Tuesday 23 June 2015

More musical magic


In the mélée that was our final week of the year, much of the video footage I'd shot of various events around school got mislaid. I had thought this was the greatest of those losses... but happily I have just rediscovered it. Beijing-based French musician Jean-Sebastien Héry joined us for the week as part of our farewell 'Arts Festival'. His main performance for students was on Thursday evening, but the day before he dropped in on our choir rehearsal - a rather fraught final preparation for the performance at the upcoming Parents' Weekend - and entertained students afterwards with this pyrotechnic improvisation on his acoustic guitar. 




Filmed by Mr Murphy



Monday 22 June 2015

Looking back....


The end of our school year was even more hectic than usual this time around, with two visiting artists in residence during the Arts Festival leading up to the final Parents' Weekend, French musician Jean-Sebastien Héry and German photographic artist Juliana Borinski.

And then there was a feast of music, sport, drama and farewell speeches over the weekend itself. 

I've already posted some highlights from Sunday's Closing Ceremony, and from the contributions of Jean-Sebastien and Juliana - but here is a further montage of some of the best bits of those busy few days. It hardly seems possible that it was little more than a week ago......





Filmed by Mr Murphy



The visits of Jean-Sebastien Héry and Juliana Borinski were generously supported by the school's Annual Fund.



Sunday 21 June 2015

Farewell to another year


Our second year drew to a close last weekend with a formal Closing Ceremony held in the school theatre on Sunday morning. As last year, the principal guest of honour was the General Manager of our Chinese partners, the Greentown Education Company, Mr Chen Hai Ke.

It was a difficult task whittling down nearly 90 minutes of humour, emotion, and music into just 9 minutes - but I've managed it! For those of you with more stamina, the entire ceremony can be viewed here.




Filmed by Mr Murphy




The individual elements of the ceremony can also be viewed as follows:


Choir & Orchestra  -  Vivaldi's Gloria

Speaker  -  Joy Koo (Parent)

Speaker  -  Adam Guo (Student)



Speaker  -  Sharon Lam (Teacher)

'Sing Thing' a cappella group  -  The Beatles' In My Life

Speaker  -  Hugo Chan (Student)


Speaker  -  Ingrid Tsang (Student)







And a complete film of Saturday evening's drama performance History Rewritten; Our Stories Retold can be seen here.








Friday 19 June 2015

Sing Thing sings a thing


My, we're getting all Dr Seuss on here today, aren't we?! Sing Thing are a student vocal group who performed in the middle of Sunday's 2nd Year Closing Ceremony. Sherson Ng took the lead on In My Life by Lennon and McCartney, while harmonies were provided by (from left to right) Kate Bradley, Isabella Boyne, Georgina Savage, Karis Tao, Jasmine Savage, Adam Guo, Simon Chen, Enrique Chuidian, Tippy Pei, and Adrian Lee.



Filmed by Mr Murphy




Thursday 18 June 2015

Another artist-in-residence


I was particularly pleased to be able to arrange a visit to our school last week by the extremely talented French musician and composer Jean-Sebastien Héry, as he has been a close friend of mine since we first met in Jianghu, a quaint little hutong music bar in Beijing, about 8 or 9 years ago. Jean-Sebastien stayed with us on campus for four days, led a series of workshops on electronic composition with our two classes of music students, sat in on one of the final choir rehearsals for the upcoming Closing Ceremony, and...  played this mesmerising concert for us in the theatre on Thursday evening.

In his time, Jean-Sebastien - now mostly promoting himself under the stage name Djang San (or Zhang Si'an, in Chinese) - has played almost every musical style imaginable, but in recent years he has become especially interested in using technology to build up multi-layered, largely improvised compositions that fuse electronic and acoustic music and have a strong influence from Chinese folk music. In addition to the guitar (and numerous effects pedals!), he also played his favourite zhongruan and, in the encore, a pipa which he has electrified with a guitar pick-up. [I'm afraid I missed that final part of the performance because my camera battery ran out - sorry!]




Filmed by Mr Murphy



Jean-Sebastien's visit was generously supported by the school's Annual Fund.



