Maharishi School to send choral reading group to All-State Festival

FAIRFIELD – Maharishi School’s speech team has done it again, earning All-State recognition for the third year in a row and getting to perform this Saturday, Feb. 17 at C.Y. Stephens Auditorium on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames.

The school’s choral reading group learned they had been selected for the All-State Festival on Tuesday, Feb. 6 when results were posted for the state contests held Feb. 3. Maharishi School speech coach Loreena Hansen is in her third year leading the program, and has taken a choral reading group to All-State every year. She attributes her team’s success to the culture of excellence of her own speech coaches and those who came before them.

Hansen graduated from Maharishi School in 2018, and performed in multiple speech productions.

“I have had a string of very proficient coaches in choral reading at this school, such as Rodney Franz, Brendan Thomas and Jan Thatcher,” Hansen said. “These are coaches I’ve seen the work of in my school. We’ve always been successful in choral reading, and it’s because they all have a specific style that is not a common one shared by other schools.”

Hansen said she feels that other schools might not realize just how versatile the choral reading category can be.

“We put a lot of focus and attention to detail in choral reading, that I don’t think everybody realizes they can take advantage of,” she said.

For this year’s choral reading, Hansen chose to have her students act out her adaptation of the novel “The Night Circus” by Erin Morgenstern, which was Hansen’s favorite novel in high school and which she’s read many times. It has themes of both fantasy and mystery, and Hansen said it’s fun to see how its moving pieces all fit together.

“We’ve done a lot of work on getting every single person 100 percent visually emotionally engaged,” Hansen said of her students. “One of the judges even said that 100 percent of the cast was emotionally expressive 100 percent of the time. That’s gold. We worked hard on that every day, getting everybody checked in the whole time.”

The nine students in choral reading consist of one sophomore, five juniors and three seniors. Only those three seniors had experience in the speech program.

“This is also the first year where a majority of the students were international students,” Hansen said. “Multiple people, I’d say more than half, have English as a second language. It’s the most diverse group we’ve had.”

KIARA DINH

Senior Kiara Dinh is one of those students performing in their second language. Dinh is from Vietnam, and went to an English-medium school there before transferring to Maharishi School last school year. She lives in Hildenbrand Hall, where its basement was converted into a boarding program for Maharishi School in 2018. Hansen also serves as the supervisor of the boarding program, and lives with the boarding students in Hildenbrand. Dinh said that has allowed the students to get to know their speech coach really well.

“She’s the same generation as us, so she can understand us,” Dinh said. “We can talk more comfortably. And having her in the dorm, she can easily remind us of things.”

Dinh said she feels her English has improved noticeably since last school year, and it’s helped that she’s participated in the speech team where she’s had a chance to focus on pronunciation. On top of that, she said she enjoyed the challenge of working on her acting and facial expression with this year’s choral reading.

APARAJITA KALRA

Aparajita Kalra is a junior who came to Maharishi School as a freshman, but went back to her native India for her sophomore year before returning to Fairfield this school year. Just like Dinh, she said she’s had to pay special attention to pronunciation because English is her second language.

“I couldn’t pronounce certain words, and it was hard to get them right,” Kalra said.

As the year has gone on, Kalra has felt more and more comfortable with her speech and her acting, and said she felt a big improvement between the district and state competitions.

“I thought I improved at delivering emotions,” she said.

Kalra said the students like Hansen as a coach because she enforces discipline and holds the students to a high standard.

Kalra said she plans to perform in choral reading again next year. Outside of school, she enjoys playing video games like Minecraft and is especially fond of badminton, which she’s contemplated going into professionally.

JAYCE WALLACE

Jayce Wallace is a senior in his third year in speech, though last year he was on the West Des Moines speech team. He said the most challenging part of choral reading is getting the vocal timing exactly right, since characters are often speaking in unison with two, three or sometimes more other characters.

Wallace said he’s planning to continue with individual speech later this spring. He’s also involved with Destination Imagination, which gives him another opportunity to put his public speaking skills to use.

Wallace said speech has been a great way to get to know students in other grades.

“A lot of my friends are juniors, since we just have a six-person senior class,” Wallace said. “But some of these students, I didn’t know them last year, but after you win some stuff, you become buddy-buddy. That’s how it works. And then you crave it again the next year.”

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

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