Applause and strategic clapping of the hands were in order for Saturday night’s talent show, put on by Activities Programming Board as part of NKU Homecoming week.

The talent show consisted of nine acts, all of which were auditioned for and consisted of mostly singing and instrument playing, with a few featuring spoken word and poetry. Judges scored the acts according to quality of the talent as well as crowd satisfaction of the act itself.

B105 DJ’s Ryan Jacobs and Jesse Tack hosted the event, cracking jokes between acts and helping to call out raffle ticket winners to claim their prizes of Mountain Dew 12-packs or if you were really lucky, a bag of Doritos.

Applause after each act helped to clue everyone in on who was the favorite. In fact, first place winner, Syreeta Briggs, a freshman theatre major, received the most enthusiastic and lively applause of all of the acts.

Briggs’ act was a spoken word piece called  “Robert’s Room” that she wrote based on her experience with her younger brother Robert who is diagnosed with nonverbal autism. The basis of the piece was to compare being artistic to being autistic.

“I guess being frustrated with never knowing how to articulate what it means to be an artist,” Briggs said referring to her underlying reason for writing “Robert’s Room.”

Briggs said that having her experience of her younger brother being autistic made it easy for her to find a correlation between what it means to be misunderstood as an artist and misunderstood as someone with autism and create the metaphor that resulted in “Robert’s Room.”

Briggs performed in this year’s talent show as a freshman and said she just might try out again next year.

“I am addicted to the energy of performing,” she said.  “I feel like there is absolutely nothing like it.”

Brian Roetker, senior sports business major came to the talent show last year but said that this year’s was better and had more variety.

“I think it was a good mix of musical talent as well as creative poetry and writing,” Roetker said. “It’s great to see all of the talent that NKU has to offer.”

Senior, computer information technology major, Shriver Withrow enjoyed the talent show as well, citing Syreeta’s spoken word act as his favorite by far.

“She was just really into her act, you could tell,” Withrow said. “I was impressed by the variety and just the talent in general was better than I expected it to be.”

You can check out more coverage of upcoming homecoming events this week on The Northerner’s homepage.