Last night was the finals for the 2nd Annual Guānggǔ Music Festival (光谷音乐节). The students came in second place in the children’s division! They were great on stage! First place went to a 4-year old girl that did a dance number. Our second performance ranked third in the scoring but since we won second place already they gave it to another girl that sang the Beijing Olympic song. It was a long night. It ran from 6:30 P.M. to almost midnight!
The Guānggǔ Music Festival is a televised event in Wuhan. I’m not sure about the rest of China. It seemed like a big thing. The production had stage monitors, fancy-shmancy lighting, pyrotechnics like fireworks and flamethrowers, smoke machines, bubble machines, and exploding containers of gold paper that would shower the stage. They were passing out signs for the audience to hold up to the cameras when it passed by and whistles and glow sticks and colourful lightsabers. They cued fake applause, cheers and whistles. The works! It was pretty cool to see it all first hand.
I haven’t been able to find any articles on last night’s show yet, but here is the old one.
“光谷音乐节” on 武汉晚报 (May 24, 2009) (*.pdf) You can read the article in shoddy English here.
The students at my school performed at the Guānggǔ Music Festival (光谷音乐节) at Lǔ Xiàng Square (鲁巷广场) on Friday. Originally, I–and some other teachers–thought the performance was just a normal school performance. Lo-and-behold, we show up on Friday and we find people at two tables set up in front of the stage. Looks like a judging panel! As we get closer to the start of the show, a cameraman sets up a camera on a tripod behind the judges. We even made the Wuhan evening news (see “光谷音乐节“). It’s crazy!
We find out over the weekend that the judges have selected 3 performances from our school. Now, we have to prep for the big show on Saturday because there’s a ¥5000 prize money for the first-place performance!
A couple days ago, I came home from work and saw a little miniature moth-like insect flying around my room. It landed it on my pearly-white walls. I was so concentrated on trying to kill the thing that I didn’t realize what I did until I did it! I smacked my slipper on the wall to kill it because I had no other weapon in hand. Now I have a black slipper mark on the wall. I haven’t cleaned it off yet. It’s a warning to all the insects to come after that no wall is too white to smoosh them on.
The last couple weeks I have set aside a brochure I was making for the school. This week, our students are performing at a nearby shopping centre and it would be silly of us not to have brochures or something to hand out to curious parents. We have a flyer for our English Immersion Summer Camp but none of the school itself. So this week I have been scrambling to get it completed. I was only able to finish it because of the prompt translations, the remade logo by Felix because I was too lazy to do it myself, and all the great pictures we had stored away on everyone’s computers. The brochure is off to the printer and hopefully ready before our performance. I’m hoping no one will notice the fake grass that I clone in front of the school. It’s better than the dirt and building materials that was in the original!
