Creative Placemaking and Career Development

Omaha Mobile Stage serves as a platform for arts, connection and learning

by Brendan Reilly 

Summer in Omaha once meant one thing to lots of people: a chance to dance, sing or play on the Show Wagon. Show Wagon was a public youth talent competition performed on a trailer-based stage that ran from 1952 to 2010 born from a collaboration between the Parks and Recreation Department and the Omaha World Herald’s Good Fellows charity. The theater on wheels traveled between different parks and community centers to bring neighbors together for a shared performing arts experience, creating fond and important memories. Omaha Mobile Stage takes up the torch of Show Wagon’s legacy, seeking to provide accessible tools and opportunities for communities to build and bolster through the practice of placemaking.

Omaha Mobile Stage (OMS) is the flagship program of Partners for Livable Omaha (PLO), a nonprofit founded in 2020 to support live performing arts in Omaha. The stage is truck-based, designed and built into a converted 18-foot box truck. The side of the truck’s box splits down the middle as double doors on either side, creating a visual framing for the stage. A stage folds down from being tucked inside the box in a vertical position, packing a whole lot of real estate into a relatively minimalistic storage space. Renters of OMS also have access to its professional sound and light system and event production crew. All those moving parts allow OMS to activate any outdoor space.

A chief summer event of OMS is a reboot of Show Wagon. OMS’s Youth Talent Show series is a free-to-the-public traveling competition where kids age 3 to 19 present a four-minute act in their chosen mode, from singing and dancing to original poems and monologues. Winners of the talent shows win eCreamery ice cream and a chance to take home the finals championship later in the season.

Since June 2022, OMS has developed free, public events with organizers from across the city and offers a sliding scale of rental prices for event bookings. Already in their short tenure, they’ve been a regular feature in celebrations in many of Omaha’s older neighborhoods such as Gifford Park, North 24th Street, Vinton and Benson, that are using arts as a tool for main street growth. Events on the stage are programmed by the communities where they take place and are often able to lift and amplify the voices of community activists and performing artists in Omaha’s creative communities. They’ve served neighborhood and arts festivals, Battles of the Bands, Pride events, summer camps and local concerts. They were once booked by the rodeo, which needed a small stage that could fit through the horse gate. OMS was able to thread the needle with nary a hitch.

The wide breadth of events is part of a focus on a diversity of users and building community through a practice called ‘placemaking.’ Jessica Scheuerman, executive director of PLO, describes placemaking as “using arts and culture for community and economic development.” This can refer to large regions, like the whole state or an entire metropolitan area, but Scheuerman likes to think of things in terms of neighborhoods.

“When Omaha Mobile Stage travels around, we’re reflecting the tastes and the culture of the places we go to,” she says. “Artists are very different, depending on the area, and every neighborhood has its own tastes. We defer to the neighborhood to program the stage.”

An example of this is when OMS first appeared at Juneteenth Joy Fest, the event organizer Alajia McKizia adorned the stage and surrounding area with art by Celeste Butler and Patty Talbert, local Black creatives.

John Bartle, Ph.D., dean of UNO’s College of Public Affairs and Community Service (where Scheuerman once had Bartle as a professor) and OMS advisory board member, says the stage’s mobility is a key component to the organization’s placemaking.

“With a mobile stage, they can move to wherever, and bring another way to connect. It brings people out, and tends to bring families out, which can create a very healthy event and environment that can become special to people.”

Another key component to OMS’s mission is serving neighborhoods in Omaha that have been previously divested in. A mobile stage “provides tremendous flexibility. It means you’re not just investing in one particular location and hoping. You go to where there’s something happening and bring another event, and that’s a [community] value added.”

Besides helping create connections in communities across Omaha, OMS is crucially enmeshed with culture and community at the University of Nebraska. Scheuerman attended UNO for her bachelor of arts in journalism and master of science in urban studies. UNL Architecture students and faculty designed and built the stage. Students 

from UNO’s Music Tech program have the opportunity to work for OMS as paid seasonal interns.

Scheuerman works with Seth Shafer, Ph.D., assistant professor of Music Technology at UNO and OMS advisory board member, to share employment opportunities with his students. These internships not only provide students with income while working a job in their chosen field of study, but with real-world, hands-on experience 

they can take with them into their careers post-graduation. Shafer says this lines up with UNO’s educational philosophy and has a net positive effect on the student experience.

“All of a sudden, it becomes very real. They become experts in their niche that they start to get paid to work in, and they’re able to bring that back to the classroom and ask very specific questions. And I think their passion for what they’re doing becomes really infectious.”

Shafer says he’d noticed newer students in the program asking those who had already gotten internships and entry level positions in the music tech field for recommendations or openings at OMS and other places. The work the students do is validating to their education and creates a feedback loop resulting in expertise.

“As an instructor, I can tell them all day long about concepts and do’s and don’t’s but hearing it from somebody who’s paying you to do it or a seasoned colleague, all of a sudden it makes a connection for them.”

OMS’s involvement in recruiting UNO students further strengthens the educational community and leads to more people getting life-sustaining and interesting jobs after graduation. Their work with OMS serves as a parallel of the academic environment, which is then reflected by what’s happening in the real world.

Bobbi Trujillo and Logan Smith, both UNO Music Technology alumni and current assistant audio engineers (who started as interns) at OMS, agree with Shafer’s estimation.

Trujillo started as an intern in the first year of OMS, mostly helping with stagehand and mixing work, and fell in love with the position and the company. They came back to OMS for a second year.

“I like being in the scene,” Trujillo said.

The main audio engineer Trujillo worked with, Jim Schroeder, would be working the board and ask them if they wanted to learn more about running the sound.

“It was basically a learning space for me, like an outdoor class I got paid for, which was awesome.”

Trujillo noticed the impact OMS events had on the communities they worked in, from bringing lots of people and families together at free events without the possible financial barrier of needing to buy tickets to patrons being introduced to neighborhood vendors and local artists they might not have found before. This focus on community is a sticking point for Trujillo’s future plans.

“Everyone who’s doing it this year is from the music tech program. It makes us feel really welcome. I would like to be there as long as I can to help other UNO students, and the performers and the communities. I love how this isn’t just for ‘music people.’”

Smith feels similarly about internships with OMS, considering it an “incredible opportunity for young performers.”

“It’s a teaching venue, so having that opportunity for people like me who are looking for gigs around town is very helpful, because a lot of places here don’t hire without experience.”

Because of his involvement with OMS, his horizons feel broadened, and he believes within a few seasons he’ll have the confidence to go out in the world and call himself a verifiable ‘sound guy,’ a life and career path he hadn’t seen before. He also recommends UNO students jump at the chance to work with OMS and Scheuerman.

“She always says, ‘what do you want to learn,’ and then she points you in that direction.”

Omaha Mobile Stage – and by extension, Partners for Livable Omaha – is on a bright path to building and bolstering communities across Omaha. The opportunities they offer UNO students are a linchpin for their strategy of placemaking and solidify their position as a go-to for the university’s Music Tech program and the greater UNO community at large.