So what actually goes on behind the scenes? I'll be sharing with you guys what went on the past month(: To start things off, let's talk about how we got our roles. All those interested are required to audition for Lit Night. Our teachers would give all of us scripts and we would have some time to rehearse. Then we'd go into the RR and act it out for them to see. The teachers would then reveal what roles we got the next lesson. Dancers work a little differently cause we volunteered ourselves and choreographed our own dances. For the Cell Block Tango you guys watched(The last dance), they got help from Guang Liang(: As for the dance off, Jo and I choreographed most of it. Of course I choreographed the Latin part hahaha!
We initially did another dance which is more of a fusion where I'd do a modern piece to a song while Jo and Karis did Hip Hop to another and finally, a last song where all 3 of us come tgt and dance. However, we scraped that idea even though we actually choreographed the whole dance cause there wasn't really a storyline to it. But anw, here are some snippets from the modern dance(:
We only decided to change it about 2 weeks before Lit Night and that means we really had a very short time to come up with a brand new dance. We were even prepared to scrape the idea and transfer to be part of the backstage crew instead. Ms Chew gave us 3 days to come up with a new dance, well the gist of it. So Jo and I spent about 5 mins discussing and then we both remembered about the dance off that we did. We were thinking, why not have a dance off? It was so much fun and we had so much more interactions cause we were both on stage tgt at the same time.
A dance off would require 2 diff genres of dance and I chose Latin, back to my element. I took up Latin since P6 and have since grown attached to it. Thought it'd be easier to do a dance off that way. Believe it or not, Jo and I came up with the steps on the day itself in less than half an hour. We first had to choose a song and we chose 'Drop, Shake, Move' cause it has Latin elements in it that I can work with. As for the part where we were all dancing tgt, we basically just took steps from our previous dance. Actually for Jo's and Karis' part at the beginning, they got it from the previous choreo as well(:
We showed Ms Chew and she approved. Yay! We were quite nervous initially cause we were on our own and didn't have any seniors or teachers to help us but it's ok! We managed to work things out and came up with a dance that I couldn't be more proud of! The only comment we had was to change the song for my part to an actual Latin song to show more of a contrast so that's what we did. Changed it to 'Eh Macalena' which is actually the song I used for a Samba performance at Raffles Club House about 2 years back.
You know how they say sometimes the impromptu things are the best? Well, I have to agree in this case. It was just so much more fun to be dancing alongside your bestie and a dance off by itself alr has a certain amount of energy that the audience can relate to. Don't you get really excited when you watch dance offs? I know I do! Anw, for those who couldn't make it to Lit Night, I'll attach a video of the actual performance in my upcoming post on Lit Night itself(:
Lit Night rehearsals are held every Tuesday and Thursday but Jo and I also practice on Fri before CCAs as well. This schedule pretty much lasted for about a month. All those in Yoga would know cause they always see us practicing on Fridays before CCAs haha!
As we're involved in a dance, we could go the the Dance Studio to practice and rehearse till it's our turn to test out lighting and music. So for the earlier part of the rehearsals, Jolene, Karis and I would be perfecting our moves at the studio. We also goofed around and had dance offs and choreographed random steps haha!
For those acting, they will mostly spend their time at the RR to rehearse. When the RR is way too crowded or noisy, they'll practice outside along the corridor. There will be different groups doing their own thing and we all leave around 7pm. As the performance draw nearer, we would all shift to LT5 to familiarise ourselves with the stage and learn from the teachers how to best use the place. The backstage crew would also have to learn which props are needed for which acts and discuss how they will move it in and out of the stage with the shortest amount of time.
And finally, the week of Lit Night finally approaches! During this week, all of us are required at LT5 to do a full run everyday with our costumes and make up. We end ltr than usual for that week at around 8.30pm. It's really quite tiring actually cause I would reach home at 9.30pm everyday and that's quite late considering the fact that I still have hw to complete, make up to remove, have dinner and bathe. Well for the most of us, we would be backstage doing pretty much nothing... Haha! At most, we would catch up on the latest gossips, do our make up and hair, ask each other how their rehearsals went and then say we're bored. And then the whole cycle restarts. During this week, the make up crew was required to watch the whole full run to help decide what sort of make up to use for each performance as well.
