Like all musical activities at Bemidji State, the Department of Music’s recent opera theatre production of “The Mikado” provided opportunities for non-music majors to play significant roles.<\/p>\n
Cooper Blackwood is one student who has taken full advantage of those opportunities. Blackwood earned a lead role in “The Mikado” as a science major who also is student-teaching.<\/p>\n
“Because we are a smaller school, opportunities like this are open to anyone on campus,” he said. “If you’re interested there’s a way you can get involved. There’s a welcoming group of people wanting you in a family of performers. You just have to be willing to make the time commitment.”<\/p>\n
For Blackwood, making that commitment himself hasn’t come without its challenges. He is married, has young children and is currently student-teaching in Blackduck, Minn., 26 miles northeast of Bemidji.<\/p>\n
“I drove home 30 minutes, and when my wife got home I immediately headed for rehearsal,” he said.<\/p>\n
His love for performance honed in high school theater and during time singing with the Bemidji Choir last year made keeping up with that grueling schedule worth the effort.<\/p>\n
“I love to perform and I love singing,” he said. “This has been a wonderful experience for me. It’s been great to be part of a performance like this again.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Like all musical activities at Bemidji State, the Department of Music’s recent opera theatre production of “The Mikado” provided opportunities for non-music majors to play significant roles. Cooper Blackwood is one student who has taken full advantage of those opportunities. Blackwood earned a lead role in “The Mikado” as a science major who also is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20384,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[959],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-circle-story"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20383"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20385,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20383\/revisions\/20385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}