At the behest of the Great SP again I come, to bring new material unto the long abandoned realms of my sorry blog.
Just came back from performing for this year's combined martial arts display. I tell you we spent ludicrous amounts of hours on this production, and 80% of those many, many hours were spent waiting and generally looking neglected and forgotten. Very, very, very poor management on the part of the organisers. We spent two saturdays of at least four hours each for supposed 'rehearsals', and today, some of us, including me, were there since 1pm for a 7:30pm performance and et voila ~ number of full rehearsals we had = zero. All of us in wushu were there waiting by 3pm, and we sat, and we sat, and we sat until at 5pm they told us that they had to close the theater till 6pm. Like excuse me? An entire troup of performers showing up and just sitting around waiting for TWO HOURS and now you tell me to just walk off and have dinner when we havent even tested the stage once? So you asked us to be there at 3pm so we can sit around and enjoy the aircon while you guys sort out a skit that should have been sorted out aeons ago?
I even had to skip NUSEG welcome tea to do basically nothing (I couldn't sneak out cos I had to do some stuff from time to time, and when they do give us the stage we need all of us to be there) Like hell, there is a curse upon this land I tell you. Those who treadeth upon it in impunity shall find their schedule mercilessly and utterly filled up but in the very end achieve nothing of value.
*sigh* *Deep breath*
Alrite! That's enough bitching. Despite the whole load of crap abovestated it was actually quite fun. There are alot of uber people in the other martial arts groups and it was cool getting to know them. Oh, I was involved in the skit of course. I played the extremely important role of Guy-who-got-kicked,flew,tumbled,looked-comically-dizzy,collapsed-and-died. The other subclub peeps were all busy trying to teach me proper forward rolls, which in all honesty looked highly martial artsy and unsuitable to me. Though they admonished me constantly on how I might injure myself if I don't do this and that I managed to convince them to just let me do it my way. I mean, this is a scenario where you can actually tune your own forward momentum so you don't hurt yourself anyway. Ask me and I'll tell you that you are just supposed to look like an abused ragged doll, not an expert in proper falling technique. But I appreciate the thought I guess ^^ In the end I had to do the tumbling without the tatami mattresses (if that's how you spell it) Its interesting that all the Judo and Karate masters, commonly seen falling in all sorts of positions on tatami mats, looked alarmed and asked me if I was ok. Made me remember the days in Catholic High (PJ!) where we basically just flung ourselves around on hard surfaces, trying to not get hurt while at the same time not look fake.
Anyways, the display, ironically and incredulously, was quite a hoot (at least the parts of it that I managed to watch). An enthusiastic cast had turned the skit script upside down with funny bits here and there, and somehow managed to pull off the hundreds of last minute changes and executed them rather flawlessly. The martial arts subclubs themselves have also evidently been rehearsing hard on their own (no thanks to the organisers), and each put on competent and occasionally really attractive performances. Although, there were backstage hickups here and there, I was thoroughly surprised and impressed by the parts of the display that I watched. I suppose the little mistakes that come with the zero full rehearsal folly can go unnoticed, and what truly mattered was the performances in between were good enough to compensate. Our wushu performance itself was a paradoxical mesh of lots of mistakes and lots of brilliance ^^ I guess because we never formally rehearsed on stage with music, many of us got nervous. Quite a few of us made mistakes or forgot parts of our routines, but everyone managed to improvise perfectly. What little inadequacies in our performance, I guess, was offset by a fantastic 九节鞭 display by Song En (may not be correctly spelt xD), after which we all came out and struck a smart pose to the audience's thunderous applause.
Wow, I can't believe I made such a long post on the display alone @@ I better go bathe now. I am highly unclean, impure, unwashed and generally ungodly now, especially after having rolled around on the floor about 8 times today. Besides, I need to be up real early tomorrow to go down to Geylang East Home for the Aged. Apparently there is a bug in our system there that we have to try and fix. And also there is the meeting with the other organisations that might want to also implement our software ~
Ah wells, long story short = gtg, oyasumi ^^