After a long day of school, junior Leila Gardner heads straight to show choir practice or she works on her art projects. Gardner finds a way to involve herself with several activities while also keeping up with her academic life.
Gardner is a junior at RHS, and is also a singer, dancer, artist and performer. She contributes hours on end for all of her extracurriculars throughout the week. On top of that, she is involved in Honors and Advanced Placement (AP) classes at RHS as well as College Credit Plus (CCP) classes at The University of Akron.
Gardner first took part in Revere Players during her freshman and sophomore years. She served as a backstage crew member her freshman year, and then became a part of the cast her sophomore year. She loved being a part of the cast because it gave her more of an opportunity to meet and speak to new people in the production.
“I feel like in crew, it’s more strict because you have to do this now and then that, but for practices, you kind of get to goof off with the cast,” Gardner said
She said her favorite production she has been a part of was last year’s spring production, Cinderella. Along with being a villager, Gardner also got to play one of the mice that turned into one of Cinderella’s horses. Her favorite part about it were the other actors who also played mice alongside her.
“ We did so much dancing and singing. . . . It was really awesome. We had a really nice group of us and we were all on stage all the time,” Gardner said.
A number of students who are also in Revere Players participate in show choir and convinced Gardner to join. She joined a show choir group called Energy, Talent, and Commitment Show Choir (ETC).This is Gardner’s second year in it and is currently in both of ETC’s groups. All Americans is the boys and girls group who are more advanced in singing, and Rouge is the all girls group who exceeds more in dancing. She said that her favorite part of being in a show choir are the competition days.
“They may be the longest thing ever. We’re there from normally seven in the morning till midnight, but it’s really cool seeing other groups and actually going on stage and really singing and dancing your heart out,” Gardner said.
Gardner said that compared to last year, this year’s show choir season is a lot more stressful and she is putting a lot of pressure on herself to improve from ETC’s previous shows.
“Last year we weren’t known as the winning group and then we went to every competition and won. So this year we have the status of being a winning group and we need to keep it up,” Gardner said.
Junior Reese Patton is also a member of ETC and Revere Players. Patton and Gardner became friends during Cinderella and during that time, Gardner convinced Patton to join ETC which ended up making them closer.
“We spent a lot more time together through ETC and Players, because they’re [of] similar interest,” Patton said.
Patton said that one of Gardner’s strengths as a dancer and a performer is her ability to pick up choreography in a quick and clean manner.
“I think it’s just that she did gymnastics for a couple of years, but she’s really good at hitting the specifics in the way that they’re supposed to be hit,” Patton said.
On top of being a part of the theatre programs, Gardner has also been involved in many RHS art programs since elementary school. She is currently in AP Drawing and an AP studio arts portfolio class taught by art teacher Robert Pierson. Pierson said that Gardner is an ideal AP portfolio student because of her technical ability.
“[She’s] very technically skilled [and] goes out of the way to get the right image to work from. . . . AP portfolio requires you to have a high technical ability or a strong technical ability,” Pierson said.
Gardner said that she has sketchbooks dating back to third grade. She took the class Drawing & Design: Life Drawing last year and learned how to do colored pencil rendering, a technique that makes an image look more detailed and realistic when drawing. Now, the majority of her portfolio is filled with color pencil drawings using that same technique. Gardner’s all time favorite art project is a large fish painting that took her quite some time to complete.
“I did my really large fish painting. It was from a trip to Japan. . . . [Pierson] gave me probably the biggest canvas ever and it took me a really long time,” Gardner said.
Pierson said that Gardner’s attention to detail is what makes her a good artist. He also said that one of her biggest strengths is that she enjoys the more time consuming art project.
“She’s not afraid to take on something really complicated and she’s not afraid of working big,” Pierson said.
Pierson said that Gardner is really good at making monotypes, an image made by ink or paint and is then transferred to canvas. Pierson believes that her monotypes are very strong. One of her monotypes earned a gold key for the Scholastic art award, a competition where students get their art work judged.
“Leila’s monotypes from day one even last year, it was like she’d already knew how to do it even though it was the first time she did it,” Pierson said.
Patton and Gardner are both a part of the CCP Government class offered at RHS, and Patton said that Gardner has a knack for these types of classes. Patton explains that Gardner is able to understand material fairly quickly, adding to a list of Gardner’s many strengths.
“We’re both in CCP Government right now, and she was in CCP U.S. History before that, and she just picks it up really easily,” Patton said.
Being in many after school activities, Gardner has a tight schedule. She is able to find a way to balance all of these extracurriculars into her day-to-day life. She said she finds time during the school day to finish her homework because she rarely has time after school to do it. Since she has to go to dance, work or any of her other activities right after school, she prefers to do it during the day.
“I normally lay out my schedule so I know I can do all of my homework and everything at school, so I don’t have to worry about it once I get home,” Gardner said.
Gardner involves herself into separate after school activities even with her complex schedule already. Her ETC season has practice being two to three times a week for hours on end. Her other artwork will also be judged by scholastic later this year and all of the art she created this year will be showcased in the art show at the end of this year. Gardner is excited to see how her art and performances will grow throughout the years.
