Last week Harker scored with two cross country league champs and sent a solid contingent to the NBA. That’s right, the United Spirit Association sent Harker’s varsity and junior varsity dancers to perform at halftime during the Sacramento Kings game against the Portland Trail Blazers. Let’s get to it!
Cross Country:
Junior Corey Gonzales and freshman phenom Niki Iyer both became league champs when they won their races at the league championship cross country race last Friday at Crystal Springs. Senior Claudia Tischler, who placed 10th, will join Gonzales and Iyer in competing in the CCS Championships Saturday, also at Crystal Springs. Gonzales and Iyer are widely considered to be contenders for the state meet.
Volleyball
The girls varsity volleyball team enters the CCS tournament ranked fourth in its division after losing to Menlo and then defeating Mercy San Francisco in its final game of the year to end the season and celebrate its senior night in style. The team travels to Carmel tonight for its first-round match-up. If the girls win, they will return home to host a quarterfinal match at Blackford on Saturday night.
The JV team, meanwhile, became league champs! The team ended its year with a 9-1 record in league play and a 22-5 record overall.
Football
The JV football team upped its record to 5-1 after a thrilling, one-point squeaker of a win over North Salinas High, 20-19, at Davis Field on Saturday. In the win, Harker leapt out to a 13-0 lead after quarterback Keanu Forbes, grade 11, threw two touchdown passes to Nikhil Ramgiri, grade 10. North Salinas then scored 19 unanswered points, jumping out to a six-point lead until late in the fourth quarter when a clutch 27-yard reception by freshman receiver Nicolas Bean kept Harker’s hopes alive and set up a 39-yard touchdown catch by sophomore Johnathon Keller. Keller snagged the pass from a scrambling Forbes and sprinted it into the endzone, tying the game up at 19-19. Kicker Alyssa Amick, grade 11, avenged an earlier blocked kick with an extra point to give Harker the win. All told, Forbes threw for 248 yards and three touchdowns, and freshman Will Park ran for 38 yards. The final game of the season is on Saturday at 11am against Leigh High School at Davis Field. All students in attendance can enter into a free raffle to win prizes.
Water Polo
The boys varsity team went 2-1 in its season-ending tournament, trumping Cupertino and Santa Clara. The girls, meanwhile, lost a heartbreaker in double overtime against Wilcox in the league tournament, finally falling by a score of 11-9. Delaney Martin, grade 11, Jackie Shen, and Anushka Das all scored two goals in the loss. Anna Levine, grade 12, Lea Daran, and Yazmin Narin added goals as well. Helena Dworak, grade 10, played a tremendous game in the cage with 13 saves, including three saves in one-on-one’s in overtime.
And …
Harker’s varsity and JV dancers performed during the halftime show at a Nov. 9 NBA game between the Sacramento Kings and the Portland Trail Blazers. Their performance was sponsored by the United Spirit Association, whose instructors taught the material to the students the day of the game. The dancers had a great experience performing at the professional game at Sleep Train Arena.
Coming Up:
Today, the girls varsity volleyball team hits the road to play Carmel High School at 7 p.m. in a first-round CCS match-up.
On Saturday, junior varsity football wraps up its season with an 11 a.m. game against Leigh High School at Davis Field, with prizes available in a free raffle for fans in attendance. At noon, three of Harker’s runners — Corey Gonzales, Niki Iyer, and Claudia Tischler — compete in the CCS Cross Country Championships. If the girls varsity volleyball team wins tonight, it will return home on Saturday night to host a quarterfinal match at Blackford at 7 p.m.
“Where I come from, there was a war that lasted so long, people forgot what they were fighting for,” says Anon, the titular character in Naomi Iizuka’s “Anon(ymous),” the 2013 fall play for the Harker Conservatory. Lost in the United States, Anon is an undocumented refugee without a name, searching for his mother. She’s trapped at a run-down sweatshop, wooed by its slimy owner, whom she has promised to marry once she completes a shroud for her presumed-dead child.
