Three Harker singers – Shreya Maheshwari and Shreya Basu, both grade 11, and Helen Woodruff, grade 10 – earned “superior” ratings at the California Music Education Association’s South Bay Solo and Ensemble Festival on March 8. Basu and Woodruff also received a command performance commendation, granting them the opportunity to perform at the CMEA State Solo and Ensemble Festival, to be held in May at Sacramento State University. Congratulations to these three talented students!
Spring break will be extra special for the students of the Harker upper school orchestra, who will be traveling to Chicago to perform at the Chicago International Music Festival. The festival will take place April 8 at the Chicago Symphony Center. “We auditioned for this festival last spring and were thrilled to be accepted,” said Chris Florio, upper school music teacher.
In addition to being invited to perform, the orchestra also was honored with the opportunity to premiere a composition commissioned for the festival. The orchestra is working with composer Jeremy Van Buskirk of the Boston Composers’ Coalition on the piece, which will be heard by an international audience for the first time at the festival, as performed by Harker students. Florio spoke to Van Buskirk to exchange information about the piece. “My interaction with Jeremy was a lot of fun. He was very curious about Harker and wanted to learn a lot about the school in general, in addition to our orchestra,” Florio said. “He opened our meeting by telling me how impressed he was with our orchestra and excited to work with them. He had done quite a bit of investigating on YouTube to view our past performances. On describing his upcoming work for us, he said ‘it would not be (Pierre) Boulez, but it would not be (Aaron) Copland either; it will most likely be somewhere in between.’ What a wonderful experience for our orchestra to be involved in the creative process of a large new work from beginning to premiere!”
Expect more news on this tremendous opportunity in the coming months!
“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).”
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.”
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.”
Congrats to five singers who have earned spots in the prestigious American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Coastal Region Honor Choir! With more than 300 singers auditioning, all five Harker singers were named to the choir. Named to the mixed choir was Ishanya Anthapur, grade 11 (alto 2). Named to the women’s choir were: Katie Chung, grade 10 (soprano 2); Maya Nandakumar, grade 11 (alto 2); Sahanna Narayan, grade 10 (soprano 1); Simran Singh, grade 11 (alto 1).
The number indicates what part – high alto or soprano (1) or low alto or soprano (2) – each girl will sing in the choir at its performance Nov. 23, 2 p.m. at the First United Methodist Church in Palo Alto. Each girl’s audition included an Italian art song (40 points), tonal memory (25 points), sight reading (20 points), and scales and triads (15 points).
“It is range and voice quality that determines their placement into a voice part,” noted Susan Nace, a Harker choir director at the upper school. The girls’ audition will next be measured against other qualifiers from the state to determine who goes on to the state honor choir. Please congratulate these girls when you see them!
Several Harker students successfully auditioned for roles in an upcoming independent film being produced by the Bay Area-based Silk Road Films. Auditions for the movie, to be titled “Family Party,” were held Dec. 4-5 at the upper school campus. With filming scheduled for April, during Harker’s spring break, the film will feature students Vishal Vaidya, grade 10, as Nick; Apurva Tandon, grade 12, as Arti; Jai Ahuja, grade 10, in the role of Sahil; Rahul Nalamasu, grade 12, playing Sanjay; Cecilia Lang-Ree, grade 12, as Tanya; and Alice Tsui, grade 12, as Amanda.
In July, student dancer Christopher Hildum, grade 10, was declared the winner of the Mr. Dance America title at the Kids Artistic Review National Dance Competition held in Las Vegas. He also took second place in the “Intermediate Solo 15-19” category. Hildum, who has been participating in the competition for 10 years, was first runner up for the Junior Mr. Dance America title at the finals of the 2006-07 season of the competition.
In May, Andree Beals ’12 was awarded a four-year scholarship from George Washington University’s Presidential Scholars in the Arts program. GWU’s department of theater and dance offers this award to incoming freshmen studying the disciplines of dance, acting or design and technical production. Beals received the scholarship after submitting an application and performing an audition.
“I am extremely honored to be given this scholarship and cannot wait to dance at GW,” Beals said. “I’m glad that my time as a company member at [Teen Dance Company], a contemporary dance company in the Mountain View, as well as my work with other San Francisco choreographers, has moved me forward into such a great dance program.”
At the United Spirit Association Dance Camp, held in July at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Harker varsity and junior varsity dancers won a number of awards and earned the privilege of performing in Hawaii and London. Students in attendance at the camp were grade 12 students Ria Desai, Michaela Kastelman and Molly Wolfe, grade 11 student Jenny Dai, grade 10 students Noel Banerjee, Darby Millard, Erika Olsen and Jacqui Villarreal and grade 9 students Selin Ozcelik, Emily Pan, Kristen Park, Ankita Sharma and Madison Tomihiro.
The camp featured classes on technique and choreography and also featured a number of competitive challenges. Under the guidance of dance teachers Amalia De La Rosa and Karl Kuehn, the dancers won several awards. Kastelman, Millard and Villarreal were recognized as All-American dancers, an honor that included an invitation to perform in London with the United Spirit Association. For their overall technique and performance acumen, Kastelman, Banerjee, Millard and Villarreal all received Super Sensational ribbons. Millard and Kastelman reached the final round of competition and were among the top 10 dancers at the camp.
The Harker dance group was awarded a “Superior” plaque, the highest group recognition at the camp, and was invited to perform at next year’s NFL Pro Bowl in Hawaii. They also won the teamwork challenge and received an award for being the most-improved team at the camp.
Desai’s and Sharma’s efforts in drill classes earned them first-place ribbons and Park and Ozcelik received second-place ribbons. In the drill competition, Sharma received a medallion for her second-place finish.