Sound and Light Crew

by Jana Kanakaratnam 

In high school, I was a quiet kid who usually kept to himself. I joined the Sound and Light Crew because I found out that someone I wanted to get to know was also joining. I didn’t really know much about it, but, once I joined, however, it opened a whole other world to me -  one of wonder, excitement, and make-believe.  This was the world of Theatre and the Performing Arts.

Tech crew in high school was an easy way for me to socialize. It also gave me an outlet for my creative side. It was lots of fun being able to help design and craft different looks for the various performances and assemblies. There was also the thrill of being part of the running crew and experiencing live theatre as part of the team putting it on.

In my final year of high school, I was promoted to co-head of my school's Sound and Light Crew.  The crew and their responsibilities had expanded over the years, becoming too much for one student to manage, so now two students were needed to share in this responsibility.  The "Co-Heads" of the tech crew in our school held a position of both prestige and responsibility. We worked with administration, student council, caretakers, and with many teachers and students.  During my leadership, I helped to link us up with other tech crews from neighbouring schools so we could learn from one another and share equipment whenever possible. We were trusted, and we were proud to live up to that trust. 

The choice to join the tech crew led me to go to university for Technical Theatre Productions. Being part of the tech crew taught me various transferable skills and gave me leadership experience that I took with me both to university and after, when I travelled and worked in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Wellington, New Zealand.

Though theatre or related work has not been my primary employment, I have gone back to that pool of work from time to time, sometimes to help a fellow techie friend in need and, other times, I just needed to make a bit more money. Often it was entirely to satisfy a creative need.

I find that I’ve never really strayed far from those outlets that I learned about during my years on the Sound and Light crew in high school.

Meeting like-minded people as a teenager helped me find my chosen network of friends and colleagues. I've stayed close to most of the friends that I made during my university career, and we still meet up, from time to time, for various occasions. Some have even become closer to me than my family. We have a powerful bond, forged behind the scenes, in that world of theatre and the performing arts that we all love so much.