Lip Sync is a tradition that is looked forward to every year, perhaps the Super Bowl of a student’s life in the Upper School. Each house selects a few songs that correlate with their them and as well as dances to have a competition against one another. The practice begins around three weeks before RUMPUS, the week before have practice multiple times a day. This year at RUMPUS, Neville House won lip sync with the theme of “Neville Gentlemen.” Following Neville, Cooper came in second place, followed by Thornwood in third. Junior Ava Ann Woods explained the environment of Thornwood’s practice.
“Thornwood is always very strict at practice, but all the girls worked really hard this year,” Woods said. “We had a really good group, barely anybody was out and they always made sure to text me if they were out. I think Thornwood should have won because we were all in sync. We were very much in sync like we were last year. I think we hit the same bar.”
For Regester, junior Zain Elkhatib thinks the reason their lip sync was entertaining was the fact that they had movement on the court.
“We worked really hard and everyone did well. I would say what made our dance good was how we switched scenes, themes and how we were all in sync,” Elkhatib said.
The week before RUMPUS, all houses hold night practices starting at 7:30 to get the last few corrections and final adjustments completed for their dance. A lot of their work and final touch-ups happen during this time.
“I think that having the night practices really helped us a lot, and I think that all of our leaders really worked hard together to make it come together for Cooper,” senior Emi Grace Wood said.
It is also very important to know how much energy you put into the dance. Moser made sure that they put in 100% energy to make their lip sync interesting.
“Our dance was good because of how in sync we were and how much effort we put in. Also, the amount of stress we had when it came to actually lip-syncing the words,” senior Jaeden Gordon said.
Gordon mentioned the lip syncing because last year their dance was very well performed, but not all the dance members were lip syncing, and that cost them some points. On the other hand, Gordon mentioned that movement on the court would have benefited Moser’s lip sync, and maybe made Moser rank better.
“Maybe changing formations a couple of times could have made the dance better, also having another person other than me being a lead would make the dance better,” Gordon said.
Not only can the dancing part of lip sync be stressful, but also coming up with songs that go along with your theme and are popular can be difficult.
“I was a little worried about our songs for the theme Gentlemen, but senior Nicky Lawrence did a great job with the music,” Head of Neville house Joe Pitts said.
Although many things are stressed to make lip sync come together, one of the biggest things is the energy that is brought. Without energy, the judges loose interest in the dance altogether, whether it was good or not.
“The energy that everyone had in our dance is what I think personally pulled Summerbell’s lip sync together,” freshman Whit Watters said.