On June 17th, the Voces group combined forces with the Manoa Project to form a roughly 45 count student group.
During our time together, the two groups participated first in activities relating to the Menoa Project, including creating a turn, a small skit, containing a beginning, middle, and end, a character leaving the ground, a discovery, at least two lines of rhyming dialogue, a kiss (ooOOOooo), and a death.
My group developed the idea of a group of acid-dropping hippies riding in a van to an unknown destination, and the antics that unfold along the way.
For the second half of El Grupo Gigante, Carlos led the students in a mass warm-up, including favorite tongue twisters.
After warming up, we all were given the task to pick any color.
After choosing a color, we then had to list 5-10 things that have our chosen hue. After that, we picked one of those objects and listed all characteristics we could think about it.
Then Carlos gave us the part that needed some thinking; he told us to write a piece about our object without saying our color or the name of our object. After writing, anyone who wanted to, could read their piece in front of the group. My eventual piece was about a fox.
After writing about objects and their respective colors, we wrote three haikus relating to dance, theatre, or poetry, and preferably you could string them together or leave them independent and still work as haikus. Then, any brave volunteers were given the opportunity to read their haikus. Mine were:
They said you can’t die
From writing too much. To prove
Them wrong: write on spleen.
She went for the stage
Kiss. He said he doesn’t like
Her halitosis.
She said she doesn’t
Kiss assholes, and kissed him on
His cheek instead, jerk.
To finish off the miniature writing workshop, Carlos had us feel ourselves for 1 minute, then write about it for 30 seconds, then feel more of ourselves for another minute, then write about that for 30 seconds, then, once more, we felt ourselves and our surroundings and wrote about them. Again, people were allowed to perform their piece if they liked it enough.
Overall, my experience with the Manoa Project was fun, and I vaguely knew some kids from last year, and knew two kids separate from Voces and the Manoa Project entirely, so it was great to see them, and luckily I was placed in a group with one of them for our skit.
