Deciding on what costume that we want to wear during our performance was somewhat kind of easy but hard at the same time. We wanted to wear something that would be totally different from other countries and make us stand out in the crowd but at the same be culturally appropriate. With the help of Sandra(co-leader), she came up with different ideas to what would look really good on stage, since she knows more about the culture that I do.

Initially, we came with the idea for everyone to all wear the same things which are call Dashiki (which is shown below)

But we change our mind and decided that we should let the boys wear Dashiki since we only have two boys and let the girls wear kanga cloths. We shared our decision with the committee and they loved it. After getting the costume, we were unsure if they were gonna work or not, but once we let them tried it on it looked absolutely amazing. And we also decided to add facepaint on the face, just to add a bit of volume and texture.

Below is our group picture of all the dancers wearing the full costume.

On our first run through it went absolutely amazing, everyone knew the choreography, but there was one thing missing from the dancers, which is ENERGY. In an African dance piece, it is really important to have energy. We also had a bit of problem with our ending of the music. So we changed it around a little bit, edit a bit more. And then it was all good.

In this run through we try to finalize everything. Making sure we have everything done, whether it’s music, costume, makeup etc. And one of the most important thing that we try to focus on during this run through was Positioning/Formation. It was very difficult because it was really hard to come up with 4 different formations and transition for 20 people where everyone should be able to be seen. But with the help of Ms.Thomas, we were able to come up with something that was gonna work for everyone.

I am the dance leader, so in our first session. I taught the dancers all the dance. We have 4 section of the dance, the first one is traditional dance and there is also 2 afrobeat, and the last one is afro-house. After I taught the dancers the whole piece, I let them decide which group they wanted to be in and which dance they are most comfortable doing. They had to choose if they wanted to do either group 2 or group 3 since the group 1 and group 4 dance is compulsory for everyone to do. I was really impressed with how our first session went because everyone was very enthusiastic, easier to control, which definitely make the teaching process very easy for me. And as for the people that were not there, I just put them in a group that I think that they would enjoy.

Down below is a link to the video of our first rehearsals, of me teaching the dance to the dancers.

https://drive.google.com/drive/recent

I started planning the dance in Grade 10 so that I have an idea of what kind of dance style I want to do, whether it’s more upbeat, very energetic, etc. I choreographed bits of the dance over the same, just so that it would be really easy for me to get on with everything, especially in teaching the dance to the dancers.

I also created tutorial videos of each section of the dance, so that it would be fast for the dancers to learn the dance and when they come in the next rehearsal, they’ll already be aware of what they are gonna be doing.

Tutorial Videos attached below:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RnjLp73uU4d4V_FFCp88Dl3b4-JbRvfh