Art Form

MUSIC

Music is a beautiful thing. It helps us to expresses ourselves in many ways. We have learnt many things throughout our year of learning music with one another. This year we learned about the origins of some forms of music, different ways to view our music and improve in our various instruments. Throughout the year, we did a number of things, such as drawing mind maps of the content covered in class, using the knowledge learned to complete tasks given and performing in front of our peers.

Click here to see Sue-Ann Ho, one of our music students, performing.

Mind Maps

Here, we have a examples of the mind maps that the music students have done in class. This is to help us recap on the things we have learnt over the year such as the era of Renaissance Music and the topic of notation.

Renaissance mind map

Notation mind map

Tasks

Here are examples of tasks that the music students had to do. For the Notation project, we had to listen to a short recording of music, then notate it in our own unique way. For the Stage Layout project, we were tasked to organise and position performers and items on stage to achieve the sound that we wanted.

Notation project

Stage Layout project

VISUAL ARTS

This year, we worked with dry mediums such as graphite, charcoal and ink. Using these mediums, we did many large-scale drawing projects which included methods we learned like observational drawing, abstraction and perspectives. We also tried our hands at 3D artworks. Some of us did ceramics while others did sculptures. For ceramics, we learned techniques like coiling and pinching whereas for sculpture, we used plaster and wire to create different forms.

LITERARY ARTS

In Literary Arts (LA), we study various forms of creative writing. This year, we had three modules -- short fiction, playwriting and poetry, in that order. Every module improved our writing skills and gave us food for thought, whether about the form itself or about ourselves as writers. Throughout the year, we grew as people and found our writing voices. Writing was and is, for many of us, a form of catharsis; an outlet to express our frustrations, doubts and confusions.

As such, our writing is often filled with emotions, especially when we write about issues we are passionate about. Our year in LA taught us the importance of personal experiences in writing, especially in forms like poetry. We put a lot of ourselves into everything we write. We hope that reading our pieces will give you an insight into the LA experience and that you will feel our emotions as you read our pieces.

Below we have chosen a few poems, excerpts of our plays and our portfolio covers for your perusal. We decided not to post our short fiction works as they would be difficult to fully enjoy without the context of the full story.

An excerpt of "Time Will Tell" by Ishanvi Bhardwaj. Context: a heart-to-heart talk with a potential love.

An excerpt of "The Red Dress" by Leonny Ong. Context: a rebel escaping prison in 1940s Nazi-occupied Paris.

THEATRE

This year, we did many projects in Performance and Practice such as making tableaus out of a nonsense poem; "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carrol. We also did a project where we had to do improv. In Concept and Design, we did a project where we had to find sounds to match to a story that we wrote. During an assessment that we did where we acted out a play called "Flying To The Sunset", we acted it out in Performance and Practice, made a set design in Concept and Design, and wrote reflections and worked on characterisation in Theory and Context. Finally, we worked on a devising project where we had to write our own script, storyline and make our own characters for a short play. We performed these short plays during the Year 1 showcase. 👍

"You Will Never Be Good Enough" short play

"Smile" short play

"I'm Perfect...I'm Doris" short play

DANCE

In dance this year, we studied ballet, music awareness and movement and improvisation. In ballet, we had a performance assessment in term 3 and a showcase called 'Just Becoming', in which we performed for our teachers and friends. In movement and improvisation (M&I), we also had a showcase in which we had to choose an academic subject and portray what we learned in this subject using a variety of movements involving different body parts and dynamics. In music awareness, we learned about pulse, rhythm and phrasing. This helped us execute the ballet steps better when we listened to the music for our dance. Below is an improvisation two of R5's dancers, Suzanne Ho and Wong Zhi Ying, performed.