went in place, music and performing arts teachers have made a strong push for virtual performances, not realizing how long that takes to assemble. He said he’s currently working on coordinating a virtual performance for the band and choir, which he admitted will probably be five times the size of the drama performance given the number of students involved.

“I’m just starting and learned from the drama one,” he said. “The audio editing and video editing takes hours just to put together that six-minute clip.”

While Clifford Bresee said it’s difficult knowing the potential they had given the time students put in, he was pleased with the performance they were able to share online. For him, he said, the outpouring of positive response was less about the product itself, and more about the importance of the connection it presents between the school and the community.

“Obviously, I’m biased as a music teacher, but the performing arts, music, having our students working together even though they’re not together there, was a moment that represented more than just the performance itself,” he said. “And that was kind of eye-opening to me.”

The outpouring of encouragement and positive response has been nice to see, but Clifford Bresee said there just isn’t any way to replace that moment when the curtains close, the show ends, and the cast is able to share in that sense of satisfaction together.

For him, that’s what was really missing.