Spanish Speech Festival 2017
This year’s Spanish Speech Festival was hosted by KGV School and took place on 21st June on a wet and windy morning. All the other ESF Secondary Schools were invited and they came along with their brave Spanish students ready to talk in front of a large audience and to have a morning of Spanish poetry. There were three native speaker judges who kindly gave up their time to come along: Francisco de las Heras, ex Principal and Spanish advisor to Rosary Hill School, interestingly he is also a Dominican Monk; Rocio Blasco who is Head of Spanish at HKU and also Cecilia Bedoya who came to us from ESF Educational Services when she herself wanted to promote the Spanish Comic Competition that was finalised the week before.
KGV took two first place positions this year: Saanchi Shah for her beautiful recitation of Cocoliche el seductor by Leonardo Antivero (in a crocodile onesie) and also Aayush Bhatt for his fiery rendition of Gatos, Gatos y Gatos. The competition was fierce and right up until the last two rounds, KGV was neck and neck with South and West Island Schools.
I would also like to mention the lovely group category contestants (Vidhita Chugani, Karina Bhojwani, Faustina Yick and Tiya Khetarpal) who were the youngest of the group competitors and remained enthusiastic right from the beginning of the rehearsals through to their calm and charming delivery of Ustedes y Nosotros. They came third overall and were a great to work with.
Sarah Chan recited the very difficult Camello declarado indeseable, a terribly sad story about a rejected camel. This was definitely the most challenging task of the festival and Sarah deserves much credit for her calm rendition of this complex reading.
Micayla Baltazar and Manas Joshi were fabulously energetic in their reading of La Lluvia (the Rain) complete with umbrellas, a cloud hat and rainwear, very much in keeping with the weather outside on the day which lent an element of pathetic fallacy to their poetry reading.
Between each of the readings, many of the schools contributed musical and dance items with a Hispanic theme. Renaissance College, Discovery College and of course our wonderful KGV year 10 musicians led by Helena Murchie made the event more than just a poetry recital. They were fab!
There are many many people and students I would like to thank for their contribution to this festival, including Alicia Matthews, one of our top Higher Level IB students who MC-ed the whole event from beginning to end. She also had help from Oliver Weston Flores, who spoke her words in Spanish at the beginning and end of the Festival even though he is only in year 9 and did a spectacular job in this regard. Seren Bird, Diva Saha and Felicity Yick also contributed interesting elements of the show with the Year 12 Ab Initio class helping back stage and the year 7s in charge of programs and welcoming our guests. There are many photos from the event, taken by Kevin Tong so please email me if you wish to have access to more of these. I am not sure if I am also allowed to mention the El Colmado online supermarket people who also showed up to feed and sell us lovely Spanish food in the interval. I do recommend them should you need to get hold of a paella in a hurry.
Julia Block