These photos are all taken from Tuesday. As you can evidently see, we spend most of our time taking photos haha! For those of you who are curious, the backstage of LT5 actually has 2 changing rooms, 1 for the guys and 1 for girls. Each changing room has a small washroom as well. We actually converted the male changing room to a make up room so everyone would go there to do their make up by the make up crew (who are students too!). Jolene did my make up so we stayed at the female changing room to avoid overcrowding the make up room. It's so crowded there!
Now to talk about what goes on outside the changing room. There was a paper stuck on the door of the changing room which listed the order of acts. The first 3 acts would be required to go get mic up by the AVA crew. And here I'd like to thank the AVA people who helped work out the micing system and staying back with us even though you guys aren't Lit students!(: The AVA crew also fed us with snacks the minute we told them we love AVA hehehe.
After they're done, they would get their mics removed. Let's say Act 1 comes back into the changing room. Act 4 would then go out to get miced. The props team would also be able to perfect their co ordination of moving the props. After the actors/actress are done, they would just chill out backstage with the rest.
To share a little on the difficulty faced for our act, believe it or not, it was actually my expression. Ms Chew commented that I still look too sweet and innocent with make up on haha! I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing but in that case, worked to my disadvantaged. So I spent quite some time trying to bring the inner sass and attitude out which is quite weird cause everyone who knows me knows I'm bubbly by nature. According to my friends, even when I don't smile, I look like I'm smiling (?) I have no idea why but oh well.
For the rehearsal on Wed, the same thing basically happened and a lot of photo spamming was happening backstage haha!
Thought I should include this but on certain days, I'm so tired that I don't even bother changing back into my uni before leaving the school. Oh and I don't bother removing my make up as well cause I just want to get home as soon as I can. I basically just throw a jacket over and run to the car haha!
Well the good part of spending 3/4 hours backstage is that you make a lot of new friends and catch up on the latest gossips. I mean after spending so many hours being cooped in a room, you'd end up talking to people. Being a social butterfly (as Meghan likes to call me), I made friends with almost everyone(: I'm pretty sure I talked to most of them haha! I also learnt the latest happenings (I'm very blur, I know) and found out more about them.
For Thursday's rehearsal, it was pretty much the same thing just that we had to switch off the lights in the changing room. Every time someone enters or exits the room, they'll knock first to let us know so that we would all keep quiet. Our voices can easily be heard by the audience so we all had to whisper. As for the lights, according to I can't rmb who, it creates some sort of reflection/shadow (I don't know what's the proper term) that can be seen on stage so we were all just in darkness for 3/4h haha! It wasn't that bad cause of the afternoon light that came in via the window but towards 8pm, it started to get quite dark. I'm just glad we ended around that time so we didn't have to stay in total darkness for too long.
A lot of effort really goes into a production and behind the 2h of performance, is about 50h worth of rehearsals. No, I'm not exaggerating. Let's do a little maths. Let's say we rehearse 3h on Tues, 3h on Thurs and 2h on Fri. This lasted for about a month so that's a total of 32h. On the week of Lit Week itself, we had to stay back for about 4h. So that lasted for 4 days which means 16h. That's alr a total of 48h. And this is just minimally. I'm very sure we stayed back for more than 3h on certain days as well.
Well for our dance at least. But I'm really glad the turn out was so good and so sorry to those who didn't manage to get tickets! The tickets got sold out within 15 mins haha! I'm really glad that Lit Night was a success and I'll blog about the actual day soon! (:
PS. I know it's quite a lengthy post but I really wanted to blog every moment of it so I'll nvr forget(:
"Dance is the hidden language of the soul."
Martha Graham
