Anna Kann
FM Community Theatre

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

For someone whose corporate title is Minister of Magic-Making, the holiday season is bound to be a special time.
Two years ago, Anna Kann was in Washington, D.C., decorating the White House for Christmas. With the rest of the Smithsonian Institution’s festival staff, she helped build the outer archway.
This year was a little different. In past weeks you could have found her in the FM Community Theatre’s construction shop, hammering and sawing and painting away on the set and props for the Christmas show being staged right now by the FM Community Theatre. Her creative style is on display in “Winter Wonderettes,” the holiday musical revue featuring favorites from the 1960s, performed through Sunday and again Dec. 19-20 on the FMCT stage in the Hjemkomst Center.
For the past two years, the Iowa City native has brought her experience with technical theater design to the musicals and plays produced by Fargo-Moorhead’s oldest theater company. A graduate of the Sargent Conservatory of Theatre Arts in St. Louis, Missouri, she joined the FMCT staff two years ago. Among her favorite projects since then: The ultra-realistic set for the dark psychological thriller “Wait Until Dark,” and its near-opposite, “Junie B. Jones: The Musical,” a playful, stylized set for the youth-oriented production.
Along with technical director Rick Lewis and production manager Katie Link, Anna creates and produced everything on the stage but the actors themselves.
She fell in love with everything that goes on behind the scenes, she says, in high school. “I played soccer very competitively in elementary and middle school. But when I got to high school, I thought I should find something to do with myself when it’s not soccer season,” Anna recalls. “I saw the ad for the theater club. I said, ‘Oh, I think I could help paint.’
“The senior boys looked at me and said, ‘We don’t need painters. We need you to help us build.’ I didn’t know how to build anything. They told me, ‘That’s fine. If you just show up after school, we’ll teach you.’ It was a real free-for-all, but I learned a lot.”
She was fascinated – even more when the director introduced a grad student majoring in technical direction to talk to the crew. “That was the first time I realized you could go to school for theater design and make it a profession,” she remembers. Changing her college plan from biology to technical theater, she found the Sargent Conservatory at Webster University and set off for four years of intense immersion in every aspect of technical production, from scenography painting and design to drafting, costume design, makeup, lighting and sound.
Technical direction, she learned, is one of the most employable aspects of theater study. While actors typically struggle to find their place on stage, the tech specialists are in demand by a host of organizations – not only theaters of all kinds, but production houses, churches with AV capabilities and concert producers.
Anna found her first job with the prestigious Smithsonian Institution in 2016. She was assigned to the production crew for the annual Folklife Festival on the National Mall. “I started out as an exhibit worker, which is the glorified way of saying ‘carpenter,’” she says. “We’d essentially built a museum with everything but walls for the 10-day festival – concert venue, plumbing, electrical, all the artisan things that they need. We had about two to three months of setup each year before the event, then two weeks to take it all down.”
She helped decorated the White House twice. She also worked on the festivals for the opening of the African American History Museum and the Freer Gallery of Asian Art. “Essentially, anytime they had a random thing that they needed done, they figured the Smithsonian FolkLife Festival can do it,” she remembers.
Anna also freelanced for other groups, including the St. Louis Rep, Opera Theater of St. Louis, the Utah Shakespeare Festival, Baltimore Center Stage and North Carolina Folk Festival. One of her contracts even brought her to Fargo, where she created the design for “Peter and the Star Catcher.” While here, she happened to meet a young Spanish instructor from North Dakota State University named Heath Wing, now an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages. “We kept in touch long-distance and traveled back and forth,” Anna says.
By 2020, she had worked her way up to assistant technical director of the Smithsonian festival. “I took a research trip to the United Arab Emirates in February,” she says. “I’d planned to join Heath in Fargo after the festival was over. And then the pandemic hit.”
The festival was canceled. And so, in March 2020, she found herself driving alone from Washington to Fargo. “It was just me and the truckers on the road,” she says. “It was weird.”
After spending the next year handling online marketing for the Dakota Timber Company, she was preparing to search for more freelance theater projects. “I was just getting ready when I heard a friend mentioned that the FMCT was looking for some help,” she says. She handled the technical production for several shows on her own, then was hired full-time in February 2023.
Anna’s decidedly non-corporate title, Minister of Magic-Making, is a light-hearted acknowledgment of the breadth of her interests: “My background is theater design, indoor theater design, but I’ve done a lot of outdoor festivals. That’s my passion, bringing art outside to people,” she comments. “I mean, inside is great — especially good here, where it’s winter a lot of the time – but I try to capitalize on any opportunity to do art outside in the sunshine.”
That notion led to an unexpected collaboration with Parks and Rec, the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County and Riverkeepers. Anna’s dimensional figures of a bear, bee, butterfly and other emblems are part of the interpretive signage along the Red River Discovery Walk in Viking Ship Park.
While many theater people dream of working on Broadway, the Great White Way holds no attraction for the FMCT’s Minister of Magic-Making. “I never wanted to live in New York. The closest I got was Baltimore and D.C., and that was enough East Coast for me,” Anna says. “Heath found his dream job at NDSU, right out of school, so he’s happy here. And then, I never thought I would be working full-time, doing full-time theater, doing the some of the best work that I’ve ever done in Fargo-Moorhead.
“We like our house. We like living in Moorhead. This is an opportunity that’s made us we’re very, very happy.”