Wednesday 17 June 2015

Closing Ceremony Finale


Last Sunday morning's Closing Ceremony in our theatre was brought to a rousing conclusion by a performance from the whole-school choir (with assistance from Mr Pratt on his trusty sax and Camille Chiang and Jean Yap on their guitars), conducted as always by Director of Music Tama Karena. They sang Turn The World Around (by Harry Belafonte and Robert Freedman) and Fields of Gold (by Sting).

The choir (and orchestra) also performed Vivaldi's Gloria at the start of the ceremony.



A complete video of the ceremony (and, possibly, one or two short 'highlights reels') should also be appearing in the next few days.




Filmed by Mr Murphy



Monday 15 June 2015

Farewell to Tongzhou


One week ago today.... we were on Tongzhou island again for our final IDE of the year, led by the PE department. On Sunday, students had criss-crossed the island on bikes, tracking down various 'Important Places' where a Tongzhou local or a Chinese member of the CIS Hangzhou staff was waiting to share unexpected stories about their lives with them. These encounters then became the basis for an art exhibit of photos and postcards, which we left in the village's 'Cultural Hall' as a memento of our visit.

On Monday, students could choose from a number of activities, including tai chi, farming (didn't manage to get any photos of that - sorry!), sewing soft toys, cooking, dancing, and kayaking. Zhejiang's notorious early summer 'plum rains' could not dampen our spirits - rather the reverse, if anything!

We rounded our trip off with a very big dinner in the 'Cultural Hall' on Monday evening.




Slideshow by Mr Murphy



The music is Incident at Gate 7 by Thievery Corporation, part of the iPhoto music library licensed by Apple for royalty-free use.




Saturday 13 June 2015

Kind of blue


German-Brazilian art photographer Juliana Borinski came up to join us for our end-of-year 'Arts Festival', after spending the previous week at our parent school in Hong Kong. 

She showed us a slideshow of some of her work, gave talks on her fascination with the history of photography, and led some workshops in which Art and Film students had an opportunity to play around with some long-exposure contact development processes to create collages. A technique using albumen (egg white), similar to the silver nitrate process used by pioneer photographers in the 1800s, producing sepia-coloured images, was a limited success; problems with 'fixing' the images meant that most of them soon faded and disappeared. These pictures created using cyanotype paper (long used to copy architectural drawings and engineering diagrams - 'blueprints') worked much better.



And she concluded her week with us by leading a small group of volunteers in creating this fun little stop-motion animation.




Juliana's visit was generously supported by the school's Annual Fund.



Slideshows by Mr Murphy




The music in the first slideshow is Endless Summer (artist uncredited) and in the second Skating (by Vince Guaraldi), both part of the iPhoto music library licensed by Apple for royalty-free use.




Friday 12 June 2015

Design IDE Fashion Show - another look


Hangzhou Motu Creative, the events company which helped us to stage the Fashion Show that was the climax of our Design IDE week in mid-April, has just shared with us their professionally shot film of the event, which is naturally a rather slicker affair than the short and long records of the event which I produced (well, they had high-quality cameras - and a crane!). It's amazing that this was only 7 or 8 weeks ago; it feels as though years have gone by since - such is the frenetic pace of life here at CIS Hangzhou.

We have a lot of events planned to greet our parents as they visit for this Farewell Weekend - but nothing quite as grand as this!




Not filmed by Mr Murphy



Thursday 11 June 2015

Yet more highlights from the Shanghai Ultimate tournament


In addition to the extended highlights (and complete films!) I posted a few days ago of the quarter-final (in which CIS Hong Kong beat CIS Hangzhou, but got a bit of a scare early on) and the final (which CIS Hong Kong won in style - yay!) of last month's Shanghai Open Ultimate Tournament for youth teams, I've also made a short film of highlights of the first day's round-robin games, featuring both CIS teams.



Filmed by Mr Murphy



Tuesday 9 June 2015

More frisbee magic!


Although our Hangzhou Ultimate team were disappointed to lose out to the parent school's team at the quarter-final stage of last month's Shanghai Open Youth Tournament, they took consolation from the fact that CIS Hong Kong then went on to even more convincing victories in the semi-final and final. The final was a tough test for them, though, as they found themselves re-matched with the very able Nanmo side - the only team to have managed to beat them during the previous day's round-robin games. Above are the highlights of an excellent game. (Our own Abigail Smith was loaned to the HK team for the weekend, and made a valuable contribution in this final.) 


