Hellooooooo! So, as you hopefully know, our world has kinda come to a stop. Yes, I am talking about the global pandemic that is COVID-19. But, even though the world has come to a stop, the show must go on! And what show, you may ask? Well, DI, of course! If you don’t know what DI is, I suggest you read my Regionals blog post, or visit their website here.
So, since we obviously can’t be in one room together, we used the handy dandy tool that is Zoom. Yes, we actually did do DI on Zoom. It was quite interesting…
We start on Thursday, April 2nd. Oh, what a day. At this point, we knew we were doing DI, we just didn’t know how or when. On this day, we met as a class on Zoom. We just talked about how our lives were going, and then about what the next however long is going to look like. Then, we started talking about DI. Oh no. We found out that we would be presenting our solution on Monday, April 6th. So, my team and I started to work immediately.
We are the improv challenge, so the first thing we did was rehearse! We had to figure out how we were going to do DI, on Zoom! At first, we were not doing well. It is hard to do improv on Zoom for a couple reasons. Zoom often glitches out, so that makes it hard to know what is going on. It is also difficult to know when someone is going to talk, because when you are talking, you can’t really hear anyone else. So we needed to rehearse. A lot.
For rehearsals, we made up our own Underwhelming Powers and Conundrums. We wrote those down on pieces of paper, and just picked them at random. So, we rehearsed the exact same way we would if we were actually with each other. It did not start off well. We couldn’t hear people, everyone was glitching, we went over the time, and it was overall just a mess. But, we just kept on working. We ended up having around 4 rehearsals, each one lasting about an hour. I am very glad that we did this, because it helped all of us feel way more prepared.
Then, the day of the Tournament came. Our challenge started at 9:30 am.
We decided to have one more rehearsal, at 8:45 am. I am very, VERY glad that we did that, because the rehearsal went really well, and that sorta put us in the right headspace for our actual challenge. We joined the Zoom call at around 9:25. We saw the teachers, and our guest appraiser, Zoe, who is currently abroad in Switzerland. We knew that there were other people watching, but we didn’t know who. So, we got our conundrum and superpower, and started planning!
Looking back at it, we had a weird skit. It was really weird. The superpower was Regeneration, and the Conundrum was “your picnic basket runs away”. We came up with the idea that the picnic basket was made out of animal hide, and that a little girl who had the power of Regeneration was bored, so she turned the picnic basket back into animals. As I am writing this, I am just so confused as to why this is what we cam up with. Anyways, we performed! It actually went really well. I am happy with our performance!
Now, lets talk a bit about DI before the world shut down. I am still really sad that DI got cancelled, because we were actually doing good. We sort of had a bit of a inspirational sports movie comeback. After coming fourth at Regionals, we were determined to place in the top three at Provincials. So we worked hard! We figured out what we needed to improve on, and we improved it.
Well, I hope you are all healthy, and taking care of yourselves. This time is really affecting a lot of peoples mental health, so just remember to take care of yourself. See you soon!!