Chosen because it features an incredibly diverse cast of characters and a political spirit ripped from the headlines, “Anon(ymous)” is a 21st century retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey,” the epic familiar to all students at Harker’s upper school. In place of Odysseus is Anon, who wanders across America, from the beach house of a wealthy congressman where he has washed ashore to the kitchen of a drunken, one-eyed cannibal with an operatic songbird. Along the way, he frolics in the ocean with a goddess, races through sewage tunnels past afflicted drug addicts, and crashes a vehicle of trafficked people. His adventures are told in a theatrical style that borrows from traditions all across the world: a Bollywood dance number welcomes Anon to a friendly Indian restaurant, and Balinese shadow puppetry conveys a flashback of Anon and his mother.
The production is replete with these ultra-theatrical moments. In one instance, enormous hoops suggest an underground system of tunnels that Anon and a companion bolt through like a maze. Undulating teal cloths form frothy ocean waves, into which Anon and his goddess dive, only to resurface elsewhere in the current to share a watery kiss.
All the while, the audience is ever-present. Director Jeff Draper has split his audience in two, on either side of a long runway, facing each other. Reflecting the blue light which beams down onto the runway, a sea of the audience’s eerie, aquamarine faces is a constant presence behind Anon, implicated witnesses to his exhausting journey.
When we first meet Anon, he is with the spoiled and ebullient daughter of a smug congressman and his yoga-obsessed trophy wife, who, despite an anti-foreigner attitude, have taken Anon into their home, offering him food and shelter. The sugar-high, smartphone-clad daughter, played with side-splitting comic aplomb by Shenel Ekici, grade 12, has taken a fierce fascination with Anon. Indeed, how could she not? As she is keen to announce, “Exotic is very in right now.” But Anon, feeling himself a novelty, very far away from his real home and real family, is unmoved and out of place. When a beautiful goddess who reminds him of his roots emerges from the ocean, he is all too relieved to leave the shelter he has been granted on the beach and join the goddess in the abyss of the waters.
That launches Anon into his adventure across the United States. A storm separates him from the goddess, and when we meet him again, he is scavenging for food in the garbage outside of an Indian restaurant. Once again, he is offered shelter, and the goddess revisits him to egg on his memory of the cataclysmic event that parted Anon from his mother: the two had fled their war-torn country on a boat, which was torn asunder by a storm at sea. That’s right, even in a year without Shakespeare, Harker gets a play where a shipwreck breaks apart a family.
Next thing we know, Anon is in the underground tunnels, racing with a new friend, Paco, from immigration police. The two escape on a boxcar and finally find themselves searching for work when they encounter the one-eyed butcher Mr. Zyclo, the updated cyclops equivalent, rendered with delicious sophistication by Damon Aitken, grade 12, whose every word drips with intoxicated erudition. Mr. Zyclo’s culinary sensibilities call for a special ingredient for his sausages: people. The butcher takes Paco’s life first, then comes for Anon, who escapes when Zyclo’s captive bird exacts revenge against her master, tearing out his remaining eye.
Anon slips away, hitching a ride in a dusty, worn-out truck. He’s mid-journey when he comes to a startling realization: the back of the truck is filled with people, trafficked against their will. The conditions are hot, too hot, and Anon fears the captives will suffocate. In what is intended as a heroic gesture, Anon grabs the wheel. His efforts backfire in devastating fashion when Anon crashes the truck. In this moment, the theater is filled with the cacophony of the crash, and an eerie soundtrack backs a chorus of the refugees, spilling out. They tell us their names, their backgrounds, and that they have now died.
This tragedy is unsettling and poignant. In a play of hardships, the sudden deaths of these nameless victims – at Anon’s unintended hand, no less – hits home the hardest. For every Anon whose story will end joyfully, there is a chorus of refugees whose odysseys do not end in tearful family reunions, who never escape their twisting roads of peril except with a final moment of pain. Our fictional Anon is not alone; he is one of many, with names, with faces, with lost families. And our innocent hero now has blood on his hands.
Anon’s story does end happily. He finds his mother, whose sweatshop is across town from the Indian restaurant. This is a story, after all, and serendipity intervenes. Anon’s mother is reluctant to believe he is who he says he is, that her child could possibly have survived, until a song from his childhood begins to put her mind at ease and open her up to the miracle of their reuniting. It is a powerful, and theatrical, conclusion to this swift and swirling epic, which packs a lot of ground into a crackling hour and 30 minutes.
