When they began planning this year’s Black Anthology and Chinese New Year Festival, the performances’ respective organizers never expected to give audiences a double dose of cultural entertainment.

“Because of an unfortunate miscommunication, the only way to accommodate both [of these shows] was to put them on the same weekend,” said Charlie Robin, executive director at Edison Theatre. “It was my error-we worked through all the issues, but there is equal priority for these two student groups.”

Robin explained that last year when setting the schedule for these two events, he had originally scheduled them for the first and last weekends in February, because both shows needed to appear on stage before spring break.

“There is reluctance on the part of the administration to do shows so close to spring break and midterms, so it turned out that the last weekend in February was unacceptable,” said Robin. “I did not know that my original scheduling was not possible within the concerns of the administration.”

Robin said that the groups were coping with this conflict, and that they were reimbursed for the inconvenience of his mistake.

“The student groups are managing with the schedule just fine-they seem to be managing everything pretty well, because the concerns and issues that they had were resolved through conversations months ago,” he said. “We gave them extra staging time and discounts on cost, so they feel like they’re being taken care of even though it’s not an ideal situation.”

Angel Lai, coordinator of CNYF, was under a different impression about the situation. She said that originally she thought that CNYF was to have the Edison for this weekend and that Black Anthology was scheduled for last weekend, but in mid-July, she received a phone call from a dean, who said that Edison only has a few slots for student productions and there was a new student group wanting to appear, so it was only fair to pair up CNYF and Black Anthology on the same weekend.

“We feel this was kind of late notice,” said Lai, “Thismay also hurt our ticket sales.”

Laid also said her group was shortchanged in terms of stage access to practice lighting and staging cues.

Senior and stage manager for Black Anthology, Crystal Moten, expressed similar concerns.

“Some of the problems with double-booking include: reduced tech time and having to come to an agreement with and share the same lighting designer with CNYF,” she said. “Since we were working with such large productions and executive boards, it was hard to communicate effectively.”

Moten said, however, that the reason supplied to her for this conflict was grounded in the administration’s concerns about academics, or midterms near spring break.

Both groups were informed of this problem over the summer, and both are concerned about the negative affects on ticket sales.

“By this time last year, Black Anthology was sold out both nights, but I know that we have not sold out for any nights as of yet,” said Moten.

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