End-of-year concert

Last night, as part of our Arts Festival to welcome parents for our farewell weekend, a group of music students performed a classical concert in the Music Hall.

Here are some of the highlights:

Sophia Chan playing Henryk Wieniawski's Scherzo for Violin...

Kelly Kwok playing Frédéric Chopin's Scherzo in B Minor on piano...

And Yudo Wong playing J.S. Bach's 2nd Flute Sonata...

Sophia and Yudo are, of course, accompanied on the piano by our Director of Music, Tama Karena.

Meeting Cindy Pon

CIS Hangzhou's first ever writer-in-residence, American Chinese YA author Cindy Pon, spent the first week of June on campus with us. Although she had arrived over the weekend and had already attended some classes on Monday morning, her formal introduction to the student body came when everyone assembled in the Library meeting area on Monday afternoon to hear her being interviewed about her life and work by English teacher Paul Murphy, who had arranged her visit.

Filmed by Hayson Chu

Thanks to the CIS Annual Fund for its generous support of this initiative

Three views of our first year in Hangzhou

Back in November, Film students Yudo Wong, Abigail Yee, and Ciara Jacob were practising shooting interviews as part of their study unit on the documentary genre.

Here we have some reflections on the early months of CIS Hangzhou from Abi herself, from English and Film teacher Paul Murphy [Gosh, I was porky at the start of the year! They say the camera adds a few kilos - but the rest is all my own fault!], and from Coach Mentor Liu Jing.

Hengdian

Semester 2 Film students took a class trip in March to visit the Hengdian World Studios, a major Zhejiang tourist attraction in the town of Dongyang, about 120 miles south of Hangzhou. Hengdian is a vast site, boasting several of the world's largest outdoor movie sets, including a full-size replica of the Forbidden City and a Han Dynasty palace that was built in the mid-90s for the filming of Chen Kaige's The Emperor and The Assassin and was made even more famous when it featured in Zhang Yimou's Hero in 2002.

Filmed and edited by Nick Berry, Cheryl Lee and Jeffrey Lam

A Coach Mentor speaks

One of our Coach Mentors, Wang Lu, was interviewed in Chinese by Nick Hildebrandt, Madeleine Witt, and Noam Braude for one of their Semester 1 assessment projects in Film. He has some interesting things to say about how this new role is evolving. [Subtitles in English]

Piano concert

At a concert last October, our star pianist Kelly Kwok performed Robert Schumann's Papillons and Alberto Ginastera's Danzas Argentinas for us. She was then joined by her friend Vanessa Wat, who sang Somewhere from the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story.

Filmed by Mr Karena

First impressions

Here's a short interview with Joe Littler and Kenny Jeong, done on the day of our Opening Ceremony back in September. It was one of a series of chats with students in their dorms filmed by one of our governors, Alex Tancock, for possible use in the film he was compiling to celebrate CIS Hong Kong's 30th Anniversary this year. [You can watch the finished film here. This didn't make it into the final edit, but a lot of Hangzhou footage did.]

Although they had only been here a week or two by this point, they already seem to have formed some powerfully positive impressions of the place. (No teachers bribed them to say this - honestly!)

And gosh - they look young in this! These two guys have grown up a lot this year.

Filmed by Alex Tancock

All you knead is love

During the Shanghai Music Trip - one of this year's 'Project Week' offerings for CIS Hangzhou students - our intrepid group of musicians (Kelly Kwok, Jessie Gao, Vanessa Wat, and JJ Cheng, accompanied by Director of Music Tama Karena, Julia Hsieh, and Aydee Tie) took a morning off to visit a bakery. Jessie seems to have more of an aptitude for working with dough than Mr K! But perhaps it was more of an exercise in percussion than baking....

Filmed by Aydee Tie

Early impressions of Hangzhou

On the last of our three days of 'orientation' at the start of the year, we ventured out into Hangzhou for the first time - to spend a day hiking around Xihu, the famous West Lake (and we were blessed with particularly glorious weather for the expedition).

Ciara Jacob created this nice photo montage of the day out (with a little bit of video too: Gloria Schiavo gives a potted history of the Leifeng Pagoda).

