Performance Day Review 10th June 2016

‘The Masked Dancers’

At the end of term 1, Mr Z’s class and Ms Whelan’s class decided to do a Fringe inspired performance day. We got to choose our groups and what we did for our performances. In my group was Tahli, Danica, Chloe, Talitha and I. We had a lot of challenges deciding what to do as we all had different ideas. At first we wanted to do face painting for our workshop but we didn’t know what to do for our performance. Chloe and I were thinking of doing a play, but no one else wanted to. We finally decided not to do face painting, and we got inspired by a broken plastic mask in the sports box to paint masks and wear them while dancing. Our first idea for a dance was for Danica and Tahli to stand at the front, and Talitha, Chloe and I to paint on them “to the music”. We then realised, with the teachers help, that that idea would never work. Mr Z then helped us by giving us the idea to paint the masks with traditional patterns from a certain country, then to do that country’s traditional dance. After a lot of arguments, we finally decided to do an Indian dance with Indian masks, and a mask making workshop. We took a long time to choose the music, and then when we couldn’t decide, Nisha told us a song that her and Anisa were using at their Bollywood dance lessons called Radha On The Dance Floor. We decided to use this song for our dance. Then we had to come up with the dance moves. This took us quite a while as a lot of the moves on Youtube were a bit too complicated. We finally came up with some moves and when I went home one night I came up with about half of the dance to music. I showed the rest of the group the dance I had come up with, and we decided to go with it. After we had practiced the moves in the dance and changed some of it a bit we needed to finish the dance, but we didn’t want to have to learn more moves as it would take us longer to finish the dance. We decided to just repeat the dance and then add one of the moves we didn’t do much in the dance on the end, as we still had some of the song left. After we had come up with the dance we had to practice.

We had to show our dance to the class and teachers so that they could see what we had done. We just showed the class some of the moves we had because we still needed a lot of practise. Ms Whelan said that she liked our dance moves and the idea we had, which we were surprised about as we thought she wouldn’t like it. The only “bad” thing she said about our performance was that we still needed a lot of practise, which we knew already. We then had to decide what we were going to wear for our performance. We chose to wear a colourful top with baggy pants that Chloe had from Bali, as well as our masks painted with traditional Indian patterns.

In term 2 we only had another 6 weeks to finish our dance. We couldn’t find the masks we wanted anywhere for our performance. We then found out that Mrs Shevchenko had some. She let us use them for our dance which we were very happy about. We had to decorate them ourselves as there wasn’t enough time to do them together. I decorated mine with a lot of flowery looking decorations and paisley designs. When it came to week 5 term 2 we only had 1 week to get it done. The weekend before the performance I invited everyone over to my house to practice the dance because we really needed to practice. Unfortunately Tahli couldn’t come as she was away camping, but everyone else came and we got the dance pretty much almost perfect.

In week 6 term 2 it was our performance day on the Friday. We were all nervous and excited. Our first performance was at 11:55 AM and was in the hall. Ms Fisher came and watched as she had helped all of us with our performances. We were paired up with another dance group called Salsa Squad. In this group was Nisha, Skye, Emily, Anisa and Leonora. Unfortunately Leonora was sick so she missed out on the day. In our first performance we had about 4 kids from Mrs Cullen’s class, 2 kids from Mrs Gregory’s class, and Miss Murphy’s class. For our workshop Danica and Chloe had brought some of their old art supplies for the kids to use. We took half of the group and Salsa Squad took the other half. Our half of the group decorated paper masks and then we got them ready for them to wear. They all looked great and the kids had a lot of fun making them. The only problem we had was that Danica had brought a box of tiny beads and one of the kids just tipped the whole thing on his mask and they went everywhere.

Our second performance was at 2:15 PM in the gym. This time we had Mrs Langton’s class, half of Mrs Natar’s class and half of Ms Bolt’s class watching. At the workshop we decided not to use the beads this time. Even though a lot of the kids were older they looked like they were having fun and all the masks looked great. Overall the whole day was a lot of fun and it was worth all the work.