When you go to see fun performances on campus like Grammy Award winner Michael Cleveland, do you ever think about what all goes into it? Well, after just a short interview with the Director of Performing Arts here at Bloom, Abby Manns, it’s become clear that more goes on behind the scenes than any of us could imagine.

At the moment, Director Manns is planning events for the 2025-2026 season, an entire year in advance. So why does it take so long to organize these events? Well, not only does Manns have to work with the headliners’ schedules, but she also has to plan around the many things that are always going on around Bloomsburg. “It all has to fit into the university schedule between, you know, commencement, open house and music events and all these other
things…”.

If the fact that the Arts in Bloom events are planned an entire year in advance doesn’t shock you, the staffing behind the events certainly will. To give you some perspective on what the typical staffing for events like those put on by Arts in Bloom is, look at Bucknell University for example.“The Weis Center at Bucknell is similar in capacity [to Bloomsburg]. Theirs is a 1,200-seat theater. They do a lot more shows than we do because their full-time staff over there consists of an executive director, a marketing director, an outreach coordinator, a house manager assistant, an assistant technical director, and a technical director. So what, that’s seven people full-time staff. For this, [it’s] myself and a half-time position.”

The organization of events is left to just Abby Manns and Arts Programming Coordinator Reed Lehman, but a lot of Bloomsburg students are involved as well.

“… the way that we get around that short amount of staffing is I have a student crew of anywhere between 15 and 25 student workers. So depending on the show [it] depends on how many of those student workers I need to use.”

The price of tickets for CU students to get into these events is just five dollars. With such a low admissions price, how is the university paying these headliners as well as student crews as large as twenty-five people at any given time? The answer is they don’t. “The university isn’t paying for the artist fees. All of that money comes from a large sponsorship from the Community Government Association every year, which is amazing, and then we have a lot of people in the community who sponsor [as well as] alumni…”

So much time, effort, and planning go into these events, so go see them! The next Arts in Bloom event is Ailey II on Saturday, November 2nd. While this will no doubt be a great show, the one to see, according to Manns, is the band Melt on Saturday, December 7th. Go, sit back, relax, and enjoy after a long, stressful week of finals.