Arts!

Yesterday was an incredibly long day, but also incredibly rewarding. I started working with the Drama club and I was blown away at the level of responsibility that the students show. The club is almost entirely student run and driven with student leaders running warm-ups and rehearsals. The club is currently preparing a short play for the SYF (Singapore Youth Festival) which they will be performing in two weeks at the competition (think Sears Fest in Canada). The students at my school are working on a play about gangs and they performed for myself and two other teachers and listened to our feedback.

This was a great chance for me to get plugged into the drama that is taking place at the school and I felt at home for the first time since arriving here when they started doing drama warmups and invited me to go with them. Vocal warm ups and physical warmups that we do in Canada were being run by students here in Singapore and I was overjoyed at the feeling of being home.

I worked with the students on a few stage fighting techniques as there is a stage slap in the play that was super awkward and so I got the chance to actually teach some drama stuff and the students had a riot learning how to fake slap each other. The kids were asking me questions about Canada (Do you know of Justin Bieber?!) and telling me that I have pretty eyes (I told them thank you, I grew them myself).

Today I am going with the drama club to the venue where they will be performing to work in the space and have a rehearsal. Yea, that's right, the school forks over the money for a bus AND a truck so that they can bring their set and their props to the place where they will be performing. And they get to go back one more time next week before the actual performance. I almost fainted when I heard about the level of funding that the arts are getting here to be able to do such a thing.

I also sat in on the rehearsal process yesterday for Synergy Night, which was a performance by the school's choirs and bands. It was really surreal to watch 40 students play "Don't Stop Believin'" on classical guitars. The students really impressed me with their performances and the Primary School's String Orchestra came to perform some peices which really blew me away. We're talking about 8 year olds that can rock out on violin. There was also a performance using handbells that was really cool and the band played "Poker Face". I took some videos during the performance on my iPhone and I will load them onto YouTube and post them on here in the next day or two.

After working with the Drama Club I was super energized and excited that I found a place where I can work with drama. The amazing thing about the students in the club is that they are all so self-directed and motivated, giving each other criticisms on performances and workshopping their peice all on their own. They respectfully worked on parts that are challenges and listened to their peers while they articulated parts of the performance that felt stilted. It was truly inspiring to see students working on such a level in the arts and with such dedication. I am excited to attend the performances and see our kids rock, and also to see the kind of performances that other schools will be putting up.

The rehearsal schedule in the upcoming weeks is going to be very vigorous for the students with us staying at school until 6pm on most nights but now is the perfect time to be working on it for me because I do not have a course load yet. I'm hoping that once the SYF is done I can possibly run some workshops with the kids to learn about different aspects of theatre and drama that I can pass on to them. Maybe some Improv?