The largest cheers are reserved for spectacular comedic turns from two of the plays’ thickly-accented characters: the jovial proprietor of the Indian restaurant and the snakelike, sleazy, Slavic sweatshop manager. Sophomore Rishabh Chandra’s Ali, the restaurateur, is a delight, boisterous and full of warmth. The sweatshop manager and suitor to Anon’s mother, named Yuri Mackus and played by Jeton Manuel Gutierrez-Bujari, grade 11, is a consummate schmoozer, sweet-talking his guests even as he dismisses concerns about the work environment he has created. When these actors work their magic, it is hard not to crack a smile. Both charm their audience with outsized portrayals, balancing out the oppressive odds facing Anon.
Indeed, for all of the serious matters which challenge Anon, “Anon(ymous)” is a very fun piece. It is a joyful, spirited adventure where harsh reality and mythical fantasy collide. As Anon, Vishal Vaidya, grade 11,carries the play on his shoulders. He is more than up to the task, imbuing the role with dignity, grace and bravery. The production is full of moments that wow, from the gorgeous, elegaic song that begins the play to the shooting of a silhouetted soldier, from the first moment a sparkling blue butterfly puppet constructed in the Balinese wayang kulit style interacts with one of the shadowed actors to the full-cast, show-stopping Bollywood dance number. All of the show’s incidental music was composed by Harker students for this production. The Harker Conservatory does a beautiful job in weaving together disparate elements and many worlds to breathe life into an amazing journey, scoring a stirring triumph with Naomi Iizuka’s “Anon(ymous).”
A contingent of Harker’s upper school biology and journalism students joined a sell-out crowd at this year’s local YWCA luncheon, where Dr. Jane Goodall gave the keynote address to an audience of more than 1,200.
Goodall is founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and serves as a UN Messenger of Peace. Considered to be the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, she is best known for her trailblazing studies on chimps, which resulted from the years she spent living among them in the Tanzanian jungle in the early 1960s.
The YWCA of Silicon Valley’s annual luncheon features guest speakers who serve as role models for women and girls. Held in October at the Santa Clara Convention Center, event proceeds help support the group’s much-lauded services.
Harker regularly hosts a table for upper school students who have a special passion for that year’s topic. The Harker group who attended this year’s event were senior biology students Lea Daran, Anna Levine, Sarai Rojas and Elizabeth Teng, along with journalism students Meena Chetty, grade 12, and Apoorva Rangan, grade 11. Accompanying them were Head of School Chris Nikoloff and upper school biology teacher Kate Schafer.
Each year, more than 40 companies and hundreds of individuals sponsor the YWCA’s luncheon. Past speakers have included Isabelle Allende, Gloria Steinem, Sally Ride, Janet Reno and Mary Lou Retton.
The mission of the YWCA is to empower women, children and families, and to eliminate racism, hatred and prejudice. The organization provides programs in the areas of sexual assault intervention and prevention, counseling services, domestic violence, child care, youth programs, family services, and social and racial justice.
The YWCA of Silicon Valley serves nearly 18,000 Santa Clara County residents each year, and has provided countywide services for more than 100 years. More information can be found at www.ywca-sv.org.
Watch for the full review and more photos from “Anon(ymous)” in a few days!
“Where I come from, there was a war that lasted so long, people forgot what they were fighting for,” says Anon, the titular character of Naomi Iizuka’s “Anon(ymous),” the Harker Conservatory’s 2013 fall play. Lost in the United States, Anon is an undocumented refugee without a name, searching for his mother. She’s trapped at a run-down sweatshop, wooed by its slimy owner, whom she has promised to marry once she completes a shroud for her presumed-dead child.
Anon wanders across America, from the beach house of a wealthy congressman to the kitchen of a drunken cannibal with an operatic songbird. Along the way, he frolics in the ocean with a goddess, races through sewage tunnels past afflicted drug addicts, and crashes a vehicle of trafficked people. His adventures are told in a theatrical style that borrows from traditions from around the world; a Bollywood dance number welcomes Anon to a friendly Indian restaurant and Balinese shadow puppetry conveys a flashback of Anon and his mother. With an ultra-theatrical approach, the ensemble brings to life a powerful rendition of this present-day retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey.”
Renowned travel and nature author David Quammen appeared via Skype to a large crowd of students at Nichols Hall auditorium on Oct. 30 to discuss his experiences in writing his latest non-fiction book, “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.”