The CIS Hong Kong team - most of whom learnt the game with us here in Hangzhou last year - has now become truly formidable at Ultimate; their movement and passing is often quite breathtaking to watch. Here are a couple of my favourite moments from the Shanghai semi-final.



A complete film of the final can be seen here. [Well, nearly complete. I'm afraid missed a few things, as the majority of the points were scored at the end of the field furthest from me, and the crowd on the near touchline often obscured my view.]




Filmed by Mr Murphy



Monday 8 June 2015

Parents' Weekend Choir Performance - November 2014


Since our parents are about to descend on us for the second and final time at the end of this week, this seems an apt time to post this film I made of one of the key entertainments at our first parents' weekend back in November. During Saturday morning break our whole-school choir, conducted by our Director of Music Tama Karena, greeted their parents with a performance of the Zambian hymn Bonse Aba (accompanied by our African drumming troupe), and followed up with sentimental Chinese folk song Mo Li Hua (茉莉花). Andy Ji played the erhu.




Filmed by Mr Murphy




Sunday 7 June 2015

Another first: our very own MUN conference


Our MUN Club here in Hangzhou has been exceptionally active this year, largely thanks to the energetic leadership of Emily Duncan. Together with other leading lights Enrique Chuidian and Flora Xiao she decided to round off the year by staging a full one-day conference, CISMUN, on our campus last Sunday. 

Unfortunately, they were not able to entice other Hangzhou schools to join in the event as they had hoped, but very nearly half of our own student body participated as committee chairs, delegates, or administrative assistants - and for the majority of them, it was their first experience in that role. What we learned from the day was that pizza and cookies can secure world peace... unless Enrique is chairing the Security Council.



Slideshow by Mr Murphy


The music is Skating by Vince Guaraldi, part of the iPhoto music library licensed by Apple for royalty-free use.

Saturday 6 June 2015

Ultimate showdown!


Two weeks ago a large party of frisbee enthusiasts, led by their coach Wang Lu, went to Shanghai to compete in the 3rd Shanghai Open Ultimate Tournament for youth teams, hosted on the Pudong campus of the Shanghai American School. As Fate would have it, after grabbing a couple of wins in the first day's group games we found ourselves drawn against CIS Hong Kong in Sunday morning's first quarter-final. The match-up gained additional poignancy from the fact that most of the Hong Kong team were members of last year's inaugural Hangzhou cohort who had learnt how to play Ultimate here from Coach Mentors Wang Lu and Eric Vallone.

Our energetic defense knocked the HK team out of their stride for the first 20 minutes or so, and we were well in the game until half-time, but then superior experience made itself felt. It was a fantastic game from both sides.


The complete match can be seen here.




Filmed by Mr Murphy




Friday 5 June 2015

TEDx Music (3)


At the climax of our inaugural TEDx event last Thursday former Coach Mentor and now Chinese teacher Wang Lu rounded off his talk about his passion for African drumming by inviting some friends from the Drum Circle he founded a few years ago at Zhejiang University to join him on stage for a performance. This piece is called Kassa, a traditional harvest celebration song from north-east Guinea. 



 Filmed by Mr Murphy



Wednesday 3 June 2015

TEDx Music (2)


Another of the musical interludes in last week's TEDx event was this group improvisation by Karis Tao (keyboards, vocals), Austin Lam (guitar), and Jasmine and Georgina Savage and Enrique Chuidian (vocals).




Filmed by Mr Murphy



Tuesday 2 June 2015

A day out in Shaoxing


To celebrate the end of regular classes and assessments, yesterday our Chinese department led a day trip to nearby Shaoxing, one of the quaint Jiangnan water towns, famous for its 臭豆腐 and its dark brown wine. In the morning we visited the ancestral home of the great writer Lu Xun, and in the afternoon went to the beautiful Shen Garden, celebrated as one of the most romantic places in China through its association with Song Dynasty lovers Lu You and Tang Wan.



Slideshow by Mr Murphy


The music is called Soft, apparently by a group called Washed Out - part of the iPhoto music library licensed by Apple for royalty-free use.




Monday 1 June 2015

TEDx Music (1)


One of the highlights of last week's inaugural TEDx Youth event at CIS Hangzhou was this performance of The Cranberries' Linger by Emily Duncan and Jae Lamb.




Filmed by Mr Murphy