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Hello everyone! I am back on the grind at Destination Imagination (DI) woot woot. I was nervous to have to do DI again especially because I had to memorize and act out a script which is wayyy out of my comfort zone. In grade 8 I was in the improv challenge which didn’t involve creating a script or making props so it wasn’t that crazy on the preparation part. So oh my gooodness when I read through the guidelines for my challenge this year I was a little bit spooked. Lucky for me I had a group I felt comfy sharing my ideas with. In my group I had Melissa, Charlie, Aiya and my grade 10 buddy Caden. We called ourselves “The Van Gogh Getters.”
For my challenge Fine Arts, In Motion, we had to create a performance that was centered around a work of visual art.
My group chose to pick the good ol’ painting, The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh (hence our group name). Inspired by the Starry Night we started crafting our story and together we contributed ideas which got incorporated into our solution.
Our story is about the adventure of two friends Emily, who loves art, and Tina, who doesn’t see the value in it. One day a colour-hating witch steals the Starry Night from a museum. Then Tina and Emily get told that the only way to restore the painting is to go out into the mystic woodlands to retrieve paints to recreate The Starry Night. Along their journey, they encounter three paint protectors who challenge them. This leads Tina to have a new appreciation for art. Finally, they retrieve all the paints and re-make the painting restoring the balance in the museum!
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Something that helped us stay on track with all the things we needed to do was that we were able to settle on our story, characters, and other elements pretty quickly. This allowed us to get our script out of the way. (Props to Caden for writing a solid script).
What made me nervous was that as the grade 10’s we needed to step up and be a leader. That meant filling out DI forms, making sure we follow the rules and in my standards meant taking one of the main roles. I was super scared to memorize a whole script and then have to present it to a live audience but I did it! I was pleasantly surprised.
In our story we needed to have a dynamic character whose personality, motives, or ideas change throughout the story. Also, we needed to have a static character whose personality, motives and ideas stay the same during the story. We decided the static and dynamic characters would be the main characters of our story. Caden played Tina who was the dynamic main character and I played Emily who was the static 2nd main character. Our paint protectors in the woods were based around a colour in the starry night (blue, black and yellow). Melissa played Blue Belinda, Aiya played Blackthorn and the evil witch who steals the painting, and Charlie played Yellow Yasmin! Although for regionals, we had to do some re-arranging of the characters, (more on that later) everyone did a great job performing.
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Another element we needed in our story was a piece of reimagined art:
We debated whether or not we wanted to dance infront of everyone. In the end we chose to channel our inner poets and create a spoken word poem!
Finally the thing that scared me the most was that we needed to create a kinetic art piece/prop. In our story Tina and Emily re-create the Starry Night, we had this cool idea to make the swirls in the sky move around but we had a problem. I am not a confident builder and neither were my group mates so we were stuck with this cool idea but no way to execute it. We ended up having to scrap the idea but maybe it was a good thing we did because I did not want to cut holes into the painting Aiya made. It looks like the real thing!
I took over creating our kinetic art and I made a curtain that opened up to reveal Tina and Emily’s new Starry Night. I was able I to make a frame that stood up without falling apart! It is not the most extravagant prop but I am impressed with myself for doing that since I had only built a few things before with the help of my dad, but this time I was flying solo.
We had the script, kinetic art, and reimagined art covered which were the big things I was worried about. Now we just had to assemble the backdrop, costumes and do run-throughs with everything.
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Our group was prepared, we had all the elements and with only a few days before DI regionals Caden told us he was sick. I started worrying and re-arranging stuff but I made the mistake of saying at least it’s just one person and jinxed myself. Charlie said she had a cold and AHH I was super scared, but those things happen and it just prepared us in case it happened again with no notice at all. Luckily we had some time to move things around and make it work. Charlie pulled through and took a day to rest and was able to make it for our performance. Sadly, Caden was still under the weather and couldn’t come. Caden was our main character and had to present our spoken word poem. I felt bad having to make someone memorize all that in such a short period of time. After re-arranging characters and finding spots we needed to fill Melissa, my saviour, stepped into Cadens role and memorized all the lines in the knick of time. She did really well improvizing and performing after becoming Tina only 2 days before. Charlie became Blue Belinda on top of being Yellow Yasmin and did great memorizing the lines, knowing that it was a struggle for her.
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I was looking over the video of our performance, and although some parts are a little embarrassing it went pretty well. At the start the speaker we were using for the museum’s intercom started playing random radio stations. I kept pressing the wrong button and instead of turning off I kept accidentally switching channels which was a little embarrassing and I was trying so hard to keep it together and not burst out laughing. You can watch our performance here! To improve for regionals we can work on the transitions and try to improve the kinetic art since it’s not the smoothest. Despite the fact DI isn’t my favourite thing after getting over the hump of it, it wasn’t that bad. It pushed me out of my comfort zone by making me step into more of a leadership role. I have a lot more to grow on when becoming a leader but I think I helped us keep moving things along and didn’t do to bad. In the end we placed 2nd which is pretty solid, even though it was only against 2 other teams from Seycove…
Wish us luck at Provincials, 1st place here we come!
