Deep in the Heart of Texas
Youth Jubilee Celebrates San Antonio Temple Dedication
Part 2
By Maurine Jensen Proctor
Photography by Scot Facer Proctor

click photos to enlarge

The event ended with the strains of "The Spirit of God like a Fire is Burning" and a production about prophets and temples.  A picture of each prophet was shown with the temples dedicated during his calling shown on screen culminating with the San Antonio Temple.

The youth jubilee was exciting and vibrant.  The participants will always remember dancing before the prophet in sheer wholesome glee.  But what was most astounding was how and why such an extravaganza was pulled together by ordinary Church members who have other things to do with their lives.

It is surely the continuing miracle of the Church that the most aptly qualified people drop everything they are doing to respond to a call—however new or out of their comfort zone.  What's more, the Church can pull off what almost no other organization can do because its volunteers work wholeheartedly—without reservations and without pay.

The producer was Gary Bradley, who said, "I'm a terrible dancer and an opinionated banker."  He said his entire theater experience "was in a ward show as a tree."

 
Producer Gary Bradley

Director Jeff Chapman said that the total of his experience was participation in a couple of plays at BYU and a roadshow 6 years ago—that's it.

 
Jeff Chapman, Director

Assistant director Kristi Chapman had been in theater at BYU with an expertise in make up, but ended up graduating in family science. 

Mary Cowart, a classically trained musician, had to stretch herself to train kids to sing country music.

Choreographer Christopher Fairbank was, Gary joked, "a hot shot professional dancer who had performed on the New York stage."  But for Christopher, creating and teaching dances to 4,000 kids, including football players who only knew how to stomp in cleats, presented its own challenge. He had to figure out how to make dances simple and how to break them down into the smallest increments to teach.  Just when he thought he'd accomplished that, he had to make it simpler still.

Add to that an impossible time frame—beginning without a final script until December—and the magnitude of the feat of creating the Jubilee begins to be clear.

"We couldn't have done it without the Lord and his miracles," they all acknowledged.  "Things and people just came together when we needed them."

It helped, of course, that Gary is a master manager and that Jeff, as CES director in the area has a winning way with youth.

Still, when it is hard to get an exact count of the kids in any single production number, it's hard to determine how many costumes you'll need and what fits the budget.  Producing the show was a bit like trying to get your fingers around a blob of mercury.

The logistics of the production consumed every minute of their free time in the months that led up to the production.  One staff meeting went until 1:00 a.m., another until 4 in the morning.  The hours were always long and late.

The "dreaded polka" as it came to be called had to be re-choreographed four times.  It came to the point that Christopher went to his assistant and asked, "How did we learn to dance?"  Together they figured out, "This is how you say this, this is how you teach that."

Click here for Part 3 of Deep in the Heart of Texas