Music ensembles
The concert band, jazz ensembles, the pep band that plays Ironclads games, choirs, a percussion ensemble, and small chamber groups are open by audition or sign-up to students in any major — a large share of members are engineering, business, and science students who played in high school and want to keep playing. Most can be taken for a credit or joined non-credit.
Theater
The theater program casts main-stage productions from open auditions, not just from majors, and the crews — set, lights, sound, costumes, stage management — always need people and teach you on the job. There is also a student-run one-act festival and an improv troupe.
Classes you can just take
Acting, stagecraft, music fundamentals, applied lessons on an instrument, dance, and digital music production are open as electives. They satisfy a general-education slot for many programs and are a genuinely different use of your brain from a lab-heavy schedule.
Dance and other groups
Student-run dance teams (several styles), an a cappella group, a musical-theater club, and cultural performance groups perform across the year and recruit each fall. These are organizations, so the commitment and audition process vary — ask at the org fair.
Where it happens and who comes
The arts season — concerts, plays, recitals, guest artists, the visiting writers series — runs all year in the campus theaters and galleries, with student rush tickets that are close to free. Going to a show is one of the cheapest good nights out on campus.
Why bother
For a lot of students the ensemble or the show is the thing that keeps a hard semester balanced — a standing rehearsal with a different group of people, a performance to point toward, and a skill that has nothing to do with your GPA. It is also where students from every major mix.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Every office, person, building, phone number and statistic on this page is invented; nothing here describes a real institution or a service you can actually contact.