singing my heart out

As many of you know, and many don't know, I have joined the Niigata charity musical group. The organization is a non-profit that raises money to build schools and teacher housing in Papua New Guinea. The group raises money by performing a musical all over the prefecture. We rehearse threw out October, November and December and preform threw Januray, Febuary, March and early April. Over our spring break in April, a group goes down to PNG and builds the the school or teacher housing.

Every year a group rewrites a normal story, typically a Disney story and makes it more "Japanese" sounding. This year, our play is based off of "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs." The story was rewritten as "Snow White and the 7 Samurai. In the story Snow White is a male. The character's name is Yuki (Japanese for snow and a popular name here!) The story reason the queen is jealous is because Yuki has the most beautiful hair in all the land. (As hair is a big ordeal here...many of my male students spend atleast twice as much time on their hair as me!) Also, in Japan, hair salons are on every corner (it's like casinos in South Dakota!). So the story is that the queen sends her stylist out to the forest to cut off Yuki's hair but she cannot do it. She sends him to live with the 7 style samurai. The queen sends her bad fashion ninjas to get Yuki and so on. I am one of the bad fashion ninjas. It is a great role-battling, sneaking and bad fashion!

There are many many wonderful (or not so wonderfully) sung songs in the muscial. Our director just uploaded 3 to youtube and know that everyone will enjoy our horrible singing and dancing. I am in all three of these songs. Please check them out and have a laugh:

This is one of the last songs of the musical. It is when the ninjas and the samurai face off but before the big battle fight scene we must dual in song!

Please ignore that I cannot sing my line. I know the song but I didn't acutally learn the verses until that day so I didn't know the tune at all. I have been practicing my line and actually hoping to pass it off to someone else! :)

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=1_3783PmYWA

This is the opener. We learned the dance that day so please don't judge!

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=CWrIBqy_fiA

We have begun to get this dance down. The Queen is the one at center stage and we are dancing as faithful ninjas. This song comes right after the queen tells her stylist to buzz all of Yuki's hair off.

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=z7v4AgKcWgY (