Wild, Clairvoyant Dreams

The Holt Winter Guard teams still get to perform their shows, “Wild”, and “Clairvoyant Dreams” despite the pandemic.
The Junior Varsity Winter Guard teams lunges forward during their performance.
Alexis Murphy(23) prepares her flag for the second half of her show.
Sitting in a pose, Paige Kenchel(24) finishes the JV show strong and proud.
The high school Winter Guard teams pose for their team photo of the night.
Cheyenne Johnson(22) flourishes her flag in unison with her show music.
Halle Broeckelmann(23) stretches to prepare for the work she does for the next few hours.
To lead into the next section, Emmy Way(24) tosses a “double” with her flag.
Tyler Smith(22) and Halle Broeckelmann(23) dance away from each other with Smith’s sabre in between.

This year has been extremely wild especially for sports teams, including Winter Guard. Their routine is changing almost every practice and even changing on the spot on competition film dates. Winter Guard and color guard are the sports you see with all of the dancing, flags, rifles and sabre. The Junior Varsity and Varsity teams have been working hard as if every practice, competition or performance were their last.

The Junior Varsity show, “Wild” is based off of the animal print of their flags, costumes, floor paint and their song “Wild Life” by OneRepublic. The idea also came from the fall marching show, “PUMA”.

“It’s more about not having a super hard show,” guard coach Leah Cordiano-Siemens said. “The staging isn’t quite as intricate as varsity but it’s about training and really getting down that solid technique and a solid base for the upcoming season.”

The team’s song somewhat resembles our world today as it’s getting wilder and wilder as we go on.

“Guard is a lot of work but it’s fun and rewarding with competitions,” JV Co-Captain Emmy Way(24) said. “I feel like I missed out on some things like competitions due to COVID but I’m still happy that I was able to perform during the fall. Being a captain is exciting, having the coaches ask me what the counts are and the work for our show is different, but I like being a reliable figure.”

Varsity’s show, Clairvoyant Dreams was based around the lyrics from a well known Fleetwood Mac song, “Dreams”. The lyrics from the song, “I see the crystal visions” gave the coaches the idea of a fortune telling based show.

“It’s all about [how] you know things will happen to you through your life and people will come and go but once the rain washes everything away you’ll know what you were looking for,” Cordiano-Siemens said. The theme is portrayed through fortune tellers and a glowing crystal ball. This theory ties into everything we know today and how you just know when somethings will happen and some things just change.

“The hardest challenge to face would be learning to differentiate between emotions because I would mess up and you could see that it affected me later,” Alexis Murphy(23) said. “You become an expert in multitasking.”

Often times both teams go through major and minor changes whether it be just switching up choreography or building an entire new show. It can be complicated to get caught up too if a member is under quarantine because they then miss at least four practices. Both groups of people put in so much work in their shows even with the fear of cancelation so they make it like every performance, practice, and film date is their last.