Our recent trip to Shenzhen, China was no easy feat. It all started when we started googling and found out about CHVOCALS, Golden A Cappella Awards & Festival - an all-new a cappella competition with theatrical presentation as one of its criteria. It immediately got us interested; Our group is all about infusing a cappella with theatre. However, due to competition rules, we didn't manage to make it in time to write an entirely new musical that could be condensed into 20 minutes and had no choice but to come up with a presentation-style competition set with the existing songs we have within our repertoire.
This trip was different from our past Apex trips. One reason would be the fact that only some of us would be able to be present for the entire duration of the trip. Marcus, Alejandro and I (Jean) headed over to China to attend the first three days of workshops they provided prior to the competition day while Von and Chek stayed behind in Singapore to attend JJ Lin's concert.
Our three days of workshop included Pop Vocal classes, Dance classes and Acting classes. We met pretty accomplished mentors such as Richard Zhu, who was actively involved in Broadway Theatre before building his career back to China. He was mad motivational, too. On the second day of our workshops, Alejandro and I decided that we would do the unthinkable. We would rewrite our entire competition set to include more of a storyline and actual characters that are not ourselves.
This was when everything fell into place, albeit in the clumsiest, roughest way possible. Since half of our group was still in Singapore, we were able to turn our new 20-minute competition set (which now qualifies as a musical because of the added conventional storyline) into a reality. Our story was set in a Singaporean classroom, and fortunately, because we had people still in Singapore, they were able to look for school uniforms to bring over when they head to Shenzhen - I would just like to take a moment to happily mention that I wrote this musical (not without the help of my fellow comrades Alejandro and Von) within half an hour *pats self on back*
So the story of our lives would be us scrambling to piece our acting, singing and dancing together for our own competition set while also juggling with workshop activities, recording sessions and rehearsals with other competing groups for the finale performance, which everyone is required to be a part of. It was truly a difficult trip.
The only time we managed to do a full run for our new competition set was at our soundcheck - we wouldn't recommend that for any aspiring a cappella bands. All of our mandarin were put to the test. Try talking about stage light and LED screen graphics entirely in mandarin. Yeah.
It's great to travel overseas for competitions and festivals because of the people that we get to meet, and the things we get to learn about them and from them. For this trip, it felt like we had a lot more time than usual to get to know our new friends from different parts of the world. Not only did we become friends with two acappella bands based in China, we also got to get closer to B-Max (based in Taiwan) and Acapellago (based in the Philippines - I literally just learnt to spell that. Thank you Acapellago)
The thing about The Apex Project is... we've always been running. Ever since our inception, all we've been doing is running at full speed. We're not unfamiliar with the concept of doing things last minute; many of us do want to accomplish as many things as possible within a short amount of time. But many times we do find ourselves wishing that we had more time to breathe.
Though this trip it's an amplification of last-minute-ness and frankly quite a rollercoaster ride, it's probably one of our most impactful accomplishments thus far - this time, we're truly proud of ourselves for even managing to create a show that all of us like.
Our last minute 20-minute musical earned us Best Stage Presentation AND First Runner-up. This, and the friends we've met made everything that we've been through worth it after all. I guess running at full speed doesn't always leave us burnt out after all. To be honest, it felt more like we were performing to a group of our friends in a supportive, cosy environment in spite of all the lights and decor because we spent so much time slogging it out with them more than practicing amongst ourselves.
We will be missing all our new friends until we see them again.
Next up, we'll be visiting China, KL, and then Taiwan all within the next two months.
Full speed ahead!