This is a poignant juncture in my life. For very nearly 30 months now I have poured my life into this crazy project of building a new school from the ground up (in China!!); and for the past 22 months I have been teaching here. It has been strange and wonderful and - mostly - a lot of fun. But it has also been at times frustrating, and overall profoundly exhausting. I haven't completely stopped working at any time in that 30 months, even during supposed vacations; and during term time, I've been typically working 80-100 hours a week.
I am sad to be leaving - but I really need A REST now.
Here are a couple of fripperies I just shared with my students and colleagues, two things that always come to my mind when I think of farewells:
Exquisite Canadian acapella group The Wailin' Jennys singing the traditional Scots/Irish folk song The Parting Glass....
And what the dolphins said when they abandoned Earth at the beginning of the Hitch-Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy saga....
This was one of the best of last year's Film class efforts on their unit of study on Reality TV: 'Fat Chance', a diet makeover show created by Joe Littler, Kameka Herbst, Hayson Chu, and Amy Hopkins. Hayson played the narrator/personal trainer, Joe the compulsive eater, and Vanessa Wat was his would-be love interest. I showed this to this year's class, as an inspiration, when they began to work on the same unit.
But probably my favourite of last year's many excellent productions was this one by Brian Lau, David Zhang, and Jasper Ng (who appears as the runner), on the impressionistic theme of 'Journeys' (alas, we didn't have space for that unit in our cramped timetable this year). The simple subject of a student running a few laps around our sports field becomes a rather broader and more resonant evocation of our campus life.
I was particularly impressed by the inventive variety of different shots used in this short film; there was a lot of clever dolly work, improvised using one of the wheeled chairs from the Library! (The accompanying music is Techy by Marcus Neely.)
I will really miss helping kids to produce stuff like this.
One of the things I have most enjoyed about my teaching here at CIS Hangzhou over the past two years has been taking on the unfamiliar role of 'Film Teacher'. My only qualifying experience for this was a lifelong love of the cinema: I've watched a huge number of films, I know quite a lot about the history of the cinema and the critical theory that's grown up around it, but.... our parent school has developed a very practical approach to the teaching of 'Film' as an International Baccalaureate subject, both at the Middle Years Program and the Diploma levels: the kids actually learn how to make their own films. And this practical side of things - setting up cameras, arranging lighting, sound and film editing (these days mostly done with software on the computer) - that was all completely new to me. I was learning most of this stuff alongside my students (but I like it that way!); indeed, many of them have been far more skilled and knowledgeable than me in many of these aspects.
It's been a fabulous experience for me, and lots of fun! And I'm really proud of the student work that's been produced here in my time.
Our culminating practical project this year, in a study unit on the 'Reality TV' phenomenon, was to produce a season trailer for a new show of the students' own devising. We did not have enough time to create 'genuine' shows, so the various scenarios had to be carefully scripted and staged for the camera (this in itself was one of the most important elements in this unit of study, demanding that students pay attention to questions of how much manipulation and fakery goes into many of the actual 'Reality' shows they enjoy, and what the ethical implications of this are).
There were two really outstanding productions. This one, The Sweet Life of Stacey and Tracey, a 'real life soap' concept depicting the tense relationship between a pair of pregnant middle-class teenagers, was filmed and edited by Tiffany Ng; her teammates Yew San Cheah and Vrithik Metha provided logistical support, and produced the voiceover narration and some other additional sound recording. Vital input also came from Emily Duncan and Frances Amos, who improvised most of the script in playing the two leads.
And then there was P-Ranked, a competitive prank show that is intended to pit friends against each other in an escalating series of tit-for-tat practical jokes. This was created by Tristan Wong, Fenton Garvie, and Lauren Justice - with a lot of help from various of their dorm mates. This one, I fear, was at times a bit too 'real' for comfort, with some of the pranks being staged without the victim's prior knowledge or consent to capture genuinely surprised - and annoyed - reaction shots.
Other groups' efforts also achieved much of merit, but were compromised by a failure to get to grips with the extreme time pressure we were under in the latter part of this semester: they just didn't get enough footage to present their concept fully and coherently.
Dominic Law, Hugo Chan, and Tippy Pei came up with Hell's Dorm, an 'extreme makeover' style of show focused on the occasional chronic untidiness of our dorms - but unfortunately they didn't get around to shooting the crucial mentor intervention/successful transformation scenes.
Jae Lamb, Ethan Chu and Kevin Ho produced Rap Wars, a talent show format in the style of American Idol, which boasted some very stylish lighting effects, but omitted to include any actual rapping, or an introduction of the judges.
And Daniel Carolan, Constance Lam, and Samantha Koo created a piece called A Couple of Wheels, which was intended to be a challenge competition for couples - something in the style of The Amazing Race, but involving goofy physical tests like bubble-wrap wrestling. They underestimated the difficulty of arranging shoots with large numbers of actors and failed to shoot many of the scenes they needed to complete the trailer. Daniel, in the final edit, came up with the ingenious idea of padding out this patchy footage with a lot of explanatory captions, now trying to pass the piece off not as an actual trailer but as a jokey film school re-enactment of a long-forgotten Vietnamese (?!) TV show.
There's lots of inventiveness - and fun - in these films too; it's a pity they're not quite 'finished'.
Content advisory: 'Reality TV' has an unfortunate tendency to concentrate on some of the less attractive aspects of human behaviour, and our students embraced this dark side of the genre rather too enthusiastically. There is quite a lot of swearing in all of these films (one key skill students learned was how to 'bleep out' offensive dialogue!).
