Ninth Week

On Wednesday morning we had to go to the city of Tuzla to collect the scenery (a miniature pirate ship) for the upcoming show. This meant a long detour on our journey to Srebrenica so we had to leave Sarajevo at 7.00am. Much to our disappointment we arrived in Srebrenica too late to visit the Kindergarten and so we went straight to Potočari. We continued our work on pirates from last week - Hannah again led the pirate warm-up (“climb the rigging!” etc.) and the pirate dance game. We sang the song we had introduced to them last week (15 men/Petnaest ljudi) and then spent some time turning the lyrics from last week into a song. It turned out great and it goes like this...

The lyrics mean...

What does a pirate look like?
Why? Why? Why?
He has scary teeth, voice and black beard.

What do pirates do?
What? What? What?
They steal gold, money and silver.

When a pirate relaxes...
They drink, gamble and play the accordion.

[Captain Pugwash theme plays and everyone dances]

Although it has still not been confirmed, we are very hopeful that the Potočari group will be able to do a small performance of their compositions and other favourite songs at the Children’s Music Theatre show next week. Hopefully this can be arranged as it would be the perfect opportunity for the group to show off their hard work from 10 weeks’ worth of workshops.

In Skelani this week our “Interkulturalno Muzičko Putovanje” took us to Scotland! We introduced them to our country with a little slide-show of Scottish landmarks – we were surprised by how intrigued they were by the pictures! We sang “Donald, where’s yer troosers?” (or Donald, vhers jer truzers? in Bosnian phonetics!). This is a comedy Scottish song about wearing a kilt, and the group seemed to find it hilarious! We then talked a bit more technically about Scottish music, with Hannah playing a strathspey on the viola to demonstrate the feature known as a “scotch snap”. The next verse of the Jednog dana... song drew on this idiom. Again the group enjoyed writing lyrics – this time based on our discussion about Scotland (pipers, kilts, whiskey etc.). Next week we plan to record this group composition, along with one of their favourite songs from the last two sessions (Makedonsko devojće), to make a CD as a memento of our work together.