From his home in Bozeman, Mont., Quammen started by talking about his authorial origins as a fiction writer in the 1970s. He later joined the outdoors magazine “Outside” as a columnist, originally planning to contribute for just one year, which ended up being 15.
He began writing non-fiction in the 1980s, and last year released “Spillover,” his 10th non-fiction book, which covers in depth how viruses travel from humans to animals. The book tells the history and development of this study, covering such key points as the AIDs epidemic, the early-2000s SARS outbreak, the spread of diseases such as Ebola and various influenzas and more.
The book, which was in the works for several years, took Quammen to many very interesting places. He recalled one night in Bangladesh, where he was observing veterinarian and epidemiologist Jonathan Epstein as he captured fruit bats in an effort to discover how the Nipah virus was infecting the local population. The job required a hazmat suit and goggles, which were constantly fogging up and obscuring his vision, increasing his anxiety that an infected bat may bite or scratch him.
On another trip, to China, Quammen and the researcher he was with squeezed through narrow caves, also looking for bats, but this time without the hazmat suits. When Quamman asked the researcher why they were not wearing protective gear, the researcher replied that oftentimes researchers take a “calculated risk.”
“The developed world is very vulnerable,” he said, citing the SARS outbreak, which began when a woman traveling from Hong Kong brought the virus with her to Toronto. Another modern example was the occurrence of the West Nile virus in New York City in 1999.
Although developed countries have more resources to deal with these outbreaks, even in undeveloped areas these viruses can pose a significant worldwide risk, he said, because viruses become more effective at infecting humans with each new case. He then stated there was a need for more international institutions dedicated to researching how viruses in animals begin to infect humans and how to prevent outbreaks.
This need has created a growing field for young scientists. A veterinarian, he said, may return to school and earn a Ph.D. in ecology. “More and more you see this kind of expert,” he said. “And most of them are young.”
As for prevention of the spread of these disease, Quammen said the biggest reason for the spread is ecosystem disruption, such as foresting and the hunting and eating of wild animals. He said that though many peoples frequently subsist on bushmeats, and that others must be sympathetic to their needs, it is necessary to help them find alternatives to prevent the spread of animal borne viruses.
Grade 9 students recently participated in the upper school’s annual freshman service day. The mandatory daylong event is designed to serve as an introduction to community service.
Traveling with their advisory groups in mid-October, 191 students set off to do some good at various sites including EcoMagic, R.A.F.T., Humane Society of Silicon Valley, San Jose Rose Garden, Sacred Heart Community Services, Sunrise Village Emergency Shelter, Acterra and Family Supportive Housing.
“Students arrived before their departure to pack a lunch and discuss the volunteer site they were scheduled to go on,” recalled Kerry Enzensperger, who directs community service for the upper school. She explained that the day is organized by advisory so advisers go on the trip along with their students. Students volunteer for a three-hour time period, and fill out a “reflection form” upon their return to campus.
“I went to the Humane Society with my advisees. We made cat toys and dog treats, and helped socialize the shelter animals,” she said.
Upper school counselor Greg Roumbanis accompanied his advisory group of seven students to R.A.F.T. in Santa Clara. “The organization we worked with puts together low-cost materials for teachers to use in their classes and the students helped put the kits together. It was a really interesting place to work because it struck up some good conversations. There was a significant amount of talk regarding the conditions people work in overseas in Third World countries,” he recalled.
In a thrilling week for Harker athletics, a golfer won a WBAL league championship for the second straight year, one runner set a new school record, another runner continued her amazing pace with a wire-to-wire win, and junior varsity football continued their pursuit of an undefeated season. Let’s get to it!
Golf:
KRISTINE LIN WINS WBAL LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP FOR SECOND YEAR IN A ROW
Kristine Lin, grade 12, won the WBAL league championship for the second straight year, defending her title by shooting a 76 at Poplar Creek! Senior Connie Li also had a great day, shooting a career-best 93. Sophomore Daphne Liang shot a 90 to tie for 10th place. The team as a whole came in third place, beating Menlo and finishing only 13 strokes behind Sacred Heart Prep. Li competes at CCS today in Carmel.
