NHS Drama Club Goes Online

by Catie Lasek

In spite of the Coronavirus pandemic, the Niskayuna High School Drama Club has persisted. While meetings don’t look exactly like they have in past years, seniors co-presidents Caroline Skrebutenas and Dan Watson have changed and adapted the structure of the club to support their new virtual format, and have some innovative ideas for the future of the NHS Drama Club.

From an outside perspective, it would seem difficult to act and perform in a completely online forum, but this is not entirely the case. While the drama club is not currently meeting in person, acting and performing are still made possible through improvisation games and activities of the sort over Google Meet. Each meeting, Skrebutenas and Watson, present new and fun topics for younger actors to learn about and practice. The club officers have been focusing on creating a well rounded and enriching experience by exploring many aspects of acting, including voice acting, improvisation, monologue work, and Shakespearean text.

The online members have been gaining valuable takeaways from each meeting, some possibly without realizing. Skrebuentas reports that each meeting she sees more and more club members actively participating with their cameras on, and unmuting their microphones more often during club activities. The drama club officers are hoping that these habits translate into their virtual school days as well. Joining the drama club, or any school club for that matter, could prove to be a beneficial experience for the freshman who have had a strange first year of high school so far. It seems to be more difficult for younger students to reach out and make long lasting friendships this year because of the smaller in person classes and having each student go completely virtual every other day. To have a club such as the drama club available for underclassmen could be a positive opportunity for them to make these connections and find other students with interests similar to them, even if their interactions are solely online at the moment.

In the future, Drama Club has some rough plans to do an all-virtual monologue or talent night rather soon, and some kind of formal performance in the spring. Currently, the Little Theater is being used as a classroom space, so they are unsure if that space would work for any sort of performance. If it violates health codes to have something indoors, Skrebutenas noted that the club would love to have something filmed outdoors with actors socially distanced and with masks on, similar to how the club performed two one-act shows in Spring of 2020. But just as the NHS Drama Club has been adapting over the course of the pandemic, so has the entire theater industry. There are now some plays being written specifically for online performances, and the drama club is in the process of looking into a few of those as possibilities for their spring performance.

Overall, the Niskayuna High School Drama Club had to change quite a few things this year in order to fit the guidelines given to them. But this does not mean that they have to put a stop to educating students on different aspects of theatre and having a fun time while doing it. After all, the Niskayuna High School Drama Club embodies one of the most common phrases used in theatrical arts: the show must go on.

Anyone interested in joining NHS Drama club can join the club’s Remind by texting @niskydrama to 81010 or use the code ld6ph7f to join the club’s Google Classroom. The club meets via Google meet every Wednesday at 2:45. For more updates, follow @niskydramaclub on Instagram!