RUMPUS lip-sync practice began before Christmas break, ahead of RUMPUS weekend two weeks after classes resume. Lip-sync is the most anxiously awaited event of RUMPUS. Participants from each house perform a two to four minute dance that directly involves their house’s theme. The houses perform in random order and are scored in different categories. All houses practice daily during iPeriod and club time in the afternoons after lunch for about 40 minutes. The locations for practice cycle through and include the following: The Van Es, the Wrestling Room, Old Gym, outside the Old Gym and two courts in the Johnson Fieldhouse.

“In the past, Cooper House has always been either an Old Gym or outside the Old Gym, and Summerbell and Cooper swapped. And now, in the past couple of years, we’ve rotated where people go. Cooper, in the past, has never had the Van Es until the week of RUMPUS,” senior SK McQueen said.

McQueen, a senior leader for Cooper House, talks about how the rotation system is new, brought forward to make the process of lip-sync practice more fair. McQueen also touches on how coveted the Van Es is for practice, for numerous reasons.

“It’s where you perform and it’s easiest to learn spots and teach the dance in the spot where you’re going to perform it because it gives everybody an idea of how it’s actually going to be,” McQueen said.

The Van Es is the universal favorite spot, but there is no true collective least favorite location among students.

“The Old Gym is just not a good use of space; it’s not big enough, it’s cold because it’s always the end of December going into January. But it’s just not a convenient spot,” said McQueen.

A secondary least favorite location is closer than you may think: outside of the Old Gym. You can choose a few different spots outside, but the universal consensus is that they are all poor options. Moser day head prefect, Murray Ellington, shares his opinion.

“It’s just in the grass, and it’s not very smooth, like the surface is rocky, and it’s in the dirt too, so people get dirty sometimes, especially for fast movements. It’s kind of hard to maintain your balance,” said Ellington.

With two out of the six practice location options being difficult and inconvenient, many students yearn for new spots to replace either the Old Gym or the outside of the building. Spaces are limited across the campus due to a lack of space, occupancy, or proximity to other practice locations, so a well-maintained spot in the great outdoors has offered itself as a possibility.

“The football field could be an option because it wouldn’t be terrible, because the hash marks would help with formations and things like that. So the football field could be a spot,” said Ellington.