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J U LY 3 1 , 2 0 1 9 F R E E
A musical at the Fringe West Windsor residents collaborate in arts festival production By MADeleine MACCAR
Plainsboro Mayor Peter Cantu (center) with GearChangers coach Shweta Ruparel (left) and team members Veer Ruparel, Milan Parikh and Aalind Tyagi. The team won the U.S. national championship and competed at Robocup2019 in Sydney, Australia, this month. Not pictured are team members Salar Sheriff and Emin Dagli.
GearChangers go international WW-P robotics team competes at world championships in Sydney, Australia By Justin Feil Much of the groundwork for the GearChangers robotics team’s world championship trip to Australia was laid in a West Windsor basement. The GearChangers—High
North students Emin Dagli, Milan Parikh, Veer Ruparel, Salar Sheriff, Aalind Tyagi and coach Shweta Ruparel (Veer’s mother)—met after school for hours each session at the Ruparel home. Their meticulous work together resulted in a national championship in New York in late May that earned the five and their coach a trip to the RoboCup2019 world championships in Sydney, Australia, during the first week of July.
And while the team didn’t come away with a world championship, they still feel they came away as winners. “At the end of the day, though, it was all a learning experience,” Sheriff said. “We realized how much the world level of robotics is different than the U.S. level. “Although I thought our performance was good, after going there and seeing all the other projects, it really inspired us to think of greater ideas. It was a See ROBOTICS, Page 6
West Windsor resident and incoming Julliard School student Louis Josephson says that he learned to speak through music. His natural passion was shaped and augmented by years of voice, piano and percussion lessons, as well as musical camps and pre-college programs. With the added to guidance of long-ago music teacher Shannon Ferrara, Josephson penned his first musical in sixth grade. “I thought it was bound for Broadway—I was, like, 12 and completely wrong, but I wrote it,” he laughs. The teenage composer hasn’t slowed down since that first piece. Now, with his first year of college coming on fast, Josephson’s most recent piece, Relapse The Musical, is just days from springing to life for its debut performance. When the fourth annual New Jersey Fringe Festival touches down in Hammonton Aug. 2-4, West Windsor will be well-represented. Joining Josephson is Shannon, who is musical director of Relapse The Musical, and her husband Frank, who’s directing
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the production. The Ferraras are West Windsor residents, and Shannon is also a music teacher at Grover Middle School. The yearly three-day theater extravaganza that is the New Jersey Fringe Festival always brings any array of fine-arts experiences along with it, and this year’s installment is no exception. Productions are staged nearly nonstop across multiple venues all centralized around Hammonton’s Eagle Theater, in addition to the bevy of art, live music, food, and drinks that the festival offers event-goers between performances. And being a part of it is “a dream come true” for the young composer. “I’ve been dreaming about doing something like this forever,” he says. “It’s been incredible to see this idea that was in my head come to life.” Relapse The Musical is an 80-minute dramatic glimpse into the lives of five patients, a doctor and a nurse and the ways their paths interact and intersect in a mental institution. The production portrays the ways the patients arrived there, their individual journeys, and their interactions with each other and the staff. The plot itself taps into humor and the spectrum of nuanced human emotions. A total of 16 original songs explore how perceived weaknesses are really assets in disguise. Josephson composed the See RELAPSE, Page 8
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