Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Dewa Athena & Evaluation Day

Dewa Athena is an annual sport festival and I, as a tenth grader in this school, should have participated in it. The sad fact is that I didn’t participate in any single game. The first day of the event was on Saturday, and Saturday is the day KPA (Keluarga Paduan Angklung, a team of angklung players in SMAN 3 Bandung, yay!) spends the most to practice. Of course it’s natural to miss one or two practice in case of this kind of event, but that Saturday is the fourth Evaluation Day. Before you waste your breath to ask ‘what is Evaluation Day and why can’t you get a permission to miss it?’, I will gladly explain.
Evaluation Day comes every beginning of the month ant it checks how much we improve from the prior month. We play every song we’ve practiced and see if the outcome is good enough for the upcoming concert. If it’s good enough to satisfy our coach, good! If it gains frown from our coach, it’s disaster because the concert is only less than a month away, and we sure aren’t going to entertain the audiences that way! Evaluation Day is really important and it needs every single person it can have. You see, if one person is missing from the team, it means that a certain angklung is not being played, which means there would be flaws in songs we play.
I truly regret that I didn’t participate in my first Dewa Athena event, but I did participate as a committee on the eleventh grade tournament. I was an LO for XI Science 5, and I was lucky enough to get this class because I was already familiar with Teh Nurul, my senior who happens to be in this class. Basically, my job was to inform the class I handle what tournament would they play, where to go after certain tournament, check the student attendance, etc. Frankly, it was a tiring and boring job because I just got to see them play without myself playing, plus the ones playing were eleventh grader and not tenth grader who I’m more friendly with. But anyway, I was left very satisfied when I finish this job and I didn’t regret that I applied to be a committee.
Since I’m done with telling you my Dewa Athena experience, now is the time to tell you about the Evaluation Day! Evaluation Day is always scary for me because alumna deliberately come to watch us play and it’d be disappointing to both of us if we turned out playing badly. I don’t know if I can tell you this (because it’ll affect the ticket sales for the concert) but we didn’t play our best last Evaluation Day. Personally, I keep forgot the notes I should be playing. I panicked, like ‘Should I play now? Gosh, what part are we in now?’ and my panic didn’t help at all because all it did is making me jittery and sweaty. Not to mention the angklungs I carried. Forgive my exaggeration, but it did feel like I was carrying an overweight three years old baby with only one hand for three hours straight. I felt like screaming and dropping the angklungs especially after we play the last song. And the high heels! In order to familiarize us girls, we play while using our 7 centimeters high heels. Because I wasn’t used to use high heels (at all!), my feet were sore to the bones. Yep, after the last song, I quickly take them off and walk back with my lovely bare feet.

Although I keep going on and on about how hard it was to play angklung, please don’t get me wrong. I reeeaaally love playing it. When we play a song together, it feels like I was inside a magic work and I just feel so grateful to be part of the team. We work hard to improve for this concert, and that’s why I would like for you to watch us play later on 29th April 2017 (yep, this is a shameless promotion). For more information, you can search through KPA’s official account on Line. See you!