For a so-called “winter assembly”, it barely made it to the finish line; it was held on March 13th and winter ended only seven days later. The Assembly was originally set for December, just before the holidays, but it ended up being delayed twice.
Although all performances are reviewed in this article, keep in mind that it was a two-and-a-half hour assembly, and this column squeezes it all into eight hundred words, so if anything is missing or misspelled (including the name of performers), I apologize.
After some brief remarks by the MC, Mr. Farrow, the concert began with a pajama-clad SAC singing a modified version of the classic Beatles tune Let It Be, and my ears were suddenly ringing loud when they claimed that SAC is the best club at MCI (how is that possible, when the best club is obviously the Beacon, the club that provides MCI with only the best news and opinion pieces). However, the ringing stopped when Mr. Farrow started his electric guitar solo, rivaled only by the late Jimi Hendrix (rest his Are You Experienced soul).
The next act came from Tanesha who played piano and sang Rihanna’s hit “Stay”, and it is clear that she put a great deal of time and effort into this emotional ballad. The next artistic effort, a dance number called The Grinch was somewhat ambiguous; the MC was correct about the misleading name, considering it was two students dancing to a song that had nothing to do with the Grinch and was instead a rap song about the days in a month. It turned out that this ambiguous rap song was a welcome surprise.
The comedian Aleksa was next. His jokes, which were all about the silliness of math, brought unpleasant memories of math homework, but were actually quite funny.
From this writer’s perspective, many of the later performances, specifically the many dance numbers, must have required an absurd amount of practice. Ting-Wei’s dance piece, featuring a great deal of jumps and baton-twirling to music from Kung Fu Panda, deserves special mention, given how fantastic it was and with how many bones the MC claims he broke while watching it.
Although the next act, a simple magic trick by fellow Beacon writer, Alisha, was fine, it also felt more like a commercial for the Scrabble Club than a performance. In that case, Stupid Magic Tricks (influenced by the old Late Show with David Letterman) and High School talent shows really do go hand-in-hand.
Dancing requires a great deal of practice, and the next performance was by Ishani, who performed a beautiful traditional Indian dance in which she was alone and in a trance as if her spirit were overtaken, getting ready to see her lover, who has unknowingly died. Overall the experience was absorbing. The drama department was so impressed by her performance, they will be creating a show next year surrounding her dance.
To give the audience a break from the performances, we were given a treat— advertisements crafted by the various clubs at MCI to promote their respective group. In summary: BAC is excellent at trick shots, Environmental Club sings beautifully, and Breakfast club, Chess club, MOD, and Computer Science are pros at video production. Lastly, of course, The Beacon produced the best commercial, really demonstrating the lengths management will go to to enslave their best and brightest; ahem, produce high-quality articles.
For the contest portion of the assembly, various teachers and students performed a series of contests for bragging rights. The contests included planking, watermelon-eating, catching gummy bearswith their mouthsand finally telling jokes. There was a great deal of intense staring during the laughing portion of joke-telling, and the pieing of the SAC Core Four was just as funny as it was the day before. The audience was ready for more acts to follow.
“Aidan And The Teners” was scheduled to be a septet, but they were reduced to six since the group’s namesake fractured his arm. This group’s performance was probably the most ambiguous during the Assembly—it was good but it may have been difficult to appreciate the music given the group’s small size or the need for a larger range of instruments.
After that, there was TBE (the best ever).
First, a South Asian attire-clad SACA put on an excellent performance. Colours flowed, music rang and the whole audience was enthralled by SACA’s performance. Second, there were back-to-back singing performances, and it should be noted that it takes nerve for somebody, anybody, to go up on stage and sing their hearts out like these two ladies. Fortunately, both of them turned out to be good. In fact, someone a few rows in front of this writer was so moved they used their Apple Watch as a second flashlight to wave around. Mr. Farrow was correct; Benedicta can talk and sing loudly without a microphone.
The final two performances were incredibly well-chosen; any meal is only as good as the dessert, and both jazz presentations were fantastic. In conclusion, everyone did a great job, and the effort required by both the performersand those working behind the scenes was insurmountable. Congrats to all!