What: World Awareness 2015
When: 3/20/15 - performance day
Where: Smoky Hill High School
Total hours: 40 hours (practice + performance day)
Contact info: Cindy Meis - cmeis@cherrycreekschools.org
Prior the World Awareness day at Smoky Hill, NGV have organized the clubs into groups to represent several Asian countries. I join the Vietnamese group. Our group leader is Sara and Sonya, planned and initial the events, but each of us does get to have a say in the matter and we each spend a lot of time and effort on this.
The goal of NGV’s World Awareness presentation is to raise awareness of the beautiful and unique Asian culture and try to make people of other nationality become more interested in them. This is event our group decided on doing a traditional Vietnamese straw hat dance featuring Vietnamese traditional dress called “Ao dai”. Since our group’s leader take initiative in planning majority of the choreography, we have with the adjustment and how to make the dance move flow more smoothly, fit with the songs, more appealing etc. Learning a dance is not as easy as I thought it would be, especially when doing it in groups. We have to develop a very high amount of trust and teamwork to be able to synchronize with each other, so this definitely demonstrated a high level of collaboration within the groups. Learning a dance is also very fun and it allows me to develop a new skill and performing in front of such a large number of audience is very nerve wrecking so this experience allow me to be more confident while serving a good cause and spreading the tradition. I think that performed is a great ways to increase people’s interest or introduce foreigners to Asian culture because it a more entertaining ways to do it, as opposed to lecturing them about it, which could easily lose their interested.
For this experience, we have to sacrifice a lot of personal time to be able to get together to have meeting and practice. With schedule conflict we have to help each other out as much as possible, if a members missed the day where new part of the dance is taught then someone have to help them get caught up. We usually do so by recorded most of our practice so that if someone is unable to attend they can practice on their own. This is a huge project and it take a lot of commitment, there are time where I have to give up something else such as sport practices resulting in losing the privilege to complete in the next match, but I feel that it have to be done because groups project involved more than just myself. My action could impact the result of the outcome. I choose my group first because I feel that I have to prioritize my commitment to the group first. It also take a lot of self-motivation because we have such little time together , so we need to put in the work, practice during our own time too. Although work is rough this year it teach me to organizes and priorities my tasks.
Overall it a great experience. I'm very proud of the out come and it also help me bound with my friends and it rewarding in it self to know that we may have spark an interested for youth to learn more about Asian culture, that I am so proud of.
