Lion Dances in public

Most of our lion dancers only did their routines for the rest of the school, but three of the best pairs - as voted for by their classmates - got to perform at a city centre shopping mall, alongside our charity craft fair, which was the centrepiece of our Chinese 'IDE' celebrating the coming Lunar New Year.

Performers:       Red Lion             Mia Kriegel and Tristan Wong                            Orange Lion        Chloe Lee and Isabella Boyne
                           Blue Lion           Sherson Ng and Andy Ji


Filmed by Mr Murphy

More music from our Chinese New Year celebrations

This is Andy Ji practising the erhu piece 良宵 (Liang Xiao - Beautiful Night) by Liu Tianhua, in preparation for a public performance in the outdoor plaza of the Euro American Center mall the next day, alongside our pop-up craft market there - the centrepiece of our Chinese 'IDE' to celebrate the approaching Chinese New Year.

And here's the actual performance at the plaza on Friday 6th February. (There is, unfortunately, quite a lot of background noise, but the sound recording has come out fairly well on this.)

Filmed by Mr Murphy

A cappella performance

Enrique Chuidian, Kate Bradley, Karis Tao, Isabella Boyne, and Jasmine and Georgina Savage rehearse an a cappella arrangement of the popular Chinese song Da Hai A Gu Xiang (大海啊 故乡, composed by Wang Liping), in preparation for a performance at our Chinese New Year's Craft Fair event at the Euro American Center shopping mall the next day.

And you can hear them performing it at the EAC here (although it's not a great recording, as it was in the open air and there was a lot of background noise).

Filmed by Mr Murphy

Chinese New Year Celebrations - Skit Show

Here is the final element of our Chinese 'IDE' at the end of our last session of school: a Saturday morning concert of music performances and comical skits, mostly prepared and performed in dormitory groups - part of our efforts to celebrate the imminent Chinese New Year. The MCs were Frances Amos and Tippy Pei.

This is just a selection of the highlights. You can watch the entire concert here. [Two other films about the earlier phases of this IDE activity can be seen here and here.]


Filmed by Mr Murphy

Chinese New Year Celebrations - Part 2

The second phase of our Chinese 'IDE' celebrating the Lunar New Year: students spent 4 hours in the plaza of the Euro American Center shopping mall - entertaining passers-by with impromptu performances and selling handmade craft products to raise money for charity.

[The 'flash mob' episode accompanied a rendition of the Zambian hymn Bonse Aba, but I wasn't able to get a decent recording of that live, so I have used a version sung by the Lenoir Rhyne Youth Chorus.]

The Part 1 film, on preparations the day before, can be seen here.

Filmed by Mr Murphy

新年快乐!

Chinese New Year Celebrations - Part 1

A few highlights from our preparations for the Chinese New Year this year. We gave over the last few days of our Jan/Feb session to an 'Inter-Disciplinary Experience' (IDE) led by the Chinese Department: students prepared performances for a farewell concert, and created homemade crafts to be sold in aid of local charities at a pop-up market in a local mall the next day. 
There was also a keenly contested inter-dormitory competition for the best decorations and hospitality displayed to a visiting judging panel (Mr Karena, Mr Tam, Ms Lam and Ms Lee) on Thursday evening.

A further video or two with snippets of the Friday market and the Saturday skit show will appear in a day or two.


Filmed by Mr Murphy

Live Lounge 2015

On Sunday 1st February, just before our Chunjie break, we transformed our black-box theatre into a cabaret/café for the evening to host a 'Live Lounge' concert.

Masterminded by Katie Eu and Mrs Grace on behalf of the student Arts & Social Committee, the event had so many people coming forward to participate that it ran on on well past its planned 70-80 minutes.... and exhausted the batteries in both of the video cameras I was using to try to record the event. I replaced them as quickly as I could, but one performance - Enrique Chuidian and Camille Chiang singing a Jack Johnson song - unfortunately did not get filmed. My apologies.

The concert was so long that - for the purposes of editing and uploading the footage - I was obliged to divide it into two parts. The final 45 minutes or so (the overrun!!) can be seen below.

The films above were shot from various points around the room with a handheld camera. You can also see an alternate view of the show (again in two parts), shot from a static camera on a tripod at the side of the stage, here and here. The pictures from this second camera mostly turned out quite well, but the sound quality was rather poorer than on the handheld shots.

I have also posted all the individual performances separately: they can be accessed via this list of links (which also appears at the top of the sidebar on the right here).

Many thanks to everyone who took part, to our splendid MCs Jasmine Savage and Enrique Chuidian, to the hard-working stage crew of Jean Yap, Yew San Cheah and Tristan Wong - and to Katie Eu and Mrs Grace for their considerable organisational efforts over the past several weeks.

Filmed by Mr Murphy

Coming soon....

Live Lounge  - films of all the performances from our cabaret-concert a week ago should be ready by the middle of this week. I'll post a few highlights on here, and put a full link list up in the 'pages' section at the top of the sidebar.

And......

Chinese New Year celebrations  -  I should have a highlights reel (or two) of our CNY activities up on here next week, shortly before the New Year finally arrives.  Watch this space.

Going home

One of our most eager film-makers this year, Stephen Chan, isn't actually studying Film with me, alas. He shot this little film, 'Back', a montage of the journey back from Hangzhou to Hong Kong, on his camera-phone - on this year group's first trip back, for the half-term break in October. It's a journey most of our students will make at least five times during their year here. They're just about to do it again....


A film by Stephen Chan

The music, he tells me, is Channel 42 by deadmau5 and Wolfgang Gartner.

Thoughts on the eve of the Chinese New Year

At the end of Semester 1 last year I arranged for both of my Film classes to visit the Hangzhou No. 2 Old People's Home to conduct interviews with some of the residents - a kind of precursor to our recent 'Humans of Hangzhou' project.
Unfortunately, we were assailed by legions of gremlins on and after these shoots (everything from broken tripod mounts to faulty SD cards and hard drive meltdowns; it was a veritable Biblical plague of technical 'issues'!), and most of the footage we got was lost or proved to be unusable. We eventually managed to salvage this one reel of some of the old folk's closing remarks - their New Year hopes and wishes for the upcoming Year of the Horse (now very nearly past).

Lion Dances 2015

As part of our efforts to connect with Chinese culture, PE classes at the end of Semester 1 spend a month or so studying the art of lion dancing - a traditional centrepiece of Chinese New Year celebrations - and work in small teams to produce a performance. Here is a highlight reel of the final performances for assessment in class last Friday morning. The best pairs, as chosen by their classmates, will perform again during our New Year festivities this week.
The traditional percussion accompanying the performances was composed and recorded by Mr Karena's music students.


Links to full films of all the separate student team performances (in two views, one shot from a tripod and the other handheld) can be found here. [And links to some of last year's performances can be found here]



Filmed by Mr Murphy