All good things must come to an end...

Hello to all!

As you know, on Thursday, November 29, 2012 Mr. Cornell’s class went on a trip to the Neilson Creative Arts Centre.  Since we do this trip almost every year I thought that when we returned to school the next day, that concluded our work with the amazing Milkweed Collective.   However, I was thrilled to find out that the fun wasn't over!

In Drama, Dance and Music class we were all split into groups of three or four and were told to create a poem about any Human Right that we wanted.  Sabhat, Tashifa, Rashawn and Baarath were in my group.  The right that we chose was: Everyone has the right to say what they feel and to receive information.  We decided to only focus on the first part.  And instead of focusing on the importance of our right, or what it means.  We decided to address the fact that it is not really a right that we have.  I thought that creating the poems was a great experience because, I personally really like spoken word/poems.

In our next Drama, Dance and Music class, were were split into groups based on whether we wanted to read a poem or create and perform a dance to accompany it.  Baarath and Harsimran were in my group.  We were assigned to do the poem that my group had created.  I really liked the fact that once we were assigned our poem, we got to make the action anything that we wanted, so there wasn't a lot of structure.  I liked this because I think structure would have liited our creativity and not allowed us to think out of the box.  This was the poem:

They say that I can say what I feel

All I wanna say is that none of this is real

We built up a façade with breaks made of lies

But all it is doing is leading to our ultimate demise

The truth is what I yearn to speak

Yet my words to you are accepted as weak

I want to proclaim from the tallest tower

That I am no longer satisfied by this illusion of power

Once we had created our presentation, we practiced twice with Ms. Walton and Mrs. Orszulik’s class on the stage.  Although it was a little bit smaller than our real presentation space, I think that this was very important for us to understand the big picture of the project.  I did not really like that we were not allowed to see the other groups perform while we were practising.  But when the video is released, we will get that opportunity.

When it came to the actual presentation day, I was quite excited.  After practicing twice in our real presentation space we got pizza, cookies, juice and water while we waited for the audience to arrive.  Then we played a game called Ninja till it was time to perform.  I was not nervous at all that entire time.  However, moments before it was my time to present, I got extremely nervous; my heart was racing, I couldn’t breathe, and I forgot everything.  But we went downstage, and it seemed to fall in place!

One of my favourite parts of the program was getting watch a slam poet named Andrea Thompson perform.   Her words were thought provoking and very engaging.  Her words of advice to everyone after her performance were to keep a journal, create a writing group and write poems in my spare time.  These are amazing ideas and I am already working on keeping a journal and writing poems in my spare time.  I'm very glad we had the chance to meet such a talented artist.

Overall, I think that the Creativity Rocks Program was a great experience and I would love to see more schools get involved.  It seems this wonderful blogging experience has come to an end, and I will no longer be posting.  I’d like to end with a quote by the prominent cartoonist and writer, Scott Adams:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.  Art is knowing which ones to keep.”