Learning Log 4

"When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning or in rain..."

Those were the famous first words quoted in Scene 1 of Macbeth, which my fellow classmates and I had the privilege of performing last Wednesday. Since this was the first ever Shakespeare performance, or rather, first ever performance for our class, we were determined to give it our all and to expose our hidden talents, in acting to Mrs Woo.

This time, I found myself in the company of Jia Le and Jiayi...one vivacious, and the other quiet...an interesting combination. Anyway, due to Jia Le and I being heavily involved in the Odyssey of the Mind National Competition around this time, our group struggled to meet up and to simply discuss what we each had in mind for our skit. Although we barely had time to make our props, prepare our costumes and most importantly, rehearse our lines and get them pitch-perfect, I still found our final performance to be better than expected. It was not flawless, like many other performances, but it was comical and the added humourous aspect into the normally spooky scene gave the skit an interesting edge. I feel that our ideas were extremely creative, such as, the part where we used umbrellas as canes, to symbolise rain, as well as to highlight our magical powers as witches when we quoted the last line together. Apart from that, I believe that both of my group members and I used excellent voice intonations to represent our individual characters, despite our lack of practice and my always-reliable speaker, which turned out to sound unexpectedly soft compared to our booming voices. As a matter of fact, it actually had the class in stitches and further livened the atmosphere in the room.

As for the other groups, I was truly impressed by the immense effort some put in to order suitable costumes and to create gorgeous props. Some of the groups even had impressive Powerpoint slides and sound effects to create a scary ambience for the performance. Among the groups that really stood out for me were Rebeccas's, Theophania's and Clarence's performance which really emphasised the effort they had all put in to make their performances successful.

All in all, I found that Wednesday to be one of the most entertaining lessons we have had in a long time, and am dearly anticipating another one just as exciting as this lesson. Perhaps the Romeo and Juliet performance coming up shortly... :D