The award-winning Oswego Commotion group began their competition season on Saturday, Jan. 20, with energy and the first award of the season: the People’s Choice Award.
Commotion is a group of OE and OH students performing as a show choir, a group that sings and dances in a long-form routine, at multiple regional competitions throughout their spring season. Student performers who have been working towards this season since before the school year began. They began preparing over the summer for their fall show, setting a baseline for their eventual work on the competition set. Then during the school year, they started working on the show they perform in competition.
“We had a couple lock-ins where we learned all of our competition choreography up until around the start of January,” said Nat Meldon, a Commotion captain, and OH Senior.
Commotion is open to all four grade levels at OE and OH, meaning they receive all different skill levels at the beginning of the year, creating a different starting point every year.
“There are people who have been dancing for their entire lives and then people who never danced in an organized way at all,” said fellow dance captain Owen Kalkman, an OH senior, “I started as never having danced […] it’s really accepting of all skill levels.”
It takes lots of patience and focuses to get a show looking and sounding performance ready, far past just learning the moves and the notes.
“Most of our rehearsals are a lot of cleaning what we’ve got […] It’s like a band when they get new music, it’s more like the fine-tuning aspect” said Kalkman.
Commotion’s routines include both dancing and singing, making it an impressive and difficult feat to not only master the move- but also being able to sing while doing it.
“Most members enter commotion with a leading strength in either dance or singing, so my goal by the end of the season is to balance their skills,” said Braden Konick, music captain, and OH Senior.
With competition season beginning, performers need to be at their best, but that does not mean there is nothing more to improve upon. Much like any other activity, there is always room for improvement, and the Commotion seeks to get better with every performance.
“It’s a 16-minute routine and by the last song a lot of energies go down, so by the end of the season our endurance is usually a lot better,” said Nina Yeomans, another OH senior and captain. “As we perform in front of audiences and see which parts of the show they like our excitement goes up, so I think the show gets better in general when people are watching it.”
Overall, the Commotion team seemed excited and extremely prepared for their debut to competition this season. After months of preparation and work, they received the People’s Choice Award at their first competition this weekend, and senior Hailey Mueller received first place in the soloist division. Future competitions are located at Manteno High School and El Paso Gridley High school in Febuary and John Hersey High School in March.
“I think every year we continue to improve and I have high hopes for how we are gonna do at competitions this year […] I think that everyone is gonna have a good time because we are a really fun group and it’s a fun time just to go to these competitions and meet new people and have new experiences,” said Meldon.
I am a senior at OH and so excited to be a Managing and Opinions Section Editor this year! I love working on 42Fifty, but I am also very involved in band and numerous honor societies here. Looking forward to doing great work this year!
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