Angie Wintering, a theatre major from Round Lake, Illinois, will be bowing out as she finishes her final semester at Northwestern College. Wintering became interested in the world of theater when her sister promulgated the “Wicked” soundtrack. “I did not think about a career in theatre at the time, but I was enamored with the artistry,” said Wintering. “I knew about musical theatre beforehand, but I was interested in going to the science field.”
Wintering’s first theater production was her church’s Easter play. “I was in the sixth grade, and I played townsfolk. I got to scream in terror as Jesus uttered his last words while I wore what had the texture of a potato sack.”
Before her senior year of high school, NW was on Wintering’s list, but for the sciences and not the theater department. “During the beginning of my senior year of high school, I was doubting my choice of science because I failed my AP science tests, and the lack of an academic lab record for collegiate sciences didn’t help anything,” she said. “One day, I was watching something where one of the characters was a theatre teacher, and the idea cropped up in my head. The concept of someone in theatre who liked to teach hadn’t clicked before. I like theatre, and I like teaching! I could incorporate both!”
Wintering’s main involvement in the theater department was interacting with the lights as designer and master electrician and involvement in RUSH. She has been a dancer, designer and choreographer in her four years at NW. Her first RUSH and designing experience was designing lights for a dance. Theater professor Drew Schmidt walked her through this design process, and she was amazed at the possibilities you can do with dancing and lighting design.
She was the lighting designer for “Love’s Labor’s Lost” and “Charlotte’s Web.” In “Jonah,” she was the master electrician and will fill the same role for the upcoming spring show “Cherry Orchard.” Wintering has also acted in the fall musical, “Little Shop of Horrors.” With all of these theater roles, how does she tie her work with her faith?
Wintering explains how theater is encompassed in the body of Christ: “I love the mentality that our theatre department tries to plant in us, that all the people who work in the theatre are all parts of a whole body… I divert whatever glory I would get onto God, who’s the One giving us our abilities.”
Wintering’s current plan is to move back to Illinois to find theatre opportunities.
For the undergraduates, she encouraged “finding the balance between being the servant in God’s kingdom and taking care of yourself. I thought it was one or the other…We, as Christians, strive to be the servants that God calls us to be, but you cannot be who God wants to be if you do not take the time and pause and listen for what He wants you to be.”
