On Tuesday 16 February, QAHS Year 12 Dragon dancers opened the Chinese New Year celebration followed by the Year 11 Mandarin classes hosting this assembly for the Year of the Ox. Students demonstrated their collaboration, cooperation, and teamwork in order to make this assembly unique. Mandarin teachers worked seamlessly and tirelessly on many after school rehearsals. Highlights included a New Year Play featuring the costumes of greeting elders and receiving the new year red pocket; the 2020 Chinese hit song Yi Jian Mei and the fitness dance Xiao Ping Guo. Thank you very much to the students and teachers for their hard work in making this assembly culturally beautiful.
"The Chinese New Year Assembly was a wonderful experience for everyone involved. It took a lot of dedication and rehearsals before the event, but its challenges were rewarded through the smiles on people's faces. For the dragon dancers, the preparation up until this moment had been almost one year in the making. For those involved with the dancing, singing and acting, it had been a busy few weeks of early morning and late afternoon rehearsals. I personally was pushed out of my comfort zone because I had to speak Chinese to a large audience in the play. However, after lots of practice, we all persevered and highly enjoyed putting together a great performance. I'm very thankful for the assembly because I learnt lots about communicating with others and the rich culture of the one and only 中国！Wish you a happy year of the OX.
我非常感谢这个表演机会，因为我们不但学到了如何互相沟通，而且还学到了中国丰富的文化！祝大家，牛年快乐！" - Charli Horchner (New Year Play actress) - Year 11
"Over the three weeks leading up to the assembly, there was even more work to be done. Firstly, there was the beginning of the organisation of the play. I did not take part in the original writing or acting, but because we found the translations for the play were very long, I had to do split them up, condense them, and do some small edits to make it interesting. This did not take very long, as I did not have to change much, but it still required a lot of re-reading to make sure that the entire play still made sense. Additionally, we had the first meetings on how we were going to dance together. I loved seeing the size of the group grow, as we originally only had about 6 people dancing but we ended up with 14 practicing by the end. I had already practiced the dance over summer break, but this was a chance to perfect it and be able to help some other people with the routine to benefit both of our skills in the dance. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of everyone dancing, as I don't think most of us dance recreationally, meaning it was always light-hearted and fun to be able to improve on our ability together in a non-judgmental environment (being honest, all of us originally thought it would be extremely embarrassing, but in the end, we got a lot of enjoyment out of it)." - Jason Sinclair (MC, New Year Play Actor and Xiao Ping Guo dancer) - Year 11
"The Xiao Ping Guo dance (小苹果广场舞) was something truly fascinating and something that I will never forget. This performance was so much fun and so different from anything I would normally do, but I loved that I gave the dance a try and especially loved that I stuck through all the rehearsals to get to the final performance, where the magnitude of the applause and appreciation from the audience made the experience worth 100 million billion dollars. Working in a team of friends really allowed me to be myself and be comfortable doing the dance while looking goofy. We treated it as something fun to do, instead of a tedious experience, because that is what it was. Fun. We made changes to the dance, which was to bring people onto the floor and dance with us, which worked quite well! We managed to get reluctant Year 10s, laughing Year 11s and even a few teachers. In fact, (and I will be proud of this until the end of time), I managed to get Mrs Rebgetz onto the stage. Being in the front row was very daunting, considering that people in the back row could choose to hide behind the people in front of them but I felt like I could show off my dance moves better." - Andrew Fong (Xiao Ping Guo Dancer) - Year 11
Mrs Joanne Cheng
Mandarin Teaching Faculty