Recently, the Arts Festival Week activities organized by Art Academy came to an end. Concerts, Art Exhibition, and Drama Shows were staged in turn, presenting a whole week of audio-visual feasts for the teachers and students of SCIE.
Highlights of Arts Festival
Art Exhibition
Concerts
Drama Shows
Performers' Words
Justin Huang
The art’s festival week has arrived, the week everyone in the orchestra is waiting for, the piece we’ve practiced for months awaits this moment. Monday! The start of this week, the start of this musical feast, the start of our stage. Days have passed but I still remembered clearly the accomplishment and pride after the performance, and it is my honor to share my feelings during that day.
As a clarinet player, I’ve joined the orchestra since August, also the time when I first met our piece ‘Sinfonie in h-moll’. It’s not a difficult piece, neither a complicated piece, but a piece that looks for cooperation. I still remembered the first time we put our hands on this piece, despite errors are made frequently, our conductor laughed and told us to relax. After four months of practicing, we no longer make any mistakes, the whole orchestra flows in the melody, but when the day arrives for us to perform, my heart still shakes and my hands grew cold. Can I stay calm?
The feeling piercing deadly in my minds. We entered the theater at 3 in the afternoon to build our stage and rehearse. I tried to talk and laugh with my friends to free my thoughts, I tell myself we have already gone through countless rehearsals and this one will act the same as before. None of them worked.
After the final thirty minute rest waiting for audiences, lights start to fade out and relight, all of them are pointing directly towards me. Sitting at the middle, I could hardly see any of the faces in the crowds. My eyes are fully attracted in our conductors rising hands, the theater seems to change to our practice room. Fear fades away as I rise my clarinets among others in the orchestra. Notes fled and rhythms flew, just like a rehearse, I thought, just like a rehearse.
After I emptied my minds and immerse myself into this show, the whole piece slipped through my fingers without realization. Blasting cheers woke me up, our conductor stood up and bowed, we collected our music scores and we walked off the stage, everything happened in a flash that the performance was already a memory. We all kept quiet because there are other performances afterwards, but I can feel directly my excitement deep in my heart.
As a part of the orchestra, this success is deserved from our months of rehearsing. But as a student new to the orchestra, this performance is a milestone in my performances. This show made my day and I am proud to be a part of the orchestra.
Barry Zeng
I have many things to say as I host Tuesday’s concert by myself.
First, I want to say is that, it is hugely difficult to prepare enough classical pieces for the solo concert. Each music piece takes lots of time to practice to make sure I can deliver the best quality performance to audiences. Plus, I add Sibelius violin concerto, the hardest violin concerto and Butterfly lover’s concerto, the concerto that almost any Chinese people are familiar with which increase the level of difficulty more.
Second, the preparation for classical concert is also a tough job. I make the posters myself and after being printed out, I stick it everywhere in campus to make sure everybody can see. Also I post out the invitation form on SCIE’s official account. I remember that day when I finished writing the invitation draft, it is 2:24 am. I was exhausted during that time. But in the end, almost 100 people came and listened which was really out of my expectation. I was really happy to see so many of teachers and students.
Finally, it is so tiring to perform almost one and a half hours!But it’s meaningful. Since it is the first time I challenged myself performing the piece over one hour continuously in front of the audience without making mistakes, I can say that I break though myself successfully! I can still remember my violin teacher once played a joke on me saying that I had no ability to perform the entire performance. Now I want to say that I did it !
Anne Lam
The reason why I decided to enroll for the drama production – Arabian Nights was very simple. I was interested in it. In addition, the whole production would soon be performed in the theatre, which means in front of a lot of people. As I would always be shy when speaking out loud to a lot of people or people I’m not familiar with, I decided to challenge myself. Therefore without any hesitation, I signed up for this production.
But the rehearsals were not as simple as expected. First of all, we only had 3 months time to rehearse our 2-hour play. Therefore, we had to rehearse on the Drama Studio for every Monday, Thursday after school, and even weekends. This is quite a challenge for myself since I, myself as a G1 have just adapted to the busy life in SCIE. I had to prepare for tests, exams, different activities as well as memorizing the script lines and acts. The process during rehearsal was also not as smooth as expected as there were mistakes. It was tough.
But nobody gave up, on the day of our show, everyone did their best. Although there were unexpected situations, such as forgetting script lines, knocking down props accidentally, forgetting to turn off the microphone while speaking off stage… After we finished the whole performance, everyone felt very satisfied and delighted.
During the performance, the laughter and applause from the audience gave everyone positive energy. With this memorable experience, I found myself more able to express feelings through facial expressions and body language than I used to. I could also speak calmly, without panicking in front of people. As well as the ability adapting to changes, improvising. Most importantly, time management since I have to balance the time spent on my academics and other activities. Time is precious, once it’s gone, it will never come back. So make good use of your time to create your own miracles!
- Article｜ Anne Barry Justin
- Photos｜Brian Dianne Dylan Rita
