Kia Manawanui Production Reflection

WALT: use scripts and skits to tell stories about Natural Disasters.

Throughout last week we practiced our natural disaster skits, these skits were based on real life natural disasters that happened all around the different Pacific Islands because as you may know Natural disasters is our inquiry topic. The Islands were Tonga, Cook Islands, Fiji, Samoa, New Zealand and Niue.

 The group I had been put in was Cook Island and the natural disaster that we got was a volcanic eruption, the story also involved the traditional cook island drums.

Small Paragraph of what the story was about -

The story was about two tribes (Rarotonga Cook Islands and Ra'iatea French Polynesia), these two tribes both had a drumming challenge to determine who was the best drum player in all the pacific. The two tribes called upon the gods to choose the winning drum player, so both men got their best drummers and drummed away. After the men were finished the gods made the decision of picking the winner which was Rarotonga. The chief of Ra'iatea was so mad he chucked his drum stick as hard as he could causing a volcanic eruption (The volcano of Rarotonga exploded), lava spat everywhere and the gods and the Rarotonga men knew they had to stop it so they got the god of winds to blow the lava to cool it down and stopped the flow. After the Volcano settled down the gods banished the chief and his men of Ra'iatea from the Island of Rarotonga.

Practicing -

Practicing this skit/play was actually really fun because I got to work with a group of people I would probably not work with and it was fun to see people from different cultures in different cultural groups. In our skit we did have a lot of performances altogether I think we had about 5 performances where other groups only had 1-3 performances because our welcoming song, boys had to play the drums, girls had to dance, then the boys had to drum again and then the girls had to dance. 

Script -

I think personally I learnt my lines somewhat fast considering that we had our scripts and story changed, but I think the thing I struggled with the most was being really loud and saying it really clearly because I usually don't shout or be really loud so that was something really challenging I found with this but I guess I somewhat got there in the end. 

Dance and Drums -

 I really enjoyed doing a Cook Island welcome song and dance because it is my culture but the first thing that was hard was teaching the other girls how to move there hips correctly and properly only because they didn't know how to do it properly. Luckily my friend Bianna helped me otherwise I would have gone crazy. The thing I know my group struggled with was the drums because they were off beat they didn't drum together and the drums were just being really annoying for everybody, that's why we went with one that was on youtube.  Even though the girls already did a welcoming dance we had to dance to a fast drum beat and that was even harder because we had to teach the girls how to shake and move their legs, feet and hips to a faster and harder beat, and after the first drum beat and dance it got faster and faster so then we had to teach the girls how to do it even faster than before and that was a struggle.

Next Steps or what I would work on next time -

In the future if I was to do something similar I think I would be a lot louder and a lot more clear and also not as tight, only because it shows like you can tell your scared and people might not hear what you are saying, and even if you say it loud you probably wouldn't understand cause you wouldn't have said it clearly.

Photo of Rarotonga -

Photo of Ra'iatea 

LINK TO THE DRUM BEAT

LINK TO THE WELCOME SONG