Water Conservation!!!!

The theme that we chose to do our performance on was “water conservation”. We chose this because we believe that this topic is a very interesting and important topic to talk about. Everyday lots of water is wasted, here in school you can see sprinklers around the dorms for example at the dorms, Pentland Hills the sprinklers go on twice during the day, watering the sidewalk instead of the grass, and over half of them are broken wasting dozens gallons of water.
For our actual performance, I believe that we did a successful job in demonstrating our topic to the public. We set all of the scenarios in two different rows, one being the bad way of performing a task, and the other that shows the alternate way that we should perform what we usually do. For my part, which was about watering a driveway, I was portraying what people do for instance using a hose to wash down a driveway. My opponent/partner on the other hand used a broom to demonstrate the alternate way that we should clean a driveway to reduce the waste of water. We demonstrated how low the actually water reserve level is by the colorful clock in the back, green was for the safe zone, yellow and orange for moderate, and red for critical low water levels.
For choreography, the only things that we shared in common with each other were the walk, and the ending which was the calling of the rain god. Then during the actual dance, we all had out own “15 seconds of fame” we called it which was where we would dance to our own music at our own dance moves that we individually created. Choreography was divided in two; one was where the main choreographers helped out in creating the walk and dance, while the other part of the choreography was where we would have to create our own.
Music was a little different than the choreography in the way that it is a little bit more difficult to demonstrate what you’re trying to demonstrate. For some of the dances it was obvious what we were trying to demonstrate such as for good and bad carwashes and the bad shower by taking her sweet time with a rubber duck. But for the majority of the other members including myself, it was pretty difficult to find a song suitable so instead we went with how the song sounded. If the song was peaceful and slow, we would direct it towards the good side whereas if the song is fast and loud, we would consider that to be a bad one.
Some of the gestures that we incorporated with our parade were during the walk, by making our hands go in a swimming motion to demonstrate that our parade involved water. Along with this gesture we made up chants that Depika would scream out loud “keep keep keep it up” and everyone else would scream out “keep that water level up” which related to the “color level clock” that demonstrates what current level we are on, which right now is relatively low. Another chant that we had was one much simpler which just consisted of the word “wa-ter” just to show what we were all about
The costumes that we wore were created by Yaheema, and Carol. They each either attached or painted some type of symbol to our shirts. The left row consisted of the bad ways to do stuff, wearing red. The right side consisted of the rather better alternate way to do something, which wore an environmentally “friendly” color green. For my shirt, bad driveway my shirt had tire tracks and real tire marks to make it seem like a driveway, along with cooking oil spots to make it seem real. We also used different types of props. For my part I used a hose to represent the watering of a driveway and to incorporate an orixa, Oxumare, who is the serpent orixa. During our call for the rain god, we all had props which were “rain sticks” that assisted in helping call out the water god and make us seem all unified.
As the blogger and camera conductor, I created the blog where all these write ups will be posted. Created a new post where the deities write-ups will be left at the bottom and all the reports will come up on top of the other stuff. I videotaped all the meetings so those who absolutely could not attend the meetings could catch up on what we did by posting the videos on YouTube and forwarding them through friend feed in our “PandaPanda” group.
At the beginning of the class I thought that Orixas were silly myths from the past and people just danced to them. As we kept going on in the course, I learned that they are deities of religions. There are several interesting Orixas, Iemanja and Oxumare I would say are the two that grasped my attention the most.
If I was to be able to work on this some most I would like to work on the whole walking part. We spent two whole practice days trying to come up with a walk rather than our simple “swimming motion” walk but we simply could not get it working. We would concentrate too much on our hand movements or shaking of rain sticks that the steps would not be coordinated with each other. I would have liked having a better organized walk but I guess that takes much more time than we had with just a couple of weeks to come up with it.
During this fascinating group project I learned that it is pretty difficult to work as a group and make something look good. Being my first college project I noticed that the biggest conflict would be working with different schedules, people being late or not showing up at all. I noticed something that at the beginning I thought I was not going to do. At first I told myself “I’ am not doing that” but in the end, I learned not to be embarrassed, I gave it all I could and did not care of what people around me would say or do because if we were doing it all as a group, there is nothing to be scared about because you are not the only one standing out, it is a whole group behind you.