The freshmen held their quad day this past Tuesday and performed five dances: partner, all girls, all boys, stunt and the finale.
Their theme was based on the 2012 Disney movie “Radio Rebel,” which follows the story of a shy high school senior Tara Adams, who takes on an alter ego as a podcast DJ titled “Radio Rebel,” unbeknownst to her classmates.
The freshman skit was comprised of five lead roles: Tara, Stacy, Gavin, Gavin’s sister and the Principal, who were played by Elsa Blom, Arlan Visser, Ethun Kung, Allison Tan and Dino Pezzi, respectively.
One regret that freshman class president Mason Wang had about the skit is not starting run-throughs earlier; the freshmen hadn’t had a single skit practice until the Sept. 21, three days before their quad day performance.
“We’ve spent a lot of time on the dances and getting those arranged,” Wang said. “In the future we would want to start skit practices earlier, because we were really pressed for time as Homecoming week approached.”
The freshman team decided to allocate around 10 minutes of their 25-minute quad day to their skit, and dedicated the remaining 15 minutes to their dances; they called the dances the highlight of their performance.
“I think the dances were in a really good place,” Tan said. “I feel that the boys dance was the strongest because it started all the energy and got the audience excited.”
The dances had their first practices on the weekend of Aug. 30 and held weekly practices up until their quad day. Tan added that some of the choreographers even started choreographing over the summer.
An area that the freshmen struggled with was in setting up their decorations, which consisted of three boomboxes, several 2000s-themed cardboard cutouts and a multitude of CDs that they had hung from the rafters of the cafeteria canopy.
Tan attributed the struggles to a typical lack of participation; at their first decoration session, which was hosted at Wang’s house, only four people attended. Despite the slow start, however, the class was able to finalize their decorations on move-in weekend, when around 40 freshmen showed up.
Despite having over 60 students initially sign up to be a part of the quad day, Tan said that many freshmen dropped out, which made it harder for the coordinators to get everything working as intended.
Wang agreed that participation could have been better, but is content with how the entire event turned out in the end. Looking ahead to next year, Wang feels confident that there will be more participation and the team will do a better job with organization.
“We didn’t have that clear of an idea as to what was going on in decoration or skit,” Wang said. “Next year we’ll have a better idea of how things are going on and we’ll focus on getting the word out quickly to improve participation.”