NV students make all-state speech

Two Nodaway Valley High School large group speech events have received the highest award you can receive in their activity and have received all-state status by the Iowa High School Speech Association.

The team’s musical theatre group, consisting of Jennifer Holliday, Brooklyn Jackson, Olivia Funke, Carmen Eirin Leis, Rose Lonsdale and Karley Shannon, received such mention for their “Cell Block Tango,” though they’re a non-performing all-state group. Performing at all-state to represent NVHS will be the other qualifying act, a group mime program given by Abigail Piearson and Sophia Broers entitled “Married Life 1942.”

Group Mime

The challenge that comes with any mime is that you cannot use any sound. All stories or sentences must be conveyed without the use of words, only actions. Miming heavily relies on sometimes overly-exaggerated movements to tell the story.

The story Piearson and Broers are telling is based on the life of a couple who are separated because the husband is off to fight in World War II.

“Abi actually got the idea for this when she was dreaming, so we really created it together,” Broers said. “It’s about a newly married couple and the husband is called away to war, so it shows our life being apart and how difficult that is.”

Piearson reports that through the process of preparing the group mime for districts, state, and now all-state, she and Broers learned that some things are more difficult to mime than others.

“We did mime last year too but we just had three objects we had to mime. This year we had a lot of objects,” Piearson said. “It was a learning experience learning how to mime and act having to remember so many objects instead of like three.”

Musical Theatre

Six girls got together early on this school year to plan a musical theatre act for large group speech based on a scene from the musical “Chicago.”

The premise is that these women are in jail because they’ve murdered their husbands.

“I know it sounds bad, but most of them had a reason for it,” Funke explained.

“They’re kind of ridiculous reasons, like one of them killed him because he was popping his gum too loudly,” Lonsdale chimed in.

“I fired two warning shots into my husband’s head, so they really weren’t warning shots, which is what makes it ironic,” Holliday said.

Leis came to Iowa as a Spanish foreign exchange student and was a character in the play “12 Angry Jurors” last fall at NVHS. Other than that, she came to America with little to no acting experience.

“Rose told me about it, and I was in the play this year, but before that, I hadn’t done any acting,” Leis said. “It’s out of my comfort zone but I like it. I like that we’re all doing the same thing but we all have our separate thing. I like that each one of us has our story [and it all comes together].”

Shannon said that “Cell Block Tango” is a series piece, however the girls say that when it comes together from their personalities on a stage in front of people, it can also be taken as a funnier piece.

“In the musical, it’s really pretty serious, if you think about it, but we just made it into our own thing,” Shannon said. “We’re not really that serious of people, we’re more sarcastic, funny people, so when we went in to start choreographing it, we put our personalities into it. We were adding all these little personalities which made it more personal to us.”

Jackson said the group found the state competition, which was held at Waukee High School last weekend, to be an interesting mix of challenging but enjoyable.

“When we got there, it was scary because Waukee’s huge. We got up really early, there were a lot of people there, and we didn’t perform until later in the day, so we spent all day practicing really,” Jackson explained. “By the time we got to perform, we were kind of nervous, but we’re a confident group.”

To have two different events from Nodaway Valley advancing to all-state is something Holliday was really excited about, as were all the other students who will have the experience of going to Ames for the event that will be hosted at C.Y. Stephens Auditorium this Saturday.

The musical theatre group thought about giving up on their act just a short time ago, but they’re glad they stuck with it thanks to the help of volunteer coach Lauren Huff and others. Nodaway Valley’s speech team is coached by Brenda Plymesser and Jaime Held.

“A week before districts, we were going to quit [our musical theatre act] because we didn’t feel like we were prepared enough. We realized that if we put our whole heart and effort into it, we could do it,” Holliday said. “After districts we realized we had a chance at this. From districts to state, we practiced every day. When we went to state and performed and I think it was the best time we had ever performed. We knew that it could be our last time performing it and we wanted to be happy with it being our last performance. We left our whole heart out there and were ecstatic we made it.”