We Won a Trophy!

The last three to four weeks has been a blur of creativity and frustration to make a Chinese dragon puppet...well...a version of the Chinese dragons that martial arts groups perform with in the annual Chinese new year parades.

I worked up a unit on Asian traditions for celebrating the new year, hoping to enlighten my young art students from kindergarten to fifth grade. Videos, books, art work, collections of artifacts, and wearing my best oriental dress to impress, we had a great time. Even the youngest tried their hand at chinese calligraphy. Each class was taught to bow and recite the chinese version of Hello and of course the traditional new year message "Gung Hay Fat Choy"! To finish the unit I wanted to create a real ( as real as the kids and I could make it) dragon and to have it run throughout the school on February 15th (Chinese New Year).

Lots of planning...failures with different materials until I came up with the final version. The school parade was a roaring success as our noisy group toured through the entire building with cymbals, drums, and shouts of Gung Hay Fat Choy as we snaked in, out, down stairs, up stairs, outside the building and returned to settle back in the art room. It was wonderful to see and hear the excitement of an entire school, enthusiastically embrace a new tradition from another culture. We have a growing asian population in our school who found sweet ways to let me know that they appreciated my efforts to open little eyes to the world beyond Texas. Little handmade presents left on my desk and the normally shy students seeking me out to thank me and hug my waist. Pure love and acceptance, what happens to us along the way to have that ability stolen or distorted! Oh, I'm rambling...anyway dear ones, the dragon was pressed into service again but with some updates for the Birthday Bash for Imagination Celebration.

So much work, planning and extra helpers to put him into action was needed. I have a small group of 5th graders called the Art Squad who worked after school. Our dragon is more than 40 feet long (I will officially measure him in class/good math connection on Monday) and needs 10 puppeteers to manage his walkabout and honestly I didn't measure the head to see if it would make it out the studio door!LOL He did!

This morning, a Saturday, students and parents met me at the art room to take our act on the road to Will Rodgers Coliseum where the Imagination Celebration Festivities were taking place. The coliseum is a wonderful example of art deco architecture with an observation tower that makes for an impressive skyline. More than fifty schools were represented and as you can imagine, it was crowded with an concoction of mini versions of Mardi Gras costumed creatures! The art teachers had gone all out to make this event as special as the director the Imagination Celebration is caring. Only three weeks earlier the organization had been honored by President Bush in Washington, D.C. for it's accomplishments over the twenty years since it's inception.

Back to the parade! Dressed in tunics to mimic oriental costumes , my art students toted our huge dragon through the halls waiting patiently behind other colorful groups for our turn to emerge on stage in front of a crowd. Like the true troopers they are, they threw themselves into character and danced that dragon in circles across the stage. Brilliant smiles mixed in with shear fear that melted into pure joy as we played across the stage together! So enchanted were they that they made an extra circle about that required me to chase down the dragon guide and grab his hand to I lead them off stage.

Once out the double doors to the crisp morning air outside, we were giddy with happiness at out endeavor. We-teacher, parents and students had taken a long journey together and together had reaped the joyful benefits...the rush of shared happiness. No one could stopped smiling and so I said, "Let's run the dragon again, guys" and so instantly the children broke into a run of victory- round and round until they had exhausted themselves and were ready the manage the emotional moment . It was almost anticlimactic when I found out that we had won the trophy for the best puppet because I had already received my reward!