On Saturday, Feb. 2 at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the Westwood German program attended Sprachfest and came away with first place in the large school category. This year Westwood had just under 50 kids place in their individual and group events. Out of these  students, 13 took home a first place title.

“For duet acting you and a partner get a script and each of you memorize one part, and you have a few weeks ahead of time to practice and memorize the lines,” Saketh Marrapu ‘22 said. “It was a lot of fun, my favorite part was to see the reaction of the judges to our funny skit.”

Saketh won first place in German II duet acting with his partner, Vishal Narra ‘22. Not only did Westwood claim the title for duet acting, but also for the Einzaltanz which is a traditional German couples folk dance. The two winners in this category were Payton Sequerra ‘20, and Kevin Murray ‘20.

“We would practice during class when we had time, and sometimes meet up in the morning before school,” Murray said. “We had traditional German clothes like lederhosen for me and a dirndl for Payton. Now we are just going to continue to practice the dance and make it the best we can so we can hopefully win state.”

Kevin had done the dance previously with a different partner, but for Payton it was all new. She and Kevin practiced almost every day for a few weeks until  she was sure she could do the dance perfectly.

“I had a lot of fun doing this dance especially because me and Kevin got first place and were so close to perfect scores,” said Payton. “There were so many other kids from other German classes and it was really cool to meet all of them and it was especially awesome that we could all communicate in German instead of English.”

Lastly, Alexander Gaber ‘21 received second place in German III paired discussion,sixth place in reading comprehension, and third in duet acting.

“My prompt was that Christmas was coming up and me and my partner had to get a gift for my teacher,” Gaber said. “We started with a discussion in German of what we wanted the gift to be, and then we would talk about that for about three minutes until we were told to stop by the judges.”

The full list of students that placed can be found, here.

The video of Payton and Kevin’s dance can be found, here.