Second Week Stories!

So, so, so.

This week was story week. Fun times. After a brief drama game and singing warm up, we delved right into the stories that the students had prepared the week before.

Mubeen and Amanda's class were the first up. I was impressed with the cross section of stories as well as performance styles. Each group had a unique presentation and it was great to see. I challenged the class to use constructive criticism to take their performances to the next level and I had each group perform twice (second time after some suggestions and they only performed half of their pieces if that.) We didn't get through all of the groups, but we will continue next week. I'm going to revise the plan slightly for Amanda & Mubeen's class to reflect the change in schedule. Next week we will continue with the stories and I think we will spend a good chunk of time discussing and brainstorming for our story for the libretto. We will spend week 4 doing the libretto as opposed to week 3. I have also taken their stories home in order to brainstorm on my own so we can have a starting point for the libretto discussion. My thought is this discussion will begin with me and then continue through out the week with their teachers.

Sona's class was next and I was impressed with their preparation and also the structure of their stories. It was clear that we worked diligently on the presentation and did excellently at incorporating elements of West African storytelling. I challenged this group to explore some characterization (which they really enjoyed) and also some choral work. We discovered that 2 or 3 voices were stronger than 1! Exploring the stories using a choral approach allowed us to understand the stories much better. So we will definitely be exploring a lot of choral work with this group, as we had planned. I gave Sona's class the challenge of creating a story in preparation for their libretto writing class next week. I gave them the following criteria to get them started on a story: 5 characters, magic, 1 character should be an animal, others should be royalty and the story should tell how some element of nature came to be. I based this criteria on interesting elements from the stories presented by the students and also some feedback from Sona. We will be writing a libretto next week based on their story.

On another note, we didn't get a chance to learn a petit song this week, but Adam and I will work on this for next week. Thanks for the suggestions Katherine! We will be researching this week for West African songs as well as looking at The Magic Flute in order to get some inspiration for Sona's class.

In regards to the structure of the program, Adam and I were speaking at length and we decided that it is important for us to be there for every class possible. A part of the collective creation process requires that the facilitators are present for every creative workshop. i.e if Adam wasn't here today for the stories, he wouldn't know what direction to take for the music. This is something to think about for the structure of the CAO in the future.

Other than that, I am looking forward to continuing to work next week. Things are shaping up well and I think this is going to be an awesome project for all the classes.

Sedina