Rock Challenge 2012

This amazing day started by waking up early and getting to school for 7:45am and we were all very sleepy, we left at 8 am from school and started our journey to Stevenage. When we arrived we were all very excited as this is one of the most important days on the school calender for us! Some schools were there already but we were the only premier team there. As we are a premier league school we only showcase and the other schools compete, this is a way is better for us because we can relax a bit and watch the other schools without them being our competition, however this can be a downside as some of the dancers feel that this means that they do not have to put in as much effort. They are wrong as this can mean we have to put more effort in to show the open league schools why we are a premier school. We got to be a premier school by winning numerous rounds over a period of years. When we got this amazing upgrade we were overwhelmed. This day was even more exciting as Miss Dolan our teacher was being the co-host throughout the evening!!
Once all the school had arrived it was time to start rehearsing, we watched a few schools and there were already a few that stood out from the rest, everyone had really upped their game and it shows how much people want to win and how much people love the rock challenge experience. Soon it was our turn to rehearse, so that meant hair up and shoes off, health and safety and all that.
We all got into our starting positioned got into character and performed. I did not start on stage so i guess it wasn't as pressuring but we had to crawl along the bottom of the stage at the back behind the boards so that we could create that element of surprise.
My part this year was to be part of Oberon's army from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' we marched on and as soon as we started you could feel the stage shaking. We performed and rehearsed twice and watched the rest of the schools.
It was the morning production meeting and it was very exciting, one of the rock challenge staff was Josh, and he used to come to Kings Langley and he was in fact a main part 2 years ago so this was almost like a claim to fame for us.
After this was lunch time, this gave us a chance to rehydrate and make sure that we ate so nobody passed out.
We continued watching the rest of the schools, and one school really stood out for me and thankfully this school won, this was 'Sir Henry Floyd Grammar School' I thought their drama skills and their dance skills put together were captivating and i couldn't take my eyes of some of their main parts. Their entire performance was amazing and they truly deserved to win as i don't think they could have done anything to improve as they put their heart and soul into the performance.
The last schools to perform were the 4 primary schools and every single child in every single school looked as if they were having the  time of their lives up on that stage and it really made us smile and i suppose that is really what rock challenge is about, apart from obviously the rock challenge ethos, a natural high.
Before we knew it, it was time to start getting ready. We had a few difficult decisions to make about the make up for Oberon's army, some was too simple ans some just didn't look right. In the end we just went with the traditional army camo make up. We used this as a sort of experiment as when evaluating our performance you cannot see any of the army's expressions due to the excessive make up.
However the performance went amazingly well and nothing went terribly wrong.
We got many awards including choreography and costume design which in my eyes and for me were the best awards seeing as we choreographed it and made some of the costumes.
As rock challenge is part of our btec course we had to evaluate the performance the next day in our lesson, unfortunately another teacher had the DVD so we couldn't. But instead we evaluated some formations, costumes and make up design using the pictures on the nick scott website. From this we discovered that the Athenians hair needed to be bigger and the make up needed to be more doll like, the fairies costumes needed to be more flamboyant and the makeup bigger, the army needed all boiler suits down and hair bigger yet make up to be smaller, drama skills needed working on and some timings as the camera caught a few people out (including me).

When evaluating our performance i think we did extremely well especially as we wanted to keep a few tricks up our sleeve for when we compete in portsmouth on the 9th of may! Some of the drama skills need working on and everything needs to be polished. To improve i think as a cast we need more focus but overall it was amazing!

After a very tiring but amazing day we all went to bed still buzzing with adrenaline from the spirit that flies thorugh the rock challenge day!