Lockdown tings
TOUR TEAM UPDATE
Another year another team.. Team lockdown
If you know EXCEL well, you would know that one of the most exciting and unique things we offer to our students is the chance to TOUR around our beautiful country. You get to perform in schools, meet new people/fans, sign autographs (oh) the list goes on! Well this year started out a little different for our fresh team..
For the first time ever we had introduced a new learning system called ‘Project Based Learning’. Now this was a totally new era for the students and even for us as staff/tutors. We had to switch from chucking all this material at the team and rehearsing for 6-8 weeks to letting the team come up with their own ideas and content for the shows (boy were we nervous for this).
So the rehearsals began and let me be honest with you, we were off to a slow start. The students were stuck on ideas in all departments and they also had to juggle their assignments in between rehearsals. To be fair this was our first year of trialling this new learning system so bumps in the road were expected. The weeks went by and slowly but gradually we started to create content! The team soon came up with a skeleton of a show and even got the opportunity to perform it in front of the one and only Lavina Williams. How lucky are we to have beast NZ artists that are keen to sow knowledge into our next generation of performers! (now can you sow that voice of yours into me sis).
And just as we were nailing into the finer details of our tour programmes, LOCK-DOWN! Gee the Lord works in mysterious ways huh? so tour rehearsals on hold for 4 weeks which unfortunately meant we had to cancel our 2 week tour up North. Guts for our team but definitely looking at possible ways of fitting them into the schedule later in the year (heres hoping Aunty Cinda lets us into schools). We may be in isolation but that doesn’t stop us creatives! If anything it’s been a blessing in disguise, giving us more time to learn, practise and refine. Stay tuned to see what post-Covid looks like for our 2020 tour team.