Slapstick

For their first 'challenge shoot' in the Film class this year, students were briefed to go out and create a short reel of simple stunts or sight gags. This was really just to let them have a bit of fun while becoming familiar with how to use the cameras; but the clips they produced lent themselves well to having enhanced sound effects added in later - using the dark art of Foley. Jasper Ng, Hayson Chu, and David Zhang produced one of the best efforts on this.

Filmed by David Zhang, edited by Jasper Ng

Busking

During the Shanghai Music Trip - one of our 'Project Week' activities at the end of March - our students took some time out to go busking in a park. Here are JJ Cheng, Vanessa Wat, Kelly Kwok and Jessie Gao (joined by Coach Mentor Aydee Tie) singing the standard Fly Me to the Moon (words and music by Bart Howard).

Filmed by Mr Karena

Getting noticed

Big thanks to Mandy Ng in the school's PR department down in Hong Kong for arranging to link this site to the CIS Hangzhou website! We now have two links from there, one on the homepage (down near the bottom of the righthand sidebar, just beneath the handsome picture of Jeffrey Lam)....

.... and one slightly more prominent one on the Hangzhou News page (next to Mr Pratt's weekly bulletins)....

Thanks also to Rosh Harjani, the administrator of the school's Moongate portal, who has given us an icon of our own in the 'Spotlight' box at the top right of the homepage (although you have to have your 'widgets' option activated in order to see this view of the site).

Hopefully, this improved interconnectedness between our school's various online information channels will slowly gather more attention for our little video blog here from the wider CIS community and beyond.

Hangzhou's Bagua Tian

One of the groups on our Maths-led Inter-Disciplinary Experience (IDE) at the start of April - (Philosopher!) Charlie Salnikow, Jasper Ng, Gloria Schiavo, Jeffrey Chak Long Lam, Abi Yee and Joe Littler - created this film about their experiences at Hangzhou's unusual tourist attraction, the Bagua Tian: a group of fields arranged in the form of Taoism's 八卦, the 'Eight Symbols'.

Filmed and edited by Joe Littler

The demonstrators

Our last Cotillion of the year last night brought back a lot of happy memories of previous evenings in this more-or-less monthly series of dances, which have been kindly arranged by Mr and Mrs Jooris.

Our regular host Axel Leven and his good friend Fin McCombe always seem to get 'volunteered' to demonstrate the dance steps - perhaps because they are the best sports rather than necessarily the best dancers. Here, they're having a go at the tango...

Filmed by Mr Murphy

Hangzhou Weekly News - 9th May 2014

Another weekly bulletin from CIS Hangzhou - this time giving us a brief behind-the-scenes glimpse of the school Choir gearing up for an end-of-year performance. And the enormous task of taking everyone's photo for the CIS Hangzhou Yearbook continues....


Filmed and edited by Jasmine Topp and Sierra Chiao

Chinese Opera

On an improbably warm Sunday afternoon at the start of December, the Chinese Department led the whole school on an excursion to nearby Huanglong Park, where there are regular matinee performances of excerpts from the local Kunqu style of Chinese opera. The genre is enormously popular with senior citizens, but doesn't seem to appeal to a younger audience any more. Nevertheless, our students seemed to find it an interesting experience.

This is just a very brief glimpse of one performance. There may be more to follow in a little while.

Filmed by Mr Murphy

Shanghai Music Week

For the CIS Hangzhou 'Project Week' at the end of March this year, a small group of musicians - Kelly Kwok, JJ Cheng, Jessie Gao, and Vanessa Wat (accompanied by our Director of Music, Tama Karena, and Ms Hsieh and Aydee Tie) - went to Shanghai, to explore the city's diverse music scene... and to meet the challenge of composing a school song.

Filmed and edited by Aydee Tie

A taiji demonstration

Many of our students have been taking taiji classes on Sunday afternoons throughout the year with Master Wang and Master Zhang, two leading exponents of the Chen family style who teach for the Taiji Zen organisation (founded by Jet Li and Jack Ma), which recently opened a centre here in Hangzhou. 

Back in October, Zhang shifu kindly agreed to let us film him giving a complete demonstration of the foundational sequence of movements - the 'Eight Forms' of the Chen style - which the whole school endeavoured to learn in an introductory series of taiji lessons at the start of the year.

Filmed by Nick Berry and Hannah Hui

[We shot the sequence twice, with two cameras at 90° to one another, so that we had all-around views: from the front, the left, the back, and the right. There's also a sequence Mr Murphy shot a couple of weeks earlier of our other teacher, Wang shifu, performing the same routine, but in failing light. However, the routine is more readily digestible in this single clip of Zhang shifu which Nick Berry edited together.]

Hangzhou Weekly News - 2nd May 2014

The weekly bulletin from CIS Hangzhou, prepared for inclusion in our parent school's regular video roundup of 'Friday Morning News'. In this May Week instalment, some of our students discuss their hopes and plans for the last few weeks of our school year here in Hangzhou - including making a Yearbook, a literary magazine.... and lots of new friends.

Filmed and edited by Sierra Chiao and Jasmine Topp

5-minute Shakespeare

Our inspiring young English teacher Sharon Lam, herself a CIS alumna, challenged her class to distill Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into a series of mini-playlets: working in groups of four, they had to use only extracts of the original text, while condensing the action into just five minutes for each of the five Acts of the play. And she gamely undertook to perform Act One herself - on her own.

Filmed by Mr Murphy

Flash Mob

As part of one of the first semester's off-campus inter-disciplinary activities, Madeleine Witt, Hannah Hui, Crystal Leung, Gabbie DeSombre, Vanessa Tidmarsh, Kelly Kwok and Jemima Barr - the girls from dorm room 302 - decided to explore local Hangzhou people's attitudes to laowai by staging a flash mob dance routine - to Jessie J's Domino - in a series of locations around the city. (Fin McCombe and Jeffrey Lam couldn't resist joining in. Although the little Chinese kids getting in on the act is even cuter.)
Most Hangzhou citizens did not think laowai were 'crazy'.... until this.

Filmed (mostly) and edited by their Coach Mentor, Aydee Tie

'Pleasure in Music' - CIS/GYS joint concert 2014

On January 10th, 2014, members of the CIS school orchestra came to Hangzhou to perform in an annual goodwill concert with musicians from the Greentown Yuhua School, whose campus in the north of the city hosts CIS Hangzhou.
This is a brief highlight reel of the one-hour concert, shot from an elevated position on one of the galleries in the CIS Hangzhou Music School by Justin Choo with JJ Cheng recording sound; edited by Justin.

There's a similar reel filmed from the back of the auditorium by Jasper Ng (sound recording and editing by Hayson Chu), but unfortunately the sound quality's a bit variable on that.

Both filming teams also produced full versions of the concert, which can be seen in this post.

Lion Dance

As part of a Chinese/PE inter-disciplinary enquiry, groups of students investigated the history and traditions of Chinese lion dancing, and then devised and performed their own Lion Dance routines for a final assessment in their PE unit on 'Aesthetics'. This is the opening performance by Ryan Hsu, Richie Cheng, Sierra Chiao and Vanessa Wat. It begins with school director Richard Pratt 'waking' the lions in the traditional manner by painting the pupils on their eyes.

Filmed by Nick Berry

Other group performances in this activity (also filmed by Nick) can be seen as follows: Charlie Salnikow, Axel Leven, Jemima Barr and Cheryl Lee Marcus Lee, Yudo Wong, Natalie Lui and Coach Mentor Chen Yuan Tynan Eurwongpravit, David Jnr Zhang, Kelly Kwok and Coach Mentor Lorna Scott

Superstition!

Victor Yin and Lauren Chillington consider whether there's any truth in numerology and other superstitions.

A short film by Nicholas Hildebrandt, created as part of a final group presentation in the Maths-led Inter-Disciplinary Experience (IDE) at the start of April

Kitchen Stomp!

Kelly Kwok, Justin Choo, JJ Cheng, Gabbie DeSombre and Grace Stevens doing a final rehearsal of their 'kitchen stomp' routine for the assessment of their Performing Arts module on Percussion

Filmed by Mr Karena