ACSian Theatre South Africa Tour 2006 - Back in Singapore

Yes, it was morning by the time we arrived in Singapore. After checking-out, those who needn't return to school to unload went home first. The bunch of us who stayed (surprisingly alumni and J2s, who have exams the next day) returned to school on the truck. While some went back the moment everything had been moved out of the truck, a few members of the committee stayed to hang out the black and white costumes to air; we're performing on Wednesday again at some HDB event.

Sigh. Miss South Africa already.

ACSian Theatre South Africa Tour 2006 - Day 8

The morning of Day 8 started with breakfast and the loading of baggage onto the bus. A few minutes' ride later, we were outside the gates of the Bruma Marketworld. The gates had not opened yet, so we visited some of the roadside stalls first. The only things I bought from the market were a necklace and a bottle of mineral water. Most of the other people in the tour group bought many more stuff with their money, for instance wooden giraffes.

I was hands-free for the trip to the airport while the others were busy wrapping their bulky goods with bubble wrap. At the airport, we said our goodbyes to Cecil, Mr. Robinson and the vice-principals of Jeppe High School for Girls, after which we checked-in (the usual laborious business), got onto the plane and headed back to Singapore...

To be continued

ACSian Theatre South Africa Tour 2006 - Day 7

The whole of Day 7 was spent at Jeppe High School for Girls. The morning was used for marking positions for The Guys and the dances. We performed at 12.30pm, music first, then dance, then a 10-minute break, then The Guys. After the performance, we didn't have to conduct a workshop; they conducted a workshop for us, teaching the African drums. After the workshop, we took a break before entering the school again for a Concert in the Park which the girls have organised and invited us to come and watch. By the end of the night, all of us were super high and every drama person will tell you that every nerd had been un-nerded.

Of course, the fact that tomorrow's the last day meant that we needed to pack. The committee stayed till 1.30am in Lindis's room to help bubble wrap equipment.

To be continued

ACSian Theatre South Africa Tour 2006 - Day 6

Breakfast this morning was at 8am, but I woke up at 6.49am to see the sun already up. When I went down for breakfast at a few minutes past 8, only Hansel was around. Timotheus came in next, and all in all only a few people showed up for breakfast, the rest probably fast asleep in their rooms. Following that the morning was spent at Eastgate for most of the people who needed groceries. I opted to stay in because I was lazy to go out to Eastgate. May have been a good choice to stay in; some reckless behaviour at Eastgate set the mood for the rest of the day.

Our first stop for the tour group was to the Apartheid Museum near Gold Reef City (a theme park cum casino). A few minutes after we arrived, a few girls from Jeppe High School for Girls, their vice-principal and some of their teachers also showed up to accompany us for the day. We entered the museum proper after snack time and interaction between the girls and us. I must say, the exhibition concepts have been very well planned. Unfortunately, the information in the museum about everything to do with apartheid, coupled with the unfortunate events this morning, made the mood rather depressing for me.

After the visit to the museum, we walked to the casino section of the Gold Reef City and waited around for the arrival of Mr. Robinson (the principal of Jeppe High School for Girls, if you've forgotten). When he did finally come, we entered the building not to play in the casino, but to have dinner at Boston BBQ, which was located in the casino. A happy moment was also spent when special cakes came to celebrate the birthdays of Tim and Mrs Oei. I also found a Jeppe girl who loved Math like me and I was in awe when she told me they studied finances in their Add. Math syllabus too. (Hang on, was Nat trying to hook us up?)

The night was spent at the Globe Theatre (also in the casino). Mr. Robinson had paid for all of us to watch African Footprints, a local song and dance production that had toured at least Europe (not sure about other places) and returned to South Africa for a limited period of time. In my opinion and perhaps most of the others who watched, the show was fabulously power-packed. Kass teased about how we need to have a whole new level to dance: mark, half-mark, all out and African Footprints.

And it was also perhaps a relief that the mood lightened up significantly by the end of the night.

To be continued

ACSian Theatre South Africa Tour 2006 - Day 5

An early morning again, and this morning we performed to Kensington Secondary School, a government-aided school. Again, we conducted a workshop after our performance today, only this time we only had to tend to a group of about 30, and since it was such a small group, Mrs Creffield led both the AC students and the Kensington students in the workshop.

After Kensington, we made a quick stopover at the hotel before carrying on with sightseeing. Lunch at Wandie's was a particularly noisy event, thanks to Gloria's 'neh-neh' game. Otherwise, the day was dedicated to the history of South Africa. We travelled to the historic town of Soweto and visited the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum. For the uninformed (like me before coming to Soweto), one of the most prominent memories of the apartheid times of South Africa was the picture of the body of Hector Pieterson, a black school boy, carried down the street with his sister running alongside him, shot during the June 1976 uprising. Hector's sister still lives today, occasionally giving tour guides at the museum (we saw her at the museum). After the trip to the museum, we took a short bus ride down to Nelson Mandela's former house in Soweto, a small brick house like all the other houses in the neighbourhood.