There will be a couple more examples of my Film class's work to follow shortly....
German-Brazilian art photographer Juliana Borinski (who I'd met quite by chance during a holiday in Cambodia a while ago) came up for our end-of-year 'Arts Festival' this past week as an artist-in-residence, generously sponsored by our school's absurdly well-endowed 'Annual Fund'. Our overall Head of Art in the parent school in Hong Kong had invited her to spend the previous week there before joining us here in Hangzhou. Here are some photos of the activities she led for us while she was here.
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 a fun little stop-motion animation.
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.
I was particularly pleased to be able to arrange a visit to our school this 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 is staying with us on campus for four days, leading a series of workshops on electronic composition with our two classes of music students.
Yesterday, I persuaded him to sit in on one of the final choir rehearsals for the upcoming Closing Ceremony, and... he entertained us with this stunning improvised performance afterwards.
And then he played this mesmerising concert for us in the theatre tonight. 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!]
It has become a regular little treat for our school to round off one of our 'sessions' of residence with a mini-holiday on the idyllic river island of Tongzhou, an hour or so south-west of the city. (Well, this is the third time we've done it in only two years. Our October visit this year was only precipitated by the miscarriage of other plans. But the June appointment seems likely to become a regular fixture, since our host Chinese school is always obliged to kick us off campus for a few days at this time of year, in order to accommodate the security arrangements required of it as a test centre for the sitting of the gaokao, China's notorious national university entrance exams.)
Even very heavy rains could not dampen our spirits (though, on balance, I would have preferred some more of the blissful sunshine we were blessed with in October!). And I found myself getting rather sentimental: some of my happiest experiences with this school have come on the Tongzhou trips - and this will be my last.
Here's another of my slideshow roundups of the shenanigans.
The music is Incident at Gate 7 by Thievery Corporation, part of the iPhoto music library licensed by Apple for royalty-free use.
This is a song, 'I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free', that has astonishingly powerful resonances for me. And yet, until I found this on YouTube a few years ago, I don't think I'd ever seen this performance of it before; or indeed, any performance up to that date. It's entirely possible that I'd never heard the song all the way through before.
The reason it induces such a swoon of nostalgia in me is that it was used as the theme music for BBC1's weekly roundup of new cinema releases (imaginatively titled Film + last two digits of year in question), a Monday night fixture throughout my childhood and adolescence. I think it was originally presented by a journalist called Iain Johnstone (ah, well, Johnstone certainly covered for the more regular presenter a number of times later on, but I discovered the early days of the show had a number of different presenters, including Freddy Raphael and Joan Bakewell.... before my time!); but he soon ceded the position to Barry Norman, whose lugubrious wit in the role soon made him a popular figure, even something of a media celebrity (and the target of numerous comedy impressions). Norman helmed the series through most of the '70s and '80s, and on into the '90s - when I became a less regular watcher (overseas a lot; and without much access to television even when I was in the UK). I hadn't noticed at the time when it finally disappeared from British TV screens; but I learned online that it was cancelled in 1998 (when I was spending a year in Canada, on a law scholarship).
I really should not have been able to watch this as a child, since it was usually on after the Monday night film - and thus starting at well after 11pm, and sometimes after 11.30pm, and going on until around midnight. However, staying up LATE - especially for a film - was something that I had come to regard as the best of treats at a very early age, maybe as young as 4 or 5 years old; and I'm sure I made such a pain of myself when denied one of these treats that my parents soon began to give in to me. Once I'd proven that I could still get up in the morning and function at school the next day, they started allowing me to stay up until 10.30 or 11 every night, and occasionally until 12..... even when I was barely 10 years old. By the mid-70s, Barry was a Monday night addiction for me. This was where my love of cinema began - and particularly where my awareness of a broader cinema began, my first exposure to an artier sort of film (things that would never appear in my local 'fleapit' theatre; films I would only get to see years later, when they showed up in a late-night slot on BBC2, or when I finally had access to art cinemas as a student).
The music played every week under the opening montage of micro-clips of famous films (which remained largely unchanged for long periods - although I think they updated it occasionally during the course of each year to represent some of the recent big hits). It was also used during the show for shorter montages of the films to be featured that night. It could be quite a challenge to spot all of the excerpts - they were usually without sound and some were subliminally brief; and, as often as not, they were from films that I'd never actually seen. Even so, I usually did pretty well: my competitive film-buffery started early!
And so...... well, I've heard this tune - especially the opening few bars - countless hundreds of times; yet it's such a catchy little number that it never seems to lose its charm. The Beeb seems to be rather over-zealous in deleting any clips of the Film shows that turn up on Youtube; but here's a rather poignant little montage of Barry 'through the ages' - accompanied by what he once not unreasonably described as "the best theme music on television".
And here is the piece's composer, the great jazz pianist Billy Taylor, playing his original instrumental version (the one, I think, used as Barry Norman's theme for all those years) - for once! - all the way through.
Shortly after discovering the clip above, I learned through further online researches that Billy Taylor had generously 'donated' the song to one of my greatest musical heroes, the divine Nina Simone. Here she is, absolutely tearing the piece apart during her celebrated concert at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. (You can find most of this show on YouTube in segments; but it really is worth sitting down to watch the whole thing from start to finish, if you can - it is one of the great moments in musical history.)
And here's a link to a more restrained - but still powerful - recording of this song by the great lady.
