Chapter 228: Chapter 95: Top Sister of the 1960s Song and Dance Troupe (34)_2
All the carelessness, the burnout from their day jobs, and the defeatist attitude of just going with the flowâin that moment, it was all swept away.
"Teacher Xia, what about me?" Yao Yunying couldnât hold back any longer. She had been itching with anticipation as she listened to Xia Zhaoyun assign one fun role after another to her friends.
Xia Zhaoyun raised an eyebrow and smiled. "Didnât you already pick a role for yourself? The flight attendant who makes an absolutely epic entrance, flying down from the ceiling on a wire!"
"Itâs definitely eye-catching, but it also means youâll need incredible control over your body while youâre in the air. Do you dare to take on the challenge?"
Yao Yunying didnât think about the roleâs demanding requirements. She just followed Xia Zhaoyunâs description, imagining her entrance. âOh, how thrilling...â
She nodded again and again. "I dare! Iâve been a daredevil since I was a kid; thereâs nothing I canât do. Itâs just dangling from a wire, right? Iâll take it, Iâll take it!"
"I think I have a distant relative whoâs a flight attendant. Iâll ask my mom to borrow a uniform for me later..."
After that, she asked curiously, "Teacher Xia, what about you?"
Xia Zhaoyun was, of course, the lead dancer. But in a musical like this, what kind of character could be a special, key figure from beginning to end, without seeming out of place?
Xia Zhaoyun raised an eyebrow and chuckled. "A reporter!"
She tilted her elegant chin up and said, "Iâll wear straight-leg trousers, a white shirt, and a plaid vest, with a beret on my head and a camera hanging around my neck. A real camera, mind youâthe kind that can actually capture your brilliance on stage!"
The girls couldnât help but gasp. They all started asking at once, "Teacher Xia, if youâre taking pictures while weâre dancing, wonât they come out blurry?"
Xia Zhaoyun shook her head. "How could they? Iâll be moving at the same speed as you. Weâll be in relative stillness to each other, so there wonât be any camera shake or motion blur."
The girls...
âJust how high are the requirements for the person doing the tracking shots?â
âA non-professional, with no tripod for support... An ordinary person might have trouble just taking a picture of a still object, let alone with the huge movements of their dancing!â
"Alright, hurry back and get your costumes ready. You donât need to come back this afternoon. Go and properly learn from people in your assigned fields. Understand the characteristics of the job youâre playing, what its most iconic movements are, and how to express that through dance..."
"I need to slowly compose the score for you all. As the saying goes, âSharpening the axe doesnât delay chopping wood.â I hope you can all bring the roles youâre playing to life. This doesnât have extremely high requirements for dance technique, but it demands you express the professional spirit and essence of the job. Thatâs the hardest part!"
"At the end, youâll all do a group dance with simple but powerful and infectious moves. As long as youâre sensitive to the music and can stay on beat, there wonât be any major issues."
Hearing theyâd been given half the day off, everyone was a little dazed.
"Teacher Xia, is this really okay?" They were excited, but also afraid of Xia Zhaoyun having to take all the responsibility. Their consciences pricked, and one asked weakly.
Xia Zhaoyun nodded as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Why wouldnât it be? Our mission for the next half-month is to prepare for the variety show for a partner unit. How we do it doesnât matter. As long as we deliver spectacular results, whoâs going to care about half a day off?"
"Besides, Iâve given you a field assignment. Iâm not sending you off to play, Iâm sending you to borrow costumes and learn from the experts."
"You need to take this with the utmost seriousness. Of course, if youâre content to let people keep calling you useless failures, seat-warmers who only got here through connections, and practitioners of âhogging the sty but producing no dung,â then by all means, do as you please!"
"The worst that can happen is you lose your perfect attendance bonus and a dayâs pay. For you all, with your comfortable family backgrounds, thatâs just a drop in the bucket..."
Teacher Xia had such a sharp tongue. She held nothing back, and her words left no room for rebuttal.
Still, someone couldnât help but ask weakly:
"Teacher Xia, what does âhogging the sty but producing no dungâ mean?"
Xia Zhaoyun shot the girl a look with a cold laugh. "In plain terms, it means âhogging the toilet without taking a shit,â got it? In situations like this, when you can clearly tell itâs not a compliment, youâre supposed to pretend you understand and go look it up in a dictionary later."
"I really didnât expect you all couldnât even appreciate my painstaking effort to save you some face..."
Everyoneâs faces turned beet red...
âAs expected, when an educated person scolds you, thereâs just no way to fight back.â
They were all just young women; none of them had ever been labeled so harshly and rudely before.
To avoid becoming practitioners of that... that "âhogging the styâ thing," they had to properly complete the field assignment Teacher Xia had given them.
The roomful of young women hurriedly left the classroom, their hearts still pounding. "Yunying, is it just me, or does everyone in our troupe who becomes a teacher, director, or troupe leader develop an impossible personality?"