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CAS Reflection: Activity (Kahaani) – Reflection 1

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CAS Reflection: Activity

Kahaani 2019 West India

Reflection 1

 

Learning Outcome(s):

  1. Identify their own strengths and develop areas for growth.  

 

To complete my activity requirements for CAS, I chose to take part in Kahaani this year. Kahaani is another dance show focused around Indian cultural dances that is organised by school, however it is organised by Kolkata GC (global concern) and all the money raised from the event is donated to an organisation situated in Kolkata.

 

I wanted to take part in Kahaani this year because after my past experience in Culturama, I had a newfound interest and appreciation in dancing. I also thought that if I liked this new activity so much, I shouldn’t just leave it to one experience, therefore I signed up for the dance. Also, I thought this would be a good way to experience my own culture as I am a little detached from it since, despite being Indian myself, I have lived in Singapore and attended international schools for the majority of my life.

 

Upon joining, I had already come across several difficulties. The dance style was obviously different from the dance style I learned in Culturama. I found these dances that I need to learn for Kahaani are much more intricate and focus on tinier details compared to the dances I learned for Ghana in Culturama which focus more on bigger, well-rounded movements. But overtime, I managed to grow accustomed to it and learning the dance became less hard.

 

In our dance, there are 4 dances altogether. Everyone in our group will be performing the second and last dance, however we’re split into two groups and one performs the first dance and the other performs the third. In my opinion, the third dance was very energetic and a bit fast, whereas the first dance was much more delicate and focused heavily on grace. Initially I was in the third dance but I was struggling a lot. I found that the beats were not easy to follow for me and I would forget the steps no matter how much I practiced after school, so much so that it began to put me under a lot of stress as we were on a time crunch. However, I ended up getting switched to the first dance as there were other dancers from that group who had dropped out of Kahaani altogether and that group had too few people in it. I found that the first dance was so much easier for me to learn and that there was clearly a certain style of dancing that I seemed to go better with, and in this case it was more fast grace. Having this affinity for this style of dance made me enjoy the dance a lot more and I didn’t find myself beating myself up over any mistakes as much.

 

The biggest struggle with this however, was that I had to learn the dance by myself due to the fact that it was such a last minute change, but I was okay with this. I used videos from the dance leaders and videos of the original group during practice as a reference. The dance itself was still a little difficult for me, but learning a dance by myself was the biggest challenge, but I’m really proud of myself because I was able to do it.

^ The original dance I was assigned to (3rd dance)

first time running through the other dance after learning it all beforehand (1st dance)

 

CAS Reflection: Creativity (HS Arts Club) – Reflection 1

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CAS Reflection: Creativity

HS Arts Club

Reflection 1

 

Learning Outcome(s):

  1. Identifying strengths and develop areas for personal growth.

 

Since I chose to take two sciences for IB, I had to drop Visual Arts. I’ve been doing art as a hobby since I was very young, and I even took it as my art subject for my (I)GCSEs. Due to the fact that I had to choose double science over it this year, I still wanted to find a way to keep up with doing art because it’s still an activity that I find relaxing yet challenging. Therefore, I think that joining the high school Arts Club this year will allow me to do so.

 

As I’ve been involving myself in art for such a long time now, I tend to be comfortable with trying new mediums or working to try new things in the mediums I know how to work with. I tend to draw portraits mostly which doesn’t really give me much practice with other things that I could possibly draw. Another common painting style for me to do is to not play much with how the background colour affects the foreground objects, so I feel that by picking a specific sort of theme or aesthetic preference I can use that to try and make the piece look a little more put together. These were just points that I noticed after painting my first piece in the club which also served as a gift for a friend.

I do think that overall I have a handle on how to paint faces in a way that’s catered towards my own stylistic preference, yet as I mentioned before, there are several steps I feel as though I could take in order to improve my watercolour skills further.


 

 

 

 

For my second piece that I’m working from a photo. Though it does involve painting a portrait, it incorporates a rose in it. With that idea, I sketched several roses so this way I’ll get practice with painting something that isn’t a human face.This is just the beginning of the painting, and I decided to try mapping out the shading first with the colour that I want to portray as the main one (being pink because of the roses) which isn’t something I normally do. Usually I paint the base colours and then add shadows and tints, so I would like to see how this will cause the painting to turn out. This was actually my second attempt, as in the previous one I ended up messing up the shading on the shirt (which I haven’t done here). Clothing is probably another area which I need to work on, as I tend to put so much detail in the faces that the rest of the painting often doesn’t hold the same amount of detail (as seen in the prior photo of the first painting).