Yes, it happened! Destination Imagination provincials have come and gone and I’m now left with armfuls of certificates and ribbons!
Incase you are completely lost and have not a clue of what I’m speaking of you may head over to my enlightening blog post where I explain the regional tournament and how we got there. If you really don’t want to read my first post, heres a brief summary of Destination Imagination (or DI for short):
DI is essentially a set of tournaments that teams from elementary schools, high schools, and universities of a region go to compete in their chosen challenge. The teams compete against each other within their age category and the type of the team’s challenge. Every team will have chosen one main challenge, and will be given one “instant challenge” while the team is at the tournament. Depending on the main challenge that the team has chosen, it takes a lot of preparation before the team is able to present it infront of a panel of judges. The instant challenge is somewhat self-explanatory, where the team is given a challenge that’s either performance based, task based, or a blend of both. The team will have a set time to do the task and there will be appraisers judging how the team works together to accomplish the challenge. Of course, with a maximum of 100 points to earn, there are many other factors that the team will be scored on, for example the execution of the challenge, creativity of material use or the creativity of the performance, teamwork and maybe something specific for the certain challenge.
My group had the pleasure of tackling the 3-peat Improve challenge. Now, I’m certainly uncertain that I know what you’re thinking. ‘Angela, you can do improv? No way! I thought you needed to be entertaining and funny to do that!’
Uhhhh…yeah…that’s often a requirement. But you see, I want to take risks! To get the most out of this wondrous, opportunity-filled life! I want to make every second of everyday of every week of every month of every year of every decade, worth while. And so, I put on my big-boy underwear and decided. ‘Maybe, just maybe, I could take a leap of faith,’ Often times, I do “shoot for the stars” but, I’m usually too busy gazing at the moon and end up crashing into a meteorite or something.
So, on the day that my teacher separated us into our DI groups, (mine, consisting of beloved Kate, Willa, Robberto, and Claire) we got our map to the destination of imagination together…more or less. We brought in our 13″ x 13″ x 13″ box of goodies to class like good students and began to ever so slowly bring in props to fill this magic box. But we had even more planning to do! We had to plan out our two Team Choice Elements. Now, I was very thankful and appreciative that we only had to do two team choice elements because I, for one, lack what some may call “skill” which may have been a problem due to the team choice elements being a reflection on something that the team’s “passionate” for. Passion, meaning being good at something or having enough passion to be good at something, and being able to demonstrate it at the DI provincial tournament. But, not all was lost! The amazing grade nine improve group put our almighty heads together and thought up some extraordinary ideas! Because of the group’s passion for music, we had Kate teach Robbie how to play the flute, and we included it in our majestic box o’ stuff. And later, yours truly hand crafted a clay jem which was also included in the magic box. But, not for long my friend. This jem betrayed me and decided to become an almost liquid blob which I was forced to quarantine by putting it into a container and eventually throwing it away forever.
But, do not lose hope just yet! Our dearest Claire managed to keep the ingenious clay idea alive by making new clay and not dumping buckets of water in the formula. So it’s settled then! All that the team will need to do is practice improv skits and games daily with provincials in mind.
DI provincials crept up on us as a predator would do its prey. When the time came to preform our three skits, our team was pretty OK I think. Looking back at the performance, our team definitely performed our best on our first skit, the prompt being that the stock character is working in a car dealership and the stock character was a royal person, our genre was parody. Our group is very experienced in the whole Kim K field and so we had our royal person be the one and only, Kimberly Noel Kardashian.
All in all, I had a lot more fun doing improv than I did doing fine arts last year. Learning how to improvise and becoming just a tad more experienced made all the difference. In a simple form, t’was pretty good. Stay tuned for further blogposts, where you will hear all about a small moose’s story in a big world.
Given these points, it’s very clear that we all have one question that needs to be answered: Why does a round pizza come in a square box?