Foreign language drama comp

The foreign language department organizes a plethora of activities for the students to showcase their language skills. First there was the speech comp, and now we have the drama comp.

As before, foreign teachers like myself are asked to participate as judges. For the drama comp i judged the semi final and final, but in the final most of the performances were the same ones i saw in the semis. they seem to run the preliminary rounds like Idol, where each round only 2 out of the 10 or so acts get knocked out!

Now the normal chinese citizen is not known for their acting or drama skills, let alone drama in a second language. Most students tend to focus more on academic subjects rather than artistic ones, and you could fairly say that the conservative character of chinese people doesn't make for a dramatic performance! I know that whenever I ask my students to do a roleplay in class, most of them rote read from a piece of paper in an inaudible voice like a robot, and usually don't even face the audience. They will avoid public speaking like the plague.

At least the drama performances in the comp were a bit more dramatic compared to my usual class fare. It wasn't exactly academy award winning stuff, but seeing it was in their second language it was still a good effort. They had their hearts in it, but they were definitely still sounding very chinglish with their lines. Unfortunately the poor organization of the event let down some of the performances when it came to sound equipment and props. It all seemed a bit disorganized when a stage hand would fly in and out, sometimes during scenes to grab props or put them in position! and there seemed to be a constant problem with microphones, or a shortage of enough to go around between the onstage actors!

Most of the performances were in english, with about 3 in japanese. fortunately for the final they invited 2 of the japanese teachers to come judge. in the semi final it was just me and another english teacher trying to score japanese dramas which we couldn't understand a word of! we just ended up scoring based on all the other aspects apart from the script. but hell if i knew they were pronouncing the japanese correctly or not!

Most of the english dramas were modern english translations of old chinese love stories. Although the english was a bit stilted, the costumes were quite impressive. And it wouldn't be a drama without a fight scene, so there were a few slow-mo fist fights thrown in for a bit of action.
A few of the dramas also incorporated random outbreaks of dancing and singing (which had nothing to do with the storyline at all ) while one of the love stories ended with a modern chinese love song duet by the two leads. I guess if the drama sucked, they could lean on the dancing and singing.

There was a moment of confusion though when a bunch of cos-play characters came up on stage and started to have mock fights. I was told by the chinese english teacher that this was a performance, so I was trying to score this performance that had no dialogue whatsoever. fortunately one of the other teachers pulled me up before i could hand in my score! Yeah these cos-play affecionados still weird me out. They had a few mock battles with their plastic swords before playing out some gay dance scene for a few cheap laughs. They ended off the performance by throwing out soft toys into the audience. I'm guessing they were cosplay toys.