Cross Country:
STERLING DAY ONCE AGAIN FOR RUNNERS GONZALES AND IYER
Well, surprise, surprise. Harker runners Corey Gonzales, grade 11, and Niki Iyer, grade 9, had incredible weeks once again. Gonzales set a new school record with a time of 15:47. He took off easy, landing in 30th place after the first half mile, then caught up to 10th over the next half mile, and finally stormed through the leaders to finish in second place. Iyer continued her amazing start to the season, leading end-to-end over the course of setting a school record and nailing the fifth best time ever for a freshman on the Crystal Springs Course with a 17:53. The next race for cross country team is the league championships on Nov. 8 at Crystal Springs.
Football:
JV STILL UNDEFEATED AFTER 18-POINT COMEBACK
The junior varsity team remains undefeated after a huge 18-14 comeback win against North Monterey County High School. Down 14-0 at halftime, the team roared back to score 18 unanswered points, courtesy of two touchdown passes by quarterback Keanu Forbes, grade 11, a pair of two-point conversions, and a safety. Nikhil Ramgiri, grade 10, led the team in receiving with three catches for 43 yards and a touchdown. Alex Youn, grade 9, snagged the other touchdown pass. Will Park, grade 9, led the team in rushing with 58 yards on 13 carries. Park also came up big on defense, intercepting a pass on North Monterey County’s final drive to seal the victory for the Eagles. The win puts Harker’s record on the year at an undefeated 4-0. The time will try to extend their streak to five when they play Cupertino on Friday night at 6 p.m.
Water Polo:
MIXED WEEK AHEAD OF SENIOR DAY
The varsity boys water polo team went 1-1 last week, losing to Wilcox but bouncing back to beat Santa Clara. Eric Holt, grade 11, scored eight goals across the two games, while Billy Bloomquist, grade 11, had a hat trick against Wilcox.
The junior varsity boys team competed in the Wilcox Tournament on Saturday, going 2-2 with victories over Heritage and St. Ignatius.
On the girls’ side, the varsity team lost both of their games last week, losing to Santa Clara and Wilcox despite seven goals from Delaney Martin, grade 11. Anushka Das, grade 11, and Anna Levine, grade 12, each had two goals that week, while juniors Jackie Shen and Sheridan Tobin scored as well. Helena Dworak, grade 10, had a total of 17 saves in goal.
The varsity teams have their senior day on Thursday, with ceremonies occurring at approximately 5:30 p.m. in between games against Cupertino.
Volleyball:
VARSITY’S RECORD NOW AT 10-9 AFTER TOUGH WEEK
The varsity girls volleyball team’s record now stands at 10-9 after a tough week which saw them lose to both Sacred Heart Prep and Castilleja. Against Sacred Heart Prep, Divya Kalindindi, grade 12, had 19 kills and Doreeen Kang, grade 10, had 10. The girls host Priory tonight, with varsity playing at 5:45 p.m., and then hit the road to play St. Francis on Friday.
Tennis:
GIRLS GO 1-1 AFTER LOSS TO MENLO AND WIN AGAINST CRYSTAL SPRINGS
The girls began the week by losing to Menlo, but bounced back to defeat Crystal Springs on their senior day. In the win, Dora Tzeng, grade 12, Izzy Gross, grade 10, and Arden Hu, grade 11, all came away with victories in their singles matches, while Ariana Shulman, grade 12, and Nadia Palte, grade 10, won in doubles. The other three matches that day all went to a third set, highlighted by a clutch come-from-behind win by Megy Appalaraju, grade 11, and Era Iyer, grade 9. The girls face off against Castilleja in a league match today.
Coming Up:
Tuesday is a packed day of Harker sports! The girls golf team begins by playing in the CCS championships at Rancho Canada Golf Club. All three water polo teams are in action. The boys play at Homestead High School, with the varsity team leading off at 3:30 p.m., followed by the junior varsity team at 4:45 p.m. The girls varsity water polo team plays at Monta Vista High School at 5:45 p.m. Both girls volleyball teams play home games against Priory. Junior varsity’s game comes first at 4:30 p.m., followed by varsity’s game at 5:45 p.m. The varsity girls tennis team also has a match, an away game against Castilleja at 3:30 p.m.
