On Friday, March 2, Building Bridges put on the annual talent show titled “GAC’s Got Talent.” Building Bridges hosts this event in order to promote their annual conference.
This year, that conference was on Saturday, March 3 and surrounded the topic of mental health.
The talent show was one of numerous events during last week before the conference.
“We had an event each day of this week and…to kick off the conference we do this talent show every year on Friday night,” senior Kelsey Backer, one of the co-captains of the events committee for Building Bridges, said.
Various members of the Building Bridges organization held auditions for Gustavus students that wanted to participate and be a part of the show.
Since Christmas and January Term were longer this year, the organization only had about a week to seek out students who wanted to share their talents.
“We tabled the first week of this second semester everyday to try to get people.” Backer said. Auditions were held during the first weekend of this semester.
Two students who sang together were excited to debut their talents.
“We both have some kind of musical background, so we’ve performed before but I’ve never done anything like this,” sophomore Nikki Abraham said.
Both women were eager to share what their voices.
“The only solo [performance] I’ve done is…karaoke. Otherwise it’s been…choir,” Sophomore Taylor Graft said.
Both Abraham and Graft didn’t seriously consider singing in the show until they learned more about what it was behind.
“I think it started off kind of [as] a joke and then we [decided] ‘We’re going to audition’ and then we were like “Oh, we made it, this is real. Okay, we’re doing it now!’” Graft said.
Both women were excited to make it past the audition and eager to share their talents.
The show consisted of singing, dancing and even a stand-up comedy routine.
Students laughed, admired their fellow classmates and were even moved to tears by some of the routines.
Wide varieties of talents were shared and each one was unique to the performer, helping to remind us of the talent that the Gustavus community possesses.
Many people look forward to this show and to this particular event during the week of the conference. “It’s fun to get to see…my friends perform. Seeing the rest of the Caf engage and have a lot of fun is really, really awesome,” Backer said.
Building Bridges has different goals for why this show, but one is to bring awareness to mental health and to that year’s upcoming conference.
“It’s a fun way to get the student body connected and we’ll be doing a little bit of mental health trivia and Building Bridges trivia throughout the night, but it’s really to just let the whole campus know that we’re doing Building Bridges this weekend,” Backer said.