Having spent the afternoon basking in the history of South Africa, we made another trip back to the hotel to change into something cool for dinner that night. We were going to a jazz club in downtown Johannesburg called Blues Room. Everybody was decked out in their best and positively excited as we headed down the stairs into the pub cum restaurant. The food was nice, but amazingly slow, so much so that Mrs Oei's and my order for the main course came after everyone else had finished their meals. The performances were also literally ear-deafening; other than the R & B performance which came first, the rest were rock performances.

Needless to say, by the end of the night, most (if not all) of the alumni guys were pretty much drunk. It was still lots of fun. Kind of glad tomorrow's a rest day too.

To be continued

ACSian Theatre South Africa Tour 2006 - Day 4

Today is performance day. We're performing at two of the four schools on our itinerary today. 4 people were missing on the bus as they fell sick last night (many more puked last night). The first school, Parktown High School for Girls, was a pretty energetic school. After our performances, we had to conduct workshops for almost the whole school. I conducted a movement workshop for the class I was allocated to, 8O (as in the letter O), in the field. About 15 minutes left to the end of the workshop, it started to drizzle lightly and the class had to be sent back to the classroom. After the workshop and lunch in the school hall, we boarded the bus to head to our next school, most of us napping on the bus.

We arrived at Crawford International School with quite some time to spare. Because of the sick people around, we decided to strike The Guys out from the original programme at Crawford. The Guest-of-Honour at the event tonight was the Singapore High Commissioner in Pretoria, South Africa, so the audience was a relatively older crowd as compared to Parktown. The day ended with McDonald's takeaway for dinner.

To be continued

ACSian Theatre South Africa Tour 2006 - Day 3

The morning started at 6am with an early morning game drive to see some lions. With dark clouds looming ahead, our jeep travelled on steep roads to the other side of a range of mountains. We manage to find and observe two lionesses and a male sub-adult (i.e. its mane is starting to grow). Our trip back, however, was plagued by rain (time to put on the ponchos), getting stuck in a difficult part of the mountain road to let another jeep pass, and getting a punctured tyre (thank goodness there were male rangers just behind us). In all these moments of uncertainty though, there's still a little time for humour; LC answered nature's call in the rocks while the guys were replacing the tyre.

By the time we got back to Lakeside, we were freezing cold, slightly wet and halfway into breakfast. Since we were booking out of Entabeni soon, I quickly downed some food and ran back to get my stuff. Thankfully I had already packed my bag before leaving for the morning game drive, so that's time saved. Although the spiders do freak me out, I was a little reluctant to leave the cool nature place. But the tour must go on; a few minutes' ride on the jeep later, we were back at the main gate of Entabeni and boarding the bus to return to our hotel.

Along the way we stopped at Carnivore Restaurant for lunch. This was truly the meat place; after the leek and potato soup, we were offered a choice of at least 10 different types of meat, whether in slices, sausages or meatballs. I think I had chicken, beef, pork, ostrich, vinissent (sorry, can't spell it), ostrich, springbok and crocodile. However, not everyone could take the amount of meat. On the way back from the restaurant to the hotel we stopped over again at a Chinese restaurant to take away our dinner. While Cecil, Suraj, Yi Jun and I waited for the food, Viki vomitted.

We set up equipment to rehearse for our items about 20 minutes after returning to the hotel. The road between blocks 7 and 8 of the hotel compound had been converted into our rehearsal space. We rehearsed the dances first, including reconfiguring the positions as Viki was too sick to dance the next day. We took longer than expected for the dances; we were given a short break to collect our Chinese takeaway from Suraj before heading down to Madam's room to rehearse "The Guys" (which we would be performing at Crawford International School the next day). By the time we ended it was pretty late.

To be continued

ACSian Theatre South Africa Tour 2006 - Day 2

The morning started at 5am for me when the morning call came 15 minutes earlier than it should. Perhaps it's the dry weather or my own fault, but my left nostril started to bleed while I was brushing my teeth. Quite freaky, considering the same nostril bled a few weeks ago. Breakfast started at 6am and the group got onto the coach once we were done. We made a trip to the airport to pick Gloria up, who had a piano exam on Saturday which she couldn't postpone, after which it was a 4-hour ride with two stopovers to Entabeni Private Game Reserve.

When the bus driver finally succeeded in navigating the winding paths to the main entrance of the reserve, we got onto the jeeps in our assigned groups (FYI, my group consisted of myself, Viknesh, Matthew, LC, Sabrina, Viki and Nirali; Mr Corbidge and Ms Cheng tagged along with us on the jeep too) and headed to our lodges. There were 4 locations of lodges in the reserve, and we got Lakeside (though it's stated Ravineside in our itinerary). Once we reached Lakeside, we had lunch at the restaurant and headed to our rooms to settle down (and mug for the J2s) until high tea at 3.30pm and the game drive at 4pm. The scary thing wasn't that I shared lodge 091 with Yi Jun, but the fact that it's a long walk from the main hall to lodge 091, and the place is full of falling or dangling SPIDERS.

