Work Archives « Sasha M Online

Voice acting for #FacetimeWithHistory

December 30, 2018 by Sasha M

acting, history, interactive, National Museum of Singapore, voice acting

In October this year, I was selected as one of the voice actors for #FacetimeWithHistory, an interactive programme run by the National Museum of Singapore to commemorate its 131st anniversary (yes, the museum is older than our nation state!).

As a voice actor, I was to play the role of one of the grandstand seats at the Old National Stadium (which many of us used to call Kallang Stadium). There were three of us playing seats, and we formed a “Sisterhood of Seats”, which made it really fun. It was a great experience chatting with unsuspecting museum guests, sharing stories with them about the historical events that happened in the museum. We even got them to sing along to National Day songs and do the Kallang Wave! You can see the highlights from the event in this video made by the National Museum of Singapore.

And here’s a photo of all of the voice actors!

Performing for Halloween Horror Nights 8

November 21, 2018 by Sasha M

Work

bellydance, choreography, dance, HHN8, tribal, Universal Studios, USS

Danse macabre. Photo by Dejiki

In the blink of an eye, it’s over. One and a half months of performing my own solo bellydance piece as part of the cannibals’ show, two times a night, four nights a week. It’s been a dream for me and I’m so happy to have gotten this chance to be part of Universal Studios Singapore’s Halloween Horror Nights 8.

It’s amazing to be part of a large scale production like Halloween Horror Nights, with the beautiful costumes, makeup, sets, lighting, and conceptualization of the shows. It’s my first time working in a production of this scale, and it’s been a really eye-opening experience for me.

Lara Croft, Egyptian version. Photo by Maddy T-Rex

Being part of a scare zone was definitely fun for me because of how much we were able to interact with guests during meet and greet sessions. It was funny to scare people as they walked through the zone. Of course, this format also made for a lot of phototaking!

The sorceress. Photo by Maddy T-Rex

I got to know some of the regular guests at Universal Studios Singapore (USS), and drew encouragement to perform my best every day by seeing them come to watch our show. Many of them were also amazing photographers and took all of the photos in this blog post!

In her element. Photo by Jeremy Quek

Guardian of the gates. Photo by Tong Ming

I’m also grateful to be with a group of extremely fun and talented scare actors in the Cannibals zone. There was a lot of interaction between the performers during our meet and greet sets, which kept things always interesting for myself personally, and which I hope the guests found entertaining too! Thanks to my fellow performers, it was honestly not hard to immerse myself in my character and in the world we helped to create, every single evening.

Queen of the cannibals. Photo by Michelle Muay

Trick or treat. Photo by Michelle Muay

A cannibal procession. Photo by Maddy T-Rex

If you missed the show, or just want to see the dance again, here’s a video for you:

Did you come for Halloween Horror Nights 8? What was your favourite part? Let me know in the comments!

Teaching Dance Choreography for Secondary School Choir

August 27, 2018 by Sasha M

Work

CCA, choir, choreographer, choreography, instructor, secondary school, Singapore, teaching

Recently, I had the honour of being invited to choreograph a dance routine for a secondary school choir. I was told that I had been sought out specifically because of my experience choreographing for a cappella groups in the past… which is, frankly, the greatest honour! So, even though I don’t often teach, I was very happy to do two sessions for this choir.

I had a great time teaching the students (13-15 year olds, a big group of 33 students), they were very tuned in and applied themselves with earnest. When I used to teach music in schools (also as a freelancer), it was always a big game of chance as to whether the students would be positive and keen to learn, or if they would play punk with you (it has happened to me). So this particular choir was really a very pleasant surprise.

Some of my teaching points:

The Responsibility of the Performer: to take care of yourself so that you can do your best
Doing well cannot happen without doing your homework; PRACTICE
No performance is perfect; every run through is a learning opportunity to improve the next time round. Keep Improving!
Work as a team, look out for and help each other
Most of all, Have Fun! (And don’t forget to smile!)

While I won’t post any photos of / with them here, you can find a snippet of the choreography on my Instagram.

I really hope the students had fun during my two sessions with them. I did get a lot of positive comments afterwards and it really warms my heart! Especially this message I received afterwards:

“Thanks so much for your help and spreading the passion for dance to the students” – choir teacher-in-charge 🙂

Very happy to be able to do this kind of rewarding work. Thank you again to the school for putting their trust in me. I’m looking forward to seeing the students perform!

Corporate Workshop Facilitation for OCBC

July 4, 2018 by Sasha M

Work

acting, artist, community, corporate, culture, facilitating, HCAC, improv, soft skills, theatre, training, workshop, worldview

Yesterday, I assisted Kamil Haque from the acting school HCAC as a facilitator in an improvisation-based workshop for OCBC. It was a team building workshop with the objective to create a new company culture. We worked with fresh graduates who had just entered the company and had not yet become integrated into the old company culture. There were 68 participants, and for such a huge group of people, we had eight facilitators as well as Kamil leading the full-day workshop.

Kamil is a boss ass workshop instructor who can handle any group size

It was really interesting working with so many people. As a performer, I’m used to training myself to improve my own skills at a craft. It’s very different to try and teach other people how to do those skills, especially when everybody has their own ideas and strengths. However, I must say I was very impressed by how the participants performed in the workshop, as they largely seemed to grasp the principles we were trying to express through our programme.

Everyone was paying close attention even at the end of a long day

Working so closely with such a large group for over 8 hours, I definitely learnt a lot from my interactions with the participants. I’m glad for the effort they put into all our games and exercises, and especially for their sincerity in reflecting on the activities. I, too, had much to reflect on as the day drew to a close.

Seriously there were so many people it was amazing that the day wasn’t mostly chaos

I’m very happy and honoured to have been part of this wonderful team of people, working on something that I find incredibly meaningful, and making an impact on people. My main objective as a performer is to have an impact on how people think and feