Well, that time of year has come again. It’s Destination Imagination, if you need a refresher on what DI is you can click here to see one of my previous blog post about it.  Or click here to see the official blog post. As you can remember if you’ve been on my blog for a while, my Destination Imagination experience last year was…well…horrible. So as you can imagine I was a bit apprehensive going into this year’s challenge. But! I’m actually happy with the results we have.

 

For you to really understand our challenge and the DI experience, I think I need to start at the beginning.

The Beginning:

Groups of 5 were made.  My partners were: Izzy, Amelia, Aedan and Luciano. We decided we would be best in the improv challenge. And we got assigned that challenge. Our team name was Common Cents (say it out loud and you might understand the pun), this name probably doesn’t make sense (cents?)  yet but it will.

Understanding the Challenge:

The next part was understanding our challenge. We read a big long booklet about it, but I’m just going to sum up the main components here:

– Our challenge had to be completely “improv-ed”. We were not allowed to have a script.

– We would have two minutes to prepare our skit on the day of. We would have 5 minutes to present.

– Our skit had to include two famous figureheads from coins around the world, such as Queen Elizabeth 2, Lady Liberty, Victor Hugo etc. Hence the name Common Cents.

– In our skit there had to be 2 genres, one was tragedy and the other was comedy, we had to show a clear difference between the two.

– We had a “flip” in our skit. The flip was a scenario on a piece of paper on the stage. An example would be: It starts raining jelly beams. 2 things would happen when we engaged the flip: A) The genre would switch from tragedy to comedy or vice versa. B) The flip would also engage the “non verbal” part of the skit. Which means we were no  longer allowed to talk.

If you want to see a more visual representation of this you can watch the official video:

 

I can tell you that incorporating all these different parts was VERY challenging. The first thing we had to do after reading the challenge was choosing our figureheads, each team member chose two figureheads and we had to learn our teamates characters in case both of them got draw or they were absent on the day of. Here is the list of figureheads we chose:

 

Currently we’re trying to replace Merlion because on the day of it was really hard to play.

To learn how to play our figureheads we had to do a lot of research and a bit of method acting. My figureheads were Victor Hugo and Queen Elizabeth 2. As an example here is some of the research I had to do:

 

 

And then we rehearsed and rehearsed. When rehearsing we had little practice cards that we used with different variables such as the figureheads, the setting, the flip and when our teacher would watch us rehearse she would give us different cards.

The Presentation:

The actual day of could have been better. I’m proud of the effort my team put in, but sad it wasn’t the best performance ever. You can watch the video of our performance:

 

So a few of the things that went wrong we’re a) our flip kind of messed us up b) our ending wasn’t conclusive and c) we didn’t integrate the figureheads soon enough. In all fairness, it is hard to integrate the flip into the story when you’re not allowed to talk. Before Provincials we want to make sure that we fix these things:

My team members and myself will be working on hopefully all of those things and fingers crossed for a better performance next time Well that’s it for today! Be ready for the next post regarding Provincials.