Students dancing at last semester’s spring WILD (Sam Powers | Student Life)

Washington University’s Social Programming Board (SPB) announced Saint Motel as the headliner for this semester’s fall WILD, which has been rebranded as the Night at the Pageant. The event will be on Thursday, Nov. 9th, at the Pageant, off campus for the first time since the event’s origin in 1973.

The change in venue means that there will be a number of different event planning procedures, including the use of ticketing because of capacity constraints, the selection of the artist, potential rebranding, and a changing role of transportation, first responders, and security at the event. 

According to junior Abby Sode, Vice President of Engagement and head of SPB, the event is being held off campus because of financial constraints and a lack of time to plan an event. 

Last year, according to Sode, [SPB’s] funding for fall WILD got cut, and now the group is planning on having, “a smaller thing in the fall, and still having the larger one in the spring.”

The budget cuts were made to promote equity amongst all student groups. “It is hard when you have one group that takes a lot of the pie,” said Sode. 

Like every WILD, the majority of the planning is being done by SPB’s concerts director sophomore Ruby Cover, who explained in an email to the student body that the event has been rebranded because not all students would have the chance to attend. 

Since the Pageant has multiple concert services offered in-house, SPB has worked with fewer campus partners to plan the event helping reduce cost and make it more feasible for an event to take place given the shorter timeline for the event. 

“Part of the problem was we have less money to do it, But also, it’s always been difficult to do the fall one because the turnaround is so tight. Spring WILD is at the end of the semester, and all we have [for the fall] is the summer, September, and then it’s supposed to happen in October, right? We’ve been [planning] since like June and it’s happening in November,” said Sode.

Cover, who has been communicating with the Pageant since the start of the semester, is optimistic about how the planning process has gone so far. 

“They’re super excited about putting on this event, and have been super cooperative with all of our needs, and campus constraints,” she said. 

One of the biggest constraints is the venue’s capacity of 2,000 concertgoers, not including any SPB, WUPD, or Pageant staff members in attendance for the event. Since WILD is meant to be accessible to all undergraduate students, SPB is planning on using a “lottery system” to distribute tickets as fairly as possible. 

According to Sode, 500 tickets will be reserved for seniors and “[Students will] essentially fill out a Qualtrics form, and you sign up and say, ‘I want a ticket,’ and then we would draw names.” 

Cover added that since, “the lottery is not necessarily conducive to making sure that people are going with people they feel safe with and going with friends. We have this idea to have people be able to reserve two tickets: one for themselves, and one for another undergraduate WashU student.”

The email from Coer states that the form will be sent out to seniors on Oct. 30 and opened to the rest of the student body on Oct. 31, and will close 24 hours later. It also says that students should be “notified by email later that week if they have received a ticket.”

Tickets will be non-transferable, attached to the individual students, and each one will be general admissions, meaning students will pick their seats at the venue on a first-come, first-served basis according to Sode and Cover. 

This semester, SPB did not send out an artist preference survey for fall WILD to the student body. Sode said they received a list of recommended artists from SPB’s “middle agent” which included artists, “who are up-and-coming or people who are, just maybe a little out of their prime.”

The list of between fifteen to twenty artists was sent to the concerts director who made a choice based on artist flexibility, desires, and student preferences from last semester’s spring WILD. 

“[With] Peach Tree Rascals being a hit, we looked into bands that were in a similar price range, and then our middle agent suggested people and then we just picked the person who was available for our date and who had the most flexibility,” Cover said. 

She elaborated, saying that the selection, “came down to basically one band that had the most flexibility because we also hadn’t picked a date when we were actually figuring out these artists.”

Sode did clarify in an interview that “when the spring rolls around, there will be a preference survey.”

In addition to ticketing, there will also be increased transportation and security at this semester’s WILD to account for it being off campus. The Pageant has its own in-house security and there will also be WUPD officers stationed around the area, “to patrol all of the potential walking paths you can take to get from campus, and the surrounding areas.”

According to Cover, there will be roughly five shuttles each with a 20-40 person capacity picking students up from the Simon Parking Lot and taking them directly to the Pageant. The normal Delmar Loop shuttle will also be running during the event. 

She estimated that a total of approximately 140 students should be able to be transported at one time, and that students should be able to get on the shuttle about every ten minutes.Cover explained that last semester, SPB was able to build relationships with many campus partners through weekly meetings while planning last semester’s WILD. 

“[They] facilitated some pretty strong ties between SPB and campus partners, and so I think this fall, people are a lot more receptive, [which has made it] definitely easier and less intimidating having to reach out to them because they trust us after last spring WILD.”

Despite the increased ease in the planning process, Cover is still nervous about the student response to the announcement of the new WILD procedures. “I feel like if I were a student, I would be frustrated about not being able to attend this event,”she said. 

Yet Cover remains confident the event will be a success because there is no other option. 

“I think hopefully this goes well, because the alternative is just that we simply don’t have a concert at all,” Cover said.