Junior choir students Parker Wilson and Emily Knapp perform with smiling faces in front of their Kansas State Fair audience. During this performance, male leads carried their female counterparts and spun them around.
MHS choirs perform numbers for state fair audience
September 21, 2017
Even in sweltering Kansas heat, Manhattan High School Varsity and Pops Choirs still finds pep in their step and song in their hearts.
Choir students from MHS combine their skills of song and dance to put on a show for their audience at the Kansas State Fair this year, putting their many practices and years of experience to the test in a public environment. Varsity and Pops Choir are classes where students with true talent get to put their skills to the test in an academic environment. While the pressure may be on, students in these classes always pull through together and help one another improve. They do this simply for their love of the class and their friends.
“Because the Pops group is smaller, I feel like we’re closer as people,“ senior Wyatt Balman said. “Emotionally, we’re more bound to the music together.”
Seniors Lizzy Mummert and Wyatt
Balman team up together in on of
their ‘80s themed dance numbers.
“I’ve been in choir for four years,”
Balman said. “It’s had it’s ups and
it’s downs.”
Most of the choir’s performances take place at MHS or in the Manhattan area, but coming to the Kansas State Fair is nothing new at MHS.
“I did it when I was in high school, and that was in … fall of ’93,” choir teacher Chad Pape said, “so we’ve been doing it at least since then. They’ve been doing it a long, long time.”
Despite the challenges students in the group face, such as performing in front of an audience and stepping out of their comfort zone, they all feel confident with the work they do in the end, striving for perfection when finding mistakes. When it comes to these classes, it is cooperation and teamwork that is the key to success.
“We have to work as a team to create music, and sometimes the teamwork can be more difficult because you’re working with people you don’t know personally or don’t know how to work with,” junior Jana Kellogg said. “We have to learn about each individual person to learn about our group as a whole.”
Like any other experiences it life, there are always highlights. Members of both choirs get to see each other frequently during the school week, so it is only natural for them to bond and make memories.
“I really like all the bonding we do at school,” Kellogg said. “We go and do lots of activities, we go to Arts in the Park together in the summer, we have sectionals and just kind of bond. … Some of the best conversations in my life have come from Varsity.”
Through challenges and mistakes and practices, students a part of the Varsity and Pops Choir still manage to find the courage to get on stage and do the best that the can, no matter the outcome. More times than not, the students are proud of what they have accomplished, as well as their director.
“I think [our choirs] did great,” Pape said. “By the time the school year is done, they will have done this tens of times, so it’ll be automatic. The first time out though, I thought they sang well and they did a good job.”