All teams are off on Wednesday. On Thursday, varsity girls tennis plays Notre Dame High School San Jose in an away game at 3:30 p.m. Then, a trilogy of water polo games take place at Harker against Cupertino High School. In episode one, the varsity girls play at 4:30 p.m. Then, for the sequel, the junior varsity boys play at 5:45 p.m. Finally, the saga wraps up with an exciting conclusion when the varsity boys play a night game at 6:45 p.m. The water polo teams celebrate their senior day in a ceremony at 5:30 p.m.
On Friday, the varsity boys water polo team plays in the Ron Freeman Memorial Varsity Boys Water Polo Tournament at Homestead. The varsity girls volleyball team has an away game against St. Francis High School Mountain View at 4:30 p.m. Finally, at 6 p.m., the undefeated junior varsity football team is back with a night game against Cupertino High School!
The Harker Conservatory’s 2013-14 fall play, “Anon(ymous),” is loaded. It features an original score created by students, original choreography by students, Balinese shadow puppetry, a Bollywood dance, fog, smoke, lights, and an all-new audience configuration.
Then there is the content. “Anon(ymous)” is a new, gritty, mythic exploration into cutting-edge, modern-day political challenges. The piece blends Homer’s “The Odyssey,” the epic read by all Harker freshmen, with the diaspora story of an undocumented immigrant finding his way across America, searching for his identity and his family.
“’Anon(ymous)‘ is a celebration of tradition and culture,” writes the director, Jeff Draper. “The epic adventure story is based on Homer’s “The Odyssey,” but this retelling reveals universal themes about our own contemporary world. This play is about the love and connection infused in the family, a love that is found in every culture, all around the world.”
While the themes of “Anon(ymous)” may be ancient and universal, there is a lot that is new and mold-breaking for The Harker Conservatory. The play is a new one, written in the last few years — there is no Shakespeare here. The audience is arranged on either side of a runway, a configuration never before seen at Harker. A handful of student directors are assisting Draper and rehearsing an alternate cast. A whole host of students are composing new music and choreographing new routines. There are more hands on deck and more moving parts than ever before, all to create a play that is not only epic but also searingly contemporary. Here are a few of the innovations taking center stage at Harker this fall:
A NEW CONFIGURATION
“Metamorphoses”featured a pool. “A Christmas Carol”had a live pre-show Dickens Faire. “Anon(ymous)” will split its audience into two and face them against each other across the stage, like fans on two sides of a football field, in a configuration known in the theater world as tennis court-style.
“I always like to mix it up,” says Draper. Because Harker lacks a theater, the performing arts directors flex their creativity every year, reinventing the Blackford auditorium when they can. Until Harker has a real performance space, he says, “I’m going to keep taking advantage of it.”
Draper named The National Theatre of Scotland’s “Black Watch” and Cirque du Soleil’s “Corteo”as his influences for the new design. In “Black Watch,” which toured the world before finally reaching San Francisco in May of this year, a partitioned audience watched a dozen soldiers race up and down a central runway connecting two structures resembling army bases at either end, acting out the Iraq War and their lives afterward. In “Corteo,” the audience wrapped circularly around a central disk, with exits and entrances also proceeding from two opposing poles. Both productions created immersive experiences that Draper was keen to emulate.
The year’s new setup is filled with exciting challenges for the actors, who now face an audience on all sides. “It makes you act three-sixty,” says Draper. “There’s no hiding,” shared one student at the cast’s retreat this month. “You feel like you always have eyes on you.” Draper, for his part, has enjoyed the new challenge. “We’re learning a lot,” he says. “It’s very different.”
A PIECE OF THE ZEITGEIST
“Anon(ymous)‘” treatment of contemporary material is startlingly new to Harker’s drama wing of the Conservatory; for a program that has made its name on classics like last year’s “Hamlet,” a freshly-written epic ripped from the headlines is a bold departure. When the actors were asked at their retreat whether this was the first time any of them had ever embarked on a project this much in the zeitgeist, the team responded with an almost-choral “yes.” “It’s not anything in the past,” one student chimed in. “It’s happening now. It’s part of our job to make people aware.”
On how they found their research for the play, the students were clear: rather than head to the library and search the catalog for critical essays as they might with a classic, they took to Google News and YouTube to develop deeper understandings of the predicaments and lifestyles of their characters.
For Draper, it was critical that the students examine their own lives and ancestries as well. So the director asked his actors to research their own lineages. He also gave each student a piece of foam core, and asked them to place information about what they uncovered on one side and their family trees on the other. That art, accompanied by the students’ personal stories, will hang in the lobby when the audience comes to view “Anon(ymous).”
