Through creating a new website and posting art and performances, the Art and Soul Fest will be held online. The event began with recording sessions in the LGI on March 8-10.
Art and Soul Fest faculty advisor Sandy Campagna helped with supervising the making of the website this year to hold the event virtually.
“We knew we weren’t going to be allowed to have people in the building so a virtual event was our next best option,” Campagna said.
Nearing the deadline over this past year, the club focused on the planning of this event with a website in mind and with fewer performers than in previous years.
According to student leader Gina Smyth, the club has had fewer performers since “it’s just been hard to reach out to people and get responses when it’s just submitting work.”
Administrative subleader Emily Pivnichny said that scheduling the time slots for artists and performers this year has been easier due to the virtual setting.
“It’s so much different this year though because it’s an online platform and it’s much different than anything we’ve planned for,” Pivnichny said.
Smyth said the idea for the website came up through collaborations and different ideas thrown around after the club knew they couldn’t host a festival in person this year.
According to Smyth, the club has been sending out online forms and taking in a lot of people’s ideas “to see how we can make this go as smoothly and as efficiently as we could.”
To work with pandemic guidelines, the club planned for the new regulations they were going to set for the recording sessions.
“Sanitizing the equipment has been our main priority,” Smyth said.
Pivnichny said that along with sanitizing the equipment, the administrative subleaders had been planning the time slots so there were 10 minutes per performer and people remained six feet apart on stage.
According to Campagna, performers were able to “video tape themselves and submit that” if they did not feel comfortable coming for recording sessions.
The Art and Soul Fest worked with students from Red Alert to make the running of the sessions and the website creation as smooth as possible.
According to Pivnichny, the group is “very blessed with kids that have been in Red Alert and other tech classes” to set up the new media for the club.
Campagna said that with the new platform of the website, the Art and Soul Fest is planning on continuing to add to the website in the future as a new area of accessibility for the community.
According to Campagna, the club is planning on keeping the website open for the future so “we can add anything we want.”
Due to the limitations of being online and recording performers this year, the Art and Soul Fest decided not to have a theme as they normally would in previous years.
Pivnichny said that the club hasn’t been focusing on decorations because “it honestly hasn’t been our top priority” and some of the decorations could possibly be distracting to the performers.