Being a High School Technician

Being in high school is stressful and I wasn't coping too well until l discovered the wonderful world of technical theatre.

I’m currently 17 and I'm proud to say that theatre is my hobby and I very much enjoy it. But why is this so? I discovered by accident in a music lesson at school. I was being taught by an older student. He started talking about a show he did on the week end.

I thought he was a actor. I had been in my year 6 production as the nerd, which was one of four main roles. I had enjoyed the role so much and I am still good friends with the 3 girls who wore in the other roles. However, then he started to talk about strange stuff, like data errors and desks crashing. I asked him what role he played in the show, which he responded with "I'm no soft-prop, Im a tech."

Over the next year, the older students told me stories of shows he had worked on each weekend. But then came production time, I had put my hand up to work backstage, however I ended up doing a lot more then pushing sets. I so many new things during the show. Concepts that I use on a day to day basics such as patching.

The show ended and I wanted to do more. At the start of the following year, I started to help more on the technical side of the school. I helped design and rig "The Crucible" which was the theater studies play for that year. Later that year, I was lucky and got to do see what it was like to do shows in a Professional venue. It was amazing.

I learned so much in the follow 6 months and finally I got to work on my first proper show. Guys and Dolls for Panorama Theatre Company. This had been the best 2 weeks of my whole life. I got to meet over 50 new people and be directly involved with the running of a show.

Since then I have done anything thrown at me and I frankly could not go back to my old life style. If i hadn't had discovered theatre, I don't know where I would be now.