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Competing against 80 other teams, all of whom had qualified by winning at the state level, the team of Philip Winer, Drew Schoenfeld, Caleb Mullenneaux, Loreena Hansen, and Alista Wikle performed a musical they wrote that not only won first place but also a coveted Da Vinci Award for exceptional creativity.
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by Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa, USA, The Review
28 June 2017
A team of Maharishi School students recently showed their extraordinary creativity by winning a first-place award at the Destination Imagination Global Finals late last month in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Competing against 80 other teams, all of whom had qualified by winning at the state level, the team of Philip Winer, Drew Schoenfeld, Caleb Mullenneaux, Loreena Hansen, and Alista Wikle performed a musical they wrote that not only won first place but also a coveted Da Vinci Award for exceptional creativity.
The 1,400 teams from 15 countries assembled at Knoxville competed in various age-level categories, and in one of six theme categories, ranging from building a machine to putting on an 8-minute play.
The Maharishi School team competed in the senior division in the Fine Arts category, in which they were challenged to present a story about how the disappearance of a color changes the world.
They came up with their own angle on the challenge, creating a play about the disappearance of communism (long associated with the color red).
From their phenominal original songs to their thought-provoking content, this team transported the appraisers.
Part of the play takes place in a communist setting, and part in a social Darwinist setting. The team incorporated computer programming and robotics into their set in a seamless and impressive manner. They built a set on wheels that could be rotated between a plain communist background and a cityscape capitalist background.
The play addressed the excesses of each system in a lighthearted way without making a clear political statement.
The creativity exhibited in the concept and staging took their performance to a high level, but then to also make it into a musical put it over the top. At the substate competition, they simply had a 30-second musical interlude, which the audience really liked. So at the state competition, three of their eight minutes was done via musical performance, and again the audience liked that.
In the weeks leading up to the global competition, they made the entire performance a musical – and ended up with a performance the audience loved.
© Copyright 2017 Maharishi University of Management
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