"The Lion and The Jewel" Drama Production

From the start of September up to December, our school's drama department was very busy in organising and planning a new play called "The Lion and The Jewel" by Wole Soyinka. The play's plot centers around how Baroka, the lion fights the modern Lakunle over the right to marry Sidi, the jewel. 
During the course of this time, I have done several activities concerning the play. 
I auditioned for the play but I didn't receive a speaking role. Instead, I've got the part of a dancing villager.
Here's a video containing parts of the dance:

 Learning how to dance West-African dance was a completely new skill for me. I attended a few dance lessons when I was younger but I wasn't committed to it in particular way and I didn't like it very much. Once I joined the play and it became a routine I found it really enjoyable and stress relieving to dance along side with my comrades. It was sometimes hard to grasp the new steps in one go, so we had to repeat the whole dance until all was perfect. 
The last week of rehearsals was the most stressful. We stayed at school until 7 each day and we practiced our dance on location rather than in the drama room, which was a bit confusing and hard to get used to at first. There were always so many things to be done and be fix and the clock was racing. However, in the end "The Lion and The Jewel" was the best play KISU has ever presented! 

Dress Rehearsals

Performance Day

Another task I did for the production was to produce a poster;

The drama department were looking for somebody who will create a poster for the production of the play "The Lion and The Jewel" and since art is one of my favorite things to do I immediately agreed to do so! With the help of 2 year 10 students who did the lettering and the graphic design we managed to create a great poster!The girl in the poster represents Sidi, the mask on the left represents Lakunle and the mask on the right Baroka. Her crossed arms symbolizes the choice of who is she to marry?
The poster took about a week to be prepared and then had to go through several adjustments since I tried to do hand written lettering but I made mistakes at some words. Through this I had increased my own artistic ability since I created an image which aimed at telling a story and had some mysterious aura to it to draw the viewers attention.

The last activity but not least, was to take upon the job of marketing and financing the play. The drama department lacked money since they wanted to create a well organised play. My friend and I took the responsibility to raise approximately 4 million Ugandan shillings with our fundraisers. We held several bake sales but our greatest fundraiser of all was our auction! An auction wasn't an easy event to plan. First, we had to go around collecting items, for instance asking for vouchers from restaurants and the art teacher to sell her work. After that we had to ask permission from our secondary head to book the assembly hall on a Tuesday (usually assemblies are on Mondays)! 
We went around distributing the posters and we were responsible for selling the tickets. Together with some sponsors help, the money from the fundraisers and the tickets were enough to cover for all the costs!
All in all, this was a challenging experience for me that required commitment, working collaboratively with other, developing new skills, increasing my own areas of growth (art and business) and planning activities.