Annual Brunch Performance Celebrates Collegiate Seniors

11/20/2017

When Brunch originated at the Collegiate School for Girls in the 1940s, it was, as the name suggests, a holiday meal for students. Today, the event has transformed into a veritable holiday musical extravaganza created and performed by junior girls in honor of senior girls.

Collegiate dance teacher Kara Priddy has overseen the production of Brunch for eight years. She shares details of what goes into the production, why it’s supposed to be so loud and why Collegiate girls can’t wait to be a part of it.

The Preparation

“We start preparing in June. As soon as exams are over, we have a meeting with all the junior girls and introduce ourselves and explain the process and what opportunities are available in terms of how they can participate. They vote on their co-chairs, who are two student leaders in charge of the whole thing. Then they vote on heads of all of the other committees. One committee is in charge of making Brunch T-shirts. One is the fake theme committee and members are in charge of spreading fake news around to throw people off of the scent. Other committees have to do with the script, the dances and the costumes. Then they vote on the theme. Over the summer, the girls write the script and choose all the songs and start choreographing the dances. As soon as we get back to school, we have auditions the second or third week of school and rehearsals start the week after that.”

Dreaming of Brunch

“You’ll probably hear almost every junior girl say, ‘I’ve been dreaming of this since I was in 5th Grade.’ It’s kind of shocking how excited they get. The day of, it’s insanely loud. The first time I saw it, coming from a theater background, I was kind of appalled. You can’t even hear the lines. It took me a little while to understand that that’s part of the process, how excited they are and the audience interaction. But once you get what’s happening, it’s understandable why they are so excited. It’s the bonding experience that happens, just the tradition of it. It’s the reason people get excited for Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas. You have these traditions that bring this nostalgic feeling back to you. So every year around this time, they all start anticipating that.”

Best of Brunch

“As the dance program has grown and gotten more intensive, the Brunch dances have as well because those girls take what they’re learning in dance class and bring it to Brunch. When I first started, the script was kind of mean. There were a lot of inside jokes going on, which I had no idea what any of them were. They were all going over my head. The more I learned, I quickly put the kibosh on it. I don’t let them make fun of specific people. The whole point of Brunch is celebrating girls. It’s not just celebrating the seniors. It’s a celebration of the community of sisters that you have at Collegiate starting in 5th Grade. They are here to watch you and have a fun, exciting experience. The year they did Monsters Inc. [in 2015], the script was really good. It actually became more original because they stopped making those silly jokes about people. So Monsters Inc. was a year I thought Brunch was really original. They had done a good job of coming up with new ideas.”

The Appeal of Brunch

“Brunch is a huge bonding experience. It gives them a common thing that they’re all really excited to come together on. I’ve really tried to stress that this is not just about them. It’s about the rest of the girls at Collegiate, too. They are doing this for them. How can we make everybody in the audience feel included in this? And how can we make the 5th Graders feel like they’re just as much a part of this as the senior girls?”

Brunch Goals

“I tell the junior girls to not speak until the senior girls stop screaming. Some years are better than others. Even if they’re screaming for five full minutes, I tell them, ‘Do not say your line until they stop screaming.’ They eventually will. I’ve had teachers in the past couple of years say, ‘I could actually hear some of it! I could actually understand some of the lines.’ I’m working toward that. I would love for there to be a balance.”

Brunch (with its secret theme of Lilo and Stitch) was held Wednesday, Nov. 22.

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