Maharishi School choral reading selected for All-State

FAIRFIELD — Maharishi School’s large group speech team was selected to perform at the All-State Festival this Saturday in Ames.

At the state contest on Feb. 5, the school’s choral reading group earned a perfect score from every judge, which put them in the running to perform at the Iowa High School State Speech Association’s All-State Festival Saturday, Feb. 19 at Iowa State University in Ames. The team learned it was selected to perform at the exclusive All-State Festival.

It’s an impressive feat for this group of six students, many of whom are performing in speech for the first time. The six include freshmen Uma Wegman and Eva Rubio Quevedo, sophomores Daira Valls Blazquez and Jace Wallace, and juniors Jolie Gaquer and Gabriel Roesler. They are led by first-year speech and drama coach Loreena Hansen, a 2018 graduate of this very school.

“I’ll just say that I couldn’t have asked for a better first year on the job,” Hansen said. “My students, many of whom have never had experience in theater before, are exemplary performers and teammates. I couldn’t be more proud of them.”

Hansen said that, since she was working with a group of students with little theater experience, her early practices involved “in-depth acting training.” Hansen graduated from California State University — Long Beach in 2021 with a degree in performance, so she was able to put her degree to work right away as a drama coach.

“I taught the students everything I learned in my acting classes,” Hansen said. “I had such a wonderful group of performers who were ready to jump right in and push themselves.”

The choral reading the students performed was a compilation script of snippets from news articles, plays, novels and poems. Hansen was responsible for putting it all together. She said the theme of the choral reading is the apocalypse, something that has always interested her.

“I have a lot of poetry, songs and books that are apocalypse-themed, and I decided to base this script on that,” she said. “I wanted to find out why we as a species are consumed by the notion of dying, why we fantasize about the end, and I think it’s because we want a societal rebirth, something new to happen.”

Hansen said it was exciting to make a choral reading from scratch, which is what she loves about speech.

“We’re not just putting on a play, but creating something from the ground up, and I really enjoy that aspect,” she said.

Hansen said the six students in choral reading are all the students in the school’s speech program. She hoped to do a couple more events, but because of COVID, several students missed some of the early rehearsals. The team decided it was best to forego those other events in order to focus on choral reading, and that focus paid off.

Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com