Anyway, the game drive was really cool; kinda like a real-life simulator ride. Our group was driven around by Liana, a female park ranger, and our group managed to see: ticks, dung beetle, 5 giraffes (far away), white rhinos, antelopes, zebras and a couple of other stuff. We stopped over at some place in the middle of the reserve to take a break and to meet up with the other jeeps. Everybody clamoured to take a photo with the sunset as the backdrop. Once the break was over, we headed over to Ravineside to watch the stars as night fell. A telescope was also placed there for avid watchers. Watching the stars was a very good experience. It's the feeling that the sky was boundless, and the moon lighting up the land at night.

Dinner was taken around a campfire back at Lakeside, with a little African music and dance before food was ready to be served. After the meal and we went back to our lodges, Yi Jun immediately fell asleep while I slept after bathing.

To be continued

ACSian Theatre South Africa Tour 2006 - Day 1

"Good morning ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Johannesburg, South Africa. The local time now is 6.50am, and the temperature outside is 13 degrees Celcius...," says the friendly SIA head stewardess moments after the jerk of the plane signalled our touch-down on South African soil.

The actual work of transportation of equipment to the airport started almost 17 hours ago at Anglo-Chinese Junior College in Singapore. Thanks to an abundance of helpers, we moved all 32 items owned by the crew onto the waiting truck, and at about 7.40pm on March 10, we set off from the school to Changi International Airport. Upon arriving at Terminal 2, we set to unloading the things. My parents were already there waiting with my luggage. Once we had moved the things to Row 11 for checking-in, I changed out of blacks. After that it was a long wait as people started streaming in with their luggage, and for each of them the procedure is the same: assign a tag number for their check-in luggage, tie another tag stating the owner's address, and sending it off for check-in. When the last person finally arrived a few minutes before check-in time was over, we hung around to say our goodbyes before entering the customs.

Boarding time was 1.05am at gate E4. Between midnight to 1am, we were free to move around the airport. My time was spent eating something, walking around with different groups of people and getting entertained by Disha, Ben and Maggie. (It seemed that Ben was trying to sap his energy out so that he can sleep on the plane.) After a 10-hour flight where Hansel made his surprise appearance on the plane closer to Johannesburg (effectively freaking his sister Deanna out), we have landed in Johannesburg.

While clearing customs and baggage, we somehow lost LC's check-in luggage. A check revealed that the luggage has gotten onto the wrong plane and landed in Brisbane, Australia. It will take one or two days to get the luggage back, so in the meantime LC received R300 to get some necessities for these few days. Once we had loaded everything onto the coach we would be travelling in, we were greeted by our tour guide for South Africa, Cecil. After giving a brief introduction about South Africa, we made our first stop at the school of our hosts, Jeppe High School for Girls. Its principal, Mr. Berry Robinson has prepared a welcome tea for us in a beautiful little park across the road from its main school building. That period of time became a huge photo-taking session by little groups of people around the area.

After receiving gifts from Mr. Robinson, we transferred to our hotel and residence for the next 8 days, Mecure Bedfordview. The usual routine of boys moving equipment followed, after which we were allocated our rooms and given some time to settle down before continuing on our itinerary. This gave time for the madams to take LC and some people to Eastgate (a big shopping complex just across the road) to get his necessities and other people's groceries. My room was 704, a second-storey apartment, and I shared it with Dinesh, Krishmen and Noel. After picking our bedrooms, I went around to each apartment containing ACSian Theatre members to collect US money to change for Rand. Ms Wong was a little overwhelmed by how much money people were changing, but nevertheless she would get more Rand from Mr. Robinson (who's supplying the Rand we will be using in South Africa).

In the afternoon, we set off to Lesedi Cultural Village. According to Raeza, one season of The Amazing Race was filmed there (and I found the page - click here and look under Detour: Tribes). We were supposed to walk around the village on our own, but a few minutes later, Cecil suggested we change the programme a little and we took the change: first we went on a guided tour of the five different tribes in the village; following that we had dinner there; then we joined a big group of Americans in the theatre to watch a video on Africa's cultural history; this was followed by the Americans' guided tour, during which we slacked around. Finally the day at Lesedi Cultural Village ended with an energetic performance in the theatre.

And with that, 1 down, 7 to go.

To be continued

I've just completed packing my luggage (with the help of my mum) and cut my fingernails. In a few minutes' time I will bathe, shave, have dinner and head on to school to help in the loading of equipment. And in about 9 hours' time, I'll be on the plane to Johannesburg, South Africa.

Yep, the day for ACSian Theatre's South Africa performance tour has come. We'll be there for about 8 days, returning on Sunday morning. The excitement in me is building very slowly though. I'll probably feel the full force when I get on the plane.

Before I leave, I must make another advertisement:

ACSian Theatre presents
THE TEMPEST

Dates and Times: 6, 7 April 2006 - 8pm; 8 April 2006 - 2pm, 8pm
Venue: DBS Arts Centre - Home of Singapore Repertory Theatre
Tickets: $25 (Free seating)

If you haven't seen me in an ACSian Theatre performance before, this is the one to catch. I'm dancing a lot again, and I've got a minor role, but you must still come and watch. Tag my board; I've got tickets.