The actors looked into their family histories with immigration and political and personal turmoil. One, whose character in “Anon(ymous)” must be the “man of the family,” told of an ancestor whose father was felled by an earthquake in Japan, leaving him to become that “man of the family.” Another told of a divide in the older generations of his family over allegiances with British prior to the partition of India. Those stories became a pretext to learn about the refugee camps spurred on by the political turmoil.
The exercise succeeded in casting the play as a piece of very personal reality for the actors, allowing them to see their characters in the context of their own lives. One student confessed that his heart was not in the play until he sought out his family and heard tales of their past. That made the play personal for him. “The play is resonating with students as I’d hoped it would,” says Draper.
Indeed, that “Anon(ymous)”is a tale of a diaspora journey was one more reason Draper chose the play for Harker. “It’s about home. It’s about immigration. It’s about leaving one place and going to another,” he says. “I think a lot of Harker families, within a generation or two, have left home and made a new home in Silicon Valley, in California, in the U.S.A.”
ULTRA-THEATRICAL
In many ways, “Anon(ymous)” is more than just a play, it’s a multidisciplinary theater event. In one love scene, two characters tread water in a sea of fabric. In another moment, moving hoops cascade down the runway to conjure up images of the characters dashing through tunnels. A shadow dance, in the style of Balinese wayang kulit shadow puppetry, tells the story of Anon and his mother.
The characters are outsized as well. “It’s not naturalistic or realistic,” says Draper. “One of the characters from “The Odyssey,” the cyclops, is, in this story, a demented butcher who eats people. He’s trying to kill our protagonist with a big butcher knife.”
“Anon(ymous)”is larger than life, in order to take the audience on a journey that is ripped from real life and even their own lives. With the actors being stretched in so many new ways, and with so many taking on extra responsibilities like choreography and puppeteering, it’s been a made dash to the finish, and an incredibly rewarding one for the collaborators. “You never know what’s going to happen next,” one student says. Another chimes in, “none of us knows exactly what we’re doing, but we know it’s going to be amazing.”
“Anon(ymous),” by Naomi Iizuka, plays Thurs., Oct. 31 through Sat., Nov. 2 at the Blackford Theater.
On Friday, the Siemens Foundation announced the regional finalists and semifinalists in this year’s Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. Two Harker students, Steven Wang and Andrew Jin, both grade 11, were named regional finalists this year for their joint research project. Harker’s 10 regional semifinalists are: seniors Aditya Batra, Stephanie Chen, Zareen Choudhury, Varun Mohan and Srikar Pyda, and juniors Matthew Huang, Helen Wu, Stanley Xie (joint project with Helen Wu), Samyukta Yagati and Andrew Zhang. This marks the third consecutive year that Harker has had at least two regional finalists in the Siemens competition. Harker had six semifinalists and four regional finalists in 2012, and six semifinalists and two regional finalists in 2011.
In another record year for the Siemens Competition, 2,440 students took part in the 2013 competition, to which 1,559 projects were submitted. Of those, 331 semifinalists and 100 regional finalists were chosen.
Each regional finalist receives a $1,000 scholarship and advances to one of the regional competitions held in November. Winners from the regional competitions then move on to the national finals in Washington, D.C., held Dec. 6-7 at George Washington University.
Harker upper school female group Cantilena took part in a special concert at San Francisco’s historic Grace Cathedral on Oct. 2 to help rebuild and replenish the resources of The Holy Trinity Music School in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The school was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake that devastated much of the country.
The group was invited to perform at the concert by Ben Johns, the educational director for the world-renowned men’s choir Chanticleer. During the concert, Cantilena joined a group comprising 10 other choirs, which sang Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum,” from the composer’s “Vesperae solennes de confessore,” and “Wondrous Love” by Joseph Jennings.
Nace reported that the audience in attendance was “very enthusiastic” about the performance.
“Our visiting opera singers were astonished at the amazing show of strength and enthusiasm from all of [Harker’s] students,” said concert organizer Bruce Garnett. “(Soloist) Susan Graham remarked that she will never again hear ‘Laudate Dominum’ without remembering the experience of being surrounded by the future of music in this place.”