And so came our final performance for DI and I’d be lying if said this wasn’t the most challenging performance in our most challenging year yet. At least in my experience…
In my previous post, I got into all the aspects of this year’s challenge and some of the problems we faced coming into our first performance. If you haven’t checked that out yet, I definitely suggest that you look at that first because without it, this post won’t make much sense.
You’ve read it? Great, now let’s get into the focus of this post, provincials… So when I left off on my previous post, I mentioned that within our group of four (Robbie, Hannah, Sofia, and I), Robbie and Sofia weren’t going to be able to come for provincials due to prior commitments. So only Hannah and I would be there at provincials to perform, yay… Anyways, this left a very big and awkwardly shaped hole in our script, performance, and setup as our whole performance was designed to fit four people.
Because all of us were still going to be together before provincials, we were going to have to scramble in order to find a solution for our lack of a cast during our performance. Our first order of business was to remodel the script and luckily for us, I had only written two major characters in the first place. When we had originally planned our performance, we figured that it would be good to have some of our group members focus more on the “behind the scenes” aspect during our performance so that everything would run smoothly. What resulted from that was two major characters and two not-so-major characters in the script. When the time came to restructure the script, I simply removed the two smaller characters, sort of… What I mean by that is that in a large chunk of our story, the presence of one of the smaller characters was actually important to the story itself, so in order to keep the “presence” of the smaller character, we had to come up with a solution.
And we did! After a few ”spitball sessions” with our teachers some of which involved the topic of building a robot made of PVC pipes with an iPad face (which would play a video of Robbie talking), we finally came up with an idea that would work! I half-heartedly joked around saying that Hannah could be two people at once by dressing as one character on her left side and another character on her right side. We all laughed but the more we thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. After some more thought, we decided that my “split personality” idea would be the best course of plans. So I implemented that idea into the script and in the meantime, Hannah and Sofia were working hard in order to mix two costumes into one. The final product actually turned out really, really good!
After fixing those problems, I felt really good about our chances in provincials as every other aspect of our performance didn’t really need to be fixed. Afterwards, it was essentially just a matter of practice, practice, and more practice. We later found out that pulling off our performance with two people was actually a little more easy and saved a lot more time during our practice runs. Things finally seemed like they were going to work out, now it was only a matter of time until DI provincials came!
And then they came. Everything ran pretty smoothly throughout our day, aside from our Instant Challenge in which we struggled to come out with a good product/solution to our challenge as a few more helping hands definitely would have been beneficial. Either way, the time finally came for our performance and there’s not much I can say that couldn’t be said better through a video…
So that was our experience but what did I take away this year from DI, or any DI since grade 8 for that matter? To be fair, every year is different and has its own set of setbacks along with advantages. Some years our groups are big, some years the challenge isn’t what you wanted, and the list goes on but I think this year has definitely solidified a few things for me.
One of the biggest things that I’ve kind of realized is that if everything went according to plan, then you did something wrong. I really think that this statement applies to DI, and here’s why. So DI is a competition of creativity, right? Sure, there’s building aspects, singing aspects, writing aspects, and many other things but when everything is simplified down, it all comes back to creativity. Kids are expected to try crazy things that might not work and take risks to make them stand out, so what happens when everything goes to plan then? In my opinion, it means that not enough was done to be unique. Not enough risks were taken. In my mind, there’s a difference between things working out and having everything go according to plan. If you ask any kid who’s taken part in DI, nine times out of ten, they’ll say that something went wrong in their performance. If anything, it’s expected for something to go wrong as there’s almost always an element in everyone’s performance that stands out enough to be great and is risky enough to cause some problems. If everything went right, did you really do enough to stand out?
There’s an article on the DI website that I think perfectly exemplifies the things that lots of us have learned or developed during our time in DI. If you want, you can check it out here…
Essentially, it shows results from studies that compare kids who have done DI and kids who haven’t. Sure, there are some pretty obvious points like the kids are “more creative than non-DI participants” or are “more self confident and tenacious” because they were surrounded by supportive people, but they all build up to one big theme, creativity…
It’s fair to say that DI focuses heavily on creativity. It’s also fair to say that some people are more creative than others and for that, they might win challenges more often but that’s not the point. I think the most important thing to realize is that all of these kids who are in DI are forced to stretch their “creative muscles” and come up with new and crazy solutions and ideas for their challenges. Essentially, all of us are being trained to be creative and thrive under sometimes uncomfortable situations and honestly, it doesn’t sound all that different from how most people survive in the real world. If you really want to make it, you need to stand out, be creative, and learn to deal with difficult challenges. So if anything, DI’s doing a lot more than one might expect and for that, I’m definitely grateful that I’ve been able to partake in it for the past three years.
Anyways, this concludes my “DI saga” of blog posts that I’ve been making since grade 8. I’m really glad that I’ve been exposed to something like this and I’m definitely going to be applying lots of the skills I’ve developed to the real world.
Hey, you’ll never know when you might need to come up with a two-act musical someday…
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