Tiny Desk concerts showcase student talent
Nabeeha Anwar | Presentation Director
Black Box Players has streamed Tiny Desk concerts on their Instagram Live every Friday since the beginning of April.
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Blake Brewer had just begun to perform the first song in his Tiny Desk concert when donations started to flood into his Venmo.
During his performance on Juneteenth, Brewer raised money for the Amazing Grace Conservatory, the Black-owned performance arts center that offers coaching to youth of color in south-central Los Angeles. He was able to donate $1000 to the conservatory, where he trained from ages 8 to 18.
“With the atmosphere of the world being so bleak I wanted to take that opportunity to lift up those with heavy hearts,” said Brewer, a senior in Syracuse University’s Department of Drama.
Black Box Players, a student-run theater company run out of SU Drama, has streamed Tiny Desk concerts on their Instagram Live every Friday since the beginning of April. The concerts allow SU students to showcase their musical talents.
Black Box Players is a campus organization that students in the drama department run. Any SU student is encouraged to perform a Tiny Desk performance and join Black Box Players, said Caleb Sheedy, co-cabaret director of the group.
The Tiny Desk performances are not limited to singing and can include poetry, acting or any other form of artistic expression that the student wants to share. Around 10 people who were not SU Drama students participated in a Tiny Desk performance, according to Sheedy.
“It was so great (to) have people who aren’t singing musical theater and aren’t always performing to get a spotlight,” he said.
Black Box Players provides drama students with opportunities to perform because they aren’t allowed to join organizations such as First Year Players, which is reserved for non-drama students. Black Box Players is also open to non-drama students, though Sheedy said that 98% of students who come to the organization’s events and meetings are in SU drama.
Sheedy came up with the idea of Tiny Desk concerts while seeing a friend’s Instagram post asking for people’s favorite NPR Tiny Desk concerts, a series in which popular artists perform a short setlist of songs.
He realized that having Tiny Desk performances was the most technically easy way to allow students to perform virtually, as they wanted to avoid Zoom.
Arianna Prappas decided to perform a Tiny Desk concert after hearing about the performances from her roommate, who’s on the Black Box Players board. She opened up her performance with an acoustic version of “You Drive Me Crazy” by Britney Spears.
“It’s just been a really cool way that I feel I have connected to the arts environment on campus from across the country,” she said.
Prappas said she wishes that more students outside of SU Drama knew about Black Box Players because the organization would be a great addition to the student body as a whole.
Michaela Vivona, a recent graduate of SU Drama, used her Tiny Desk concert to perform original music from the EP she’s creating. She describes her music as a mix of pop, country and folk music.
In her senior year, Vivona debuted an original musical she wrote called “Start From Hello.” She was nervous about debuting her own music, but the Tiny Desk concert provided a safe space to force herself out of her comfort zone.
“I can perform as a singer and I can perform musical theater stuff, but when I’m performing as myself I get super nervous,” she said.
She raised over $200 during her performance for The Trevor Project, a foundation that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ youth.
The performances have had an average of 20 to 30 viewers, Sheedy said. He plans to hold fewer Tiny Desk concerts so Black Box Players can focus on its virtual cabarets, in which people send in recordings of performances that are compiled together and played on Facebook Live.
Sheedy doesn’t have any plans for stopping the Tiny Desk concerts, and the performances will most likely happen in the summer and during school breaks, he said.
“It’s (The Tiny Desk Concerts) provided the reminder that no matter what is going on in the world, no matter what is happening or what situation we’re dealing with, theater, art and music can never go away,” Sheedy said.
Published on August 24, 2020 at 8:43 pm
Contact Sydney: sabergan@syr.edu
