Curtain Club’s PowerPoint night features presentations on video games, fairy tales, and more

Morgan “Slideless Morgan” Davis presents on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night during Friday’s PowerPoint night.

Photo credit: Elizabeth Salo

By Elizabeth Salo

There was anticipation and laughter over dramatic presentations in Thom Auditorium on Friday night as Concordia’s Curtain Club hosted its first annual PowerPoint Night.

There were 16 presentations by students on a wide variety of topics, including video games, conspiracy theories, fairytale real estate crises, theological analyses of themes in pop culture, impersonations, and fake eulogies.

Some of the presentations were heavily improvised, as with sophomore Morgan “Slideless Morgan” Davis, given the nickname by Curtain Club Vice President junior Claire Horacek. Davis explained the plot of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to the audience, but his last-minute decision to present meant he had no slides prepared.

“Earlier in the day…I delivered a presentation on Twelfth Night, and I decided it would be funny, since my teacher was in the room, to adapt the presentation and make it more humorous and a lot less formal,” Davis said.

Another presenter was junior Sarah Stepp, who performed a theatrical presentation on “Princesses Trapped in a Tower,” which was inspired by another theater project she was working on.

“I actually got the idea from the show I’m directing, Commedia,” Stepp said. “There’s a moment of ‘Princess in a Tower’, and it got stuck in my head, and I thought it would be a really funny presentation to do.”

Given the variety, students were not given a lot of guidelines on their presentations, but there were a few rules.

“I put out information asking people to create a presentation that was on a theater-related topic or utilizing the theater in some capacity, whether that be that a character was presenting or you are doing some sort of creative theater presentation,” said Horacek. “And I asked that it be between five and seven minutes long. I asked that it be ‘Dr. Bull appropriate’…but otherwise they were allowed to do whatever they wanted.”

Horacek said that this was the first event of its kind that the Curtain Club has hosted. The club hopes to boost its number of events per year, and PowerPoint Night was partially inspired by the IMPROVables.

“I’ve seen [PowerPoint Nights] around, and I think they’re fun, and there’s an element of theater and performance in them,” said Horacek. “We have a game in IMPROVables called ‘Slideshow’ where IMPROV members will be the slideshow and then two other members will present…and so when I was brainstorming ideas for Curtain Club, I wanted to do more events than we had been previously, and I though, that’s popular, that’s fun, we can get people to do it…and it was fun.”

Overall, the night appeared to be a success, and audience members expressed that they had had a fun time.

“I did enjoy the Curtain Club’s PowerPoint night,” said junior audience member Autumn Consier. “I came and I’m glad that I came, and it was just a lot of students who just had fun. Some of the presentations were a little bit more serious…It was good, it was educational…and some of them were just fun.”

Freshman audience member Naomi Sharkey was invited by a friend, and she very much enjoyed the evening.

“I enjoyed it a lot, I thought that they did really well,” she said. “Everything was either educational or really, really funny, too, and poked good fun at each other.”

Bryan Moore, a professor of theatre and the Curtain Club’s advisor, said he “was pleased with the creativity and talents of the students as they were sharing their passions with their peers.”

The next Curtain Club event is set for Oct. 3, when students will present their annual children’s play, The Commedia: Tales of King Arthur, at 4:30 and 7 p.m. in the Borland Black Box Theatre. Admission is free.