What’s up guys! I’m back with another blog post. The last time I wrote about how the transition from elementary school to secondary school has changed and challenged my worldview. We decided to put that unit on pause because our teachers enrolled us in Destination Imagination; where can your imagination take you? DI for short, is a competition with different categories like Scientific, Improv, Technical, Fine Arts, and Engineering. Each group competes with other groups from other schools in their category. Every group is given the same challenge, but each group comes up with different solutions. On the day of regionals, each group presents and gathers scores from the appraisers watching.

 

Our group was Improv. Improv didn’t seem like much of a challenge to me when I signed up for it. But as we progressed and got closer to regionals, the stress was piling up and I felt swamped with work. Luckily I had an amazing team who would always help with finishing work efficiently. Our challenge was to research 10 figure heads and just be for our performance the judges would tell us 2 of those figure heads that needed to be included in the skit. They would also give us a random scenario in which the figure heads were in. To make the skit more interesting there would be a flip in the middle of the skit, changing the genre to the opposite genre that was portrayed in the first half and switching the play to non-verbal. At the start, we were all scared to act in front of everyone because we weren’t really familiar with each other. As we started to practice we got less worse but not really that good. We had a lot of paperwork to complete as well, and we were so focused on that we didn’t really want to act anymore.

As the weeks went by, we saw the number on the countdown board to regionals get lower and lower and our stress levels get higher and higher. Our team had lost all hope of even getting third place when Ms. Maxwell came along and taught us an acting excersise and thats when our team started to get out of our slumps. We regularly played this acting game and that really taught us to not be ashamed of being silly in front of our peers.

The day of the competition, everyone was suppposed to be there at 8 am sharp. I thought, at 8 am, the school would still be quiet and people setting up. But when I arrived the school was buzzing with students from different schools and every team was so focused on making sure that the whole day went perfectly for them. Our team headed down to The Vortex, where we would be performing shortly. First there was a parade and then the challenges began. At that time it was only 9 and every team had to check in to the appraisers 20 minutes before their challenge time. The teams who were scheduled to perform at 9:20 were excused from the hall and the rest of us a few minutes after. My teams challenge was scheduled from 10:00-10:20. Here are the timings for each Seycove team and thier team names.

We just decided to stay in The Vortex and watch all the performances before us, until it was our turn. The other teams were very good but still our team held our confindence. The 10:00 team finished and we were up. I swear I could feel myself sweating when I was walking to the stage. But as we were getting prepared, guess who walks in? Almost all of PLP 8! 1-800-Improv was definitely surprised when both our teachers and a bunch of our friends were trading behind them. This is our team right before we went to perform.

There’s Felix down in the front, Thomas in the far left, Emily next to Thomas, Grace next to Emily and I’m next to Grace in the far right. To me, this was the dream team and I’m so lucky I got to work with these amazing people. Back to the day of regionals, after everyone got settled in their seat and the volunteers explained the challenge to the audience, our team was shaking in our skins. The volunteer gave us our figure heads (Jane Austen, Queen Elizabeth II) and our situation (The figure heads are buying a cell phones) and put our flip on the front of the stage. We started our skit and frankly I thought it went really good. Our team had one rule while performing, make sure by the end the audience knows 3 facts about each figure head. Keep that in mind while watching our performance! Hope you guys enjoy!!

I think we did very good on our performance level and it payed off because guess what!! We won first place. I was, and still am, incredibly proud of my team because we really came together in the end was perfect, in my opinion.

Something I think our group could’ve worked on is not talking over each other in the performance. Maybe working on not overlapping others while they are talking. Another idea we could use to help us focus during “discussion time” is making sure all technology is turned off and giving out undivided attention to the speaker.

Thanks so much for reading this blog post, I know it was a lot of words but if you made it this far: thanks for reading!

See you in the next one!

Malaika💛