Five years ago, on Feb. 12, 2014, we published an opinion piece complaining about the state of our high school auditorium.
The facility, frankly, had become an embarrassment. Its condition was a slap in the face to anyone, especially our young people, who had any aspirations toward quality musical or theatrical performance.
There were deep gouges in the stage floor. The stage curtains were in shreds – or nonexistent. The auditorium had no sound system at all. The portable sound systems used in it were a joke, a bad one.
Students, who had prepared with great energy for performances, would get up on stage and be faced with failing technology, as they sweated under the antique stage lights that made performing a sweat-soaked enterprise. The mics would crackle as students tried to sing solos – or they didn’t work at all.
Things weren’t much better in the Main Gym, where it was often very difficult to decipher what was being said, with the echo factor and the crummy speaker system.
Five years later, what the auditorium – and the gym – offer now is night and day from what used to be.
The School District took the opportunity, as it did needed earthquake safety upgrades, to improve other aspects of the auditorium and this year committed to joining SHARC and its successor SHOCASE, groups dedicated to improving the auditorium and promoting arts in the Sweet Home community, in putting money on the table to solve the problems.
With the help of SHARC-SHOCASE fund-raising efforts, the district paid the lion’s share of the expense of installing sound and lighting equipment in the audorium and new sound equipment in the main gym.
Art is important, particularly in a blue collar community like ours where a lot of us are simply concerned about earning a living, often at great physical exertion. Singing, dancing, theater represent another aspect of the human experience that many of us don’t engage with often enough.
A few years ago, local organizers put on a chainsaw carving demonstration during Sportsman’s Holiday. They brought in some carvers who went to work on logs provided locally. Not only was it entertaining and inspiring to watch the artists produce eagles and fish and bears, but it brought out a crowd of local residents who had obviously made it a point to stop by and observe. Some even sought out the artists afterward to negotiate for some personal chainsaw art pieces.
Times like that are good for us.
Art – whether it be a musical performance or a beautiful painting or a statue in a public park, enriches each of us. It brings individuals together in common appreciation of what someone contributes in the public arena. It fosters community.
Arts give us a means to communicate publicly. They inspire us, sometimes, to action. They help us stretch our minds and our creative appreciation and intelligence.
Art is all around us, sometimes in places we don’t expect to find it. Human beings are creative, and art is how we often experience that.
That’s why art is good for Sweet Home, and that’s why we appreciate the efforts and ingenuity that went into the changes described above.
And now we have an opportunity to sample the improvements in the auditorium.
SHARC, the Sweet Home Auditorium Remodel Committee, formed in 2014 for that purpose, is holding its fifth annual SHARC Showdown talent show on April 6.
The dual purpose of this event has been to give local artists a venue to show the world what they have to offer, and also to raise funds to replace those curtains and those lights and that sound system.
It’s been a process. Some artists have been handicapped by the limitations of the facility. SHARC has been forced, in some years, to rely on donated sound and lights because the house equipment was unreliable, the lighting, or did not exist at all, the sound.
SHARC volunteers have repaired and painted the stage and auditorium, and they have spent their time raising funds for this project.
Those efforts have been paying off with improved productions by the choir, band and drama programs at the high school, and they will continue to pay off April 6 in a chance to watch local performance artists with a wide range of talents and of a wide range of ages, entertain us with, they hope, their best stuff.