#AdaTIFFmems - When volunteer orientation sessions included improv

As volunteers of the festival, we are expected to adhere to rules & regulations around confidentiality. That said, I feel comfortable (and compliant) with discussing today's memory because none of these practices are still in use.

Once in a while if you run into one of us who have been helping at "Orientation Sessions" or (an even older term) "recruitment sessions" we might start telling you about a time when you had to sign up for shifts on paper, when powerpoint presentations didn't accompany presentations, etc.

For some years, one of the ways to spice up the (then) loooong speeches, was to have volunteer representatives from each of the venues/departments get on stage to give a quick 1-2min speech.  It was more like an elevator pitch, to encourage volunteers to sign up for a particular venue/department.

Like a lot of the things then, it was a bit "fly by the seat of your pants".  Who gave the venue speeches was dependent on who was volunteering that day, we didn't have guidelines on what to say other than "talk about the venue", so as I mentioned in the title, it was very much like improv.

We often riffed off each other, would jokingly try to "one up" each other, sparking a little friendly competition on stage between venues.  Some days these speeches weren't very inspired, or jokes fell flat, but other days there was a good energy, and I like to think generated some excitement for the new volunteers.

It was always a hoot when you had to substitute for a venue you knew nothing about and desperately tried to remember what was said in the previous session's speech.

Some sessions you spoke in front of a crowd of a hundred or less.  Then there was the time I stepped on stage at Massey Hall (on my birthday no less), peered out at 300 (or more?) people, and tried to convince them that Elgin was great (ok, fine, that part of the task is easy, but that was the largest crowd I'd ever spoken in front of and I didn't even have notes!)

It's thanks to these impromptu speeches that I feel reasonably comfortable speaking to crowds today.