Two students from Dance Marathon’s Louis Room Productions committee talk quietly in the otherwise vacant Louis Room. Someone else stands at the top of a huge ladder and adjusts a ceiling fixture. His colleague sits behind a table on the stage and offers him some direction, their voices echoing off of the partly decorated walls.
On the floor above, though, a jumble of noise from the Dance Marathon office flows out into the hallway and neighboring rooms.
“We’re fixing a crisis right now!” says Chip Newcom, who chairs the DM executive board with Nadia Rawls. Neither he nor Rawls have time to offer the press a few quotes, so he sends Media and Public Relations co-chair Krysta Kauble out to talk Wednesday evening.
Kauble and the rest of the Media and Public Relations committee have dealt with local and national media all week long, in addition to reporters from Northwestern publications.
“But the main thing that we’ve been working on are the celebrity videos,” she says. These videos consist of celebrities who offer encouragement to the couples who’ll dance for 30 hours, starting at 7 p.m. on March 2.
A cart weighed down by a box of merchandise appears from around the corner, guided towards the elevators by Mark Dean Henley, co-chair of the Merchandise committee. He and his committee members sell DM-emblazoned paraphernalia in the residence halls, which they call “dorm storming.”
By now, a crowd has formed at the office’s entrance. “There are a lot of people out there,” someone informs Kauble. She assures him that she will be there in a moment. The crowd gets bigger.
“Ummm…” Kauble says as she attempts to regain her composure. “The last thing that the Food committee does – well, actually, the entire board does this, is leave here at one in the morning on Friday and beg stores for fresh fruit and produce until 4 a.m.”
“Hey, these people want their t-shirts!” someone yells.
“We’re very confident it will be our best year yet,” Kauble says before disappearing back into the office.
The last thing the DM executive board will do before the start of the event is synchronize their watches. Andrew Prince, co-chair of Louis Room Productions, said: “We run on ‘DM Time’ so our producers, stage managers, technical directors, and our entire board knows exactly what will be going on at any time.”
Kauble described the remaining committees needed to put on DM (there are 12 total):
- The Alumni and University Relations committee makes phone calls and sends out e-mails and old-fashioned snail mail to get support from NU faculty and alumni.
- The Special Events committee focuses on setting up small parties and get-togethers with student groups to encourage involvement throughout the campus, while Norris Project Planning members concern themselves with the fundraising that supports the unique amenities they offer, such as the DM Spa and the DM Coffeehouse.
- The Advertising committee has been bombarding student listservs and Facebook with information announcing DM events.
- The Outreach committee has been working to get the entire campus behind its “One Cure, One Northwestern” campaign.
- The Finance committee continuously crunches the latest fundraising numbers as the Corporate Relations committee works with all of its sponsors, a list that grows relentlessly despite the committee’s efforts to finalize it. “We get more corporate sponsors everyday,” Kauble says.