On Friday, March 4, 2016, seniors Kyle Best and Sarah DeMarco competed in the annual “Dancing with the CAHS Stars” and were crowned as the winners by both the judges and the audience.

Many months before the performance, Kyle and Sarah began to come up with ideas for their dance. “We started in December,” Demarco said. “We spent a month coming up with the song and the brainstorming.”

Throughout a long process of choosing a song, they decided to perform their dance with “Work Song” by Hozier. “[Our song choice] went from a multi-song hip-hop dance playlist to [“Work Song”],” Best said. “We slowly kinda inched towards that song with the intentions of trying to find a piece that was meaningful and had a story to it lyrically and was in a style that we both kind of liked with our similar musical tastes.”

With the song chosen, the two wanted to portray a certain message. “The artist himself, Hozier, has different levels to each of his songs where it is very applicable to anyone,” Kyle said. “There’s a lot of references to a husband and wife in the song and a family that they had and how it is damaging to each other with them being there. It just isn’t working, and they need to get out of it, but they can’t. They have these ties to each other. But, with the little references within some of the lyrics, like the subtext as well, there’s a deeper meaning to it that kind of is interpreted to mean like [an] addiction to drugs and alcohol. We figured like within any interpretation of it, that was the kind of addiction, the theme that it was talking about.”

One of the most interesting attributes about Kyle and Sarah’s performance was the implementation of props. “We were thinking…[it] would be like a very earthy, grungy kinda dance…like work, [where] you were out in the fields. Then, Kyle actually had the idea to implement a table, like a workbench. That was what it was originally going to be to dance around because we watched a ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ that had like a bench in it so we were really inspired by it and just the solidarity of the prop that they used,” Demarco said. “The powder,” Demarco added, did not only “add beautiful ambiance, [but] for me it made it more dream-like. It was a real man dealing with ethereal things, things that aren’t really there.”

After all their hard work, Kyle and Sarah performed their dance and amazed the crowd with their emotional and attention-grabbing dance. They ended up winning first place from the three judges that judged the competition, and the two also won first place from the audience’s choice. Even though the two were notably cherished by the audience, they never expected to win the competition. “Neither of us expected to win for sure. Even from the beginning, going into it, [we were like], ‘It’s too weird, this won’t make sense …No one is going to get it because we are just kids.’ … [Winning] isn’t our intention with dancing. I think we just kind of assumed people would just be bored with it and confused or weirded out with it. I think to win was really neat in that our intentions were recognized…It is just neat [be]cause we told a story, or at least we tried to.”

With this being their last year at Classical Academy High School, Best discussed how he wishes for the high school to continue pursuing the art and creations many of the students made. “I liked the opportunity that we were given, and stuff like the ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and the Arts Festival…stuff that is very student-driven, I think, is the coolest things a high school could ever do…Imagine an Arts Festival with the art class, the drama class, and choir…the kids are doing their own thing…creating and producing their own art because every dance in there was created by us…We are not learning unless we are doing, and we can learn a lot with all these classes. And it is awesome to [see the] history and the theory and philosophy behind everything we want to do. But unless we do it, there’s very little progress being made, and so, I think stuff like that is so important. People like Mr. Farmer and Miss D who are encouraging that in their students is the best thing you can do at this school.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: On Apr. 21, at 2:33 p.m., we fixed an incorrectly placed comma in the fourth paragraph.