SpeakEasy returned to the Girls’ School this year with a full house across the Middle and Senior sections. As speaker followed speaker, a common thread emerged. My Words Were a Whisper That Became a Roar. Until She Is Heard. Our Voice Is an Echo. The Things We Don't Say. Title after title circled the same question, what happens to the things that go unsaid, why do we not want to talk about difficult things and what does it take to speak of them anyway?
Delivery style was left to each speaker, and the range, from tightly structured formal speeches to looser, rhythm-driven spoken word, kept the evening from settling into any single register. Just like a conversation between a group of friends, the ebb and flow of different voices swirled across the space holding attention and then releasing to allow another to hold space.
Boys’ School Year 7 Harrison Te’o took out the Future Talent Award with Born and Raised in South Auckland, a speech about place and identity that gave the youngest finalists one of the evening’s clearest statements of who gets to speak – and how they choose to capture and represent where they're from. Tom Bowkett, Boys’ School Year 8, won the Middle School category with The Art of the Inner Voice, projecting negative ‘Nigel’, an inner voice out of his head, to share the self-talk that plagues his mind, and how he chooses to overcome it.
Coco Veber-Nichols challenged our empathy with a consideration of this year’s Move-on Orders, the change to the Summary Offences Act allowing police to clear rough sleepers from public spaces and asked what it says about a society that would rather make poverty invisible than address it. Monica Qian explored a quieter kind of pressure in Running on the Treadmill of Perfection, the exhaustion of performing wellness even when no one is watching.
The Senior School section carried a similar subtext with continued creativity and passion in their delivery. Olivia Chadzynska opened with I Never Noticed…, Cameron Abba’s emotive consideration of What the Children Can See echoed the concern of how our future will look along with Danya Wang’s The Things We Don't Say which sat close to the emotional centre of the evening. She shared the idea that while ‘history teaches us what is worth remembering,’ it doesn’t always capture the gravity or scope of events that shape the world we live in. Sophie McIndoe won the category with Five Ways to Say Goodbye, walking the audience through the five stages of grief personified, from the disbelief of, ‘They aren’t coming back’ through to ‘giving grief the time of day’ and landing somewhere more comforted than where she’d started.
Judging came from alumnus Harrison Griffiths (2018), who studied Management and International Business at the University of Auckland before moving into a banking career now focused on business lending. Music and theatre have stayed with him well past his own school years, and he still sings and plays piano simply for the love of it.
By the end of the evening, one thing was hard to ignore. Speech after speech had turned the audience inward, asking each of them to reckon with how easily we look past the events on the news, the people who walk past us on the street and our feelings that we would notice more intentionally if we looked directly at them and thought.
