With Mt. Eden’s remix of “Escape” by Craig Armstrong playing in the background, Cliff Ressel ’15 performed with three poi, which are tethered weights, for the first time at Andover during last weekend’s Abbot Cabaret. Ressel added lights to the weights to draw attention to their rhythmical patterns.
“For this performance, I aimed for much more advanced and technical choreography than [that] in the previous ones [with glowsticks]… It was a great experience to push my ability with poi to its limits with this choreography,” said Ressel. “A variety of three poi techniques and moves have been recently discovered by some of the top spinners around the world, and I was trying to showcase some of my favorite innovations.”
Abbot Cabaret, which was organized by Roshan Mathi ’15, Abbot Cluster President and directed by Victoria Bian ’15, Emma Kukielski ’15 and Wei Han Lim ’15, displayed Andover’s wide range of talent. All proceeds raised from the five dollar admission fee went to We Are The World Kids, a charity founded by Justine Wang ’15.
“The Abbot Cabaret is a longstanding tradition in Abbot. It tries to showcase talent in all different areas and ways, and it seeks to highlight students who might not necessarily always get a chance to be onstage. Every year, we are amazed by the range of abilities, interests and creativity of the students,” said Jennifer Elliott, Dean of Abbot Cluster.
The show opened with The Brett Quartet’s rendition of “C.R.E.A.M.” by Wu-Tang Clan. The Brett Quartet includes Brett Sawka ’17 on upright bass, Jake Peffer ’17 on saxophone, Arthur Doran ’15 on drums, Krishna Canning ’16 on piano and Skylar-Bree Takyi ’16 on vocals. Rather than rapping the song like the original version, Takyi sang the lyrics at a steady tempo.
Sawka said, “When deciding what to play for [Abbot Cabaret], we knew we wanted something that would resonate with the audience at least a little. Since much of what we play is instrumental music, and the audience we knew we’d be playing for wouldn’t really care for, it took some time to come up with a good choice that the audience would enjoy and that we could play. We hoped some people might recognize the song, even though we put together much of the music for it and didn’t fully expect it to be recognized.”
Later, Footnotes, a student tap dance group, collaborated with Stellae, a new a cappella group, to perform “Cups” by Anna Kendrick. The sounds of the taps were timed to match the rhythm of the song, providing a steady beat for soloists Grace Anthony ’17 and Kelly Sheng ’17.
Michaela Barczak ’15, Co-Head of Footnotes, said “[‘Cups’] was very popular when the movie ‘Pitch Perfect’ came out and there are so many cool versions of the song that play with the rhythm. I’ve always wanted to do a tap dance to that rhythm and ‘Cups’ just seemed like it would be a short, sweet dance in a package.”
Dressed casually in jeans and sweatshirts, the Yorkies, Andover’s all-male a cappella group, performed Fountains of Wayne’s song “Stacy’s Mom.” The group’s humorous acting and hand gestures accompanied the voices of soloists Tyler Shen ’17, Tom Burnett ’15 and Tas Yusoontorn ’15.
Shen said, “I think this performance was different from others [we’ve done] because of the fun we had singing this song. The song itself was whimsical and we had a good time practicing and introducing new components as we went along. I think we really nailed it in terms of our character. I also think we did a great job getting physically engaged with the song.”
Later, the student K-pop dance group Roll Like a Buffalo, featuring Ava LaRocca ’15 , Xin Wen ’15, Julia Xia ’15 and Rebecca Savord ’15, executed an action-packed dance to B.A.P’s “One Shot.” The group has been dancing together for the past two years.
Xia said, “[Roll Like a Buffalo] is just a group of friends with a common interest who wanted to dance together. We practiced maybe four times in total for [Abbot Cabaret]. Just staked out Steinbach Lobby for a few hours at a time, after school or on weekends. It was a bit of a learning, a lot of perfecting – what angles are the arms out at? How far apart are we? How low do we bring our arms at this certain part?”
Nurilys Cintron ’15 closed the show with her rendition of “Who You Are” by Jessie J. The song started out calm, but quickly gained momentum, becoming more intense. Cintron’s distinctive voice captured the song’s message about staying true to one’s self.
Cintron wrote in an email to _The Phillipian_, “We all have things in our life that are difficult to deal with. [‘Who You Are’] is about remaining genuine to yourself through those struggles and always remembering that no matter what you go through, you’re never alone. I feel like [the song] was a good way to bring people back to reality since they’re really worried about anything that’s going on personally.”
Lim said, “I think the best bit about Abbot Cabaret is that we’re not obligated to pick the usual acts that typically feature in these performances. I love that we have the chance to showcase acts that usually don’t get the spotlight, but are just as good as, if not better than, the established acts on campus. We definitely enjoyed auditioning acts that we hadn’t really heard of before being blown away by their performances. There were a lot of moments during auditions when we saw some acts and all realized, ‘They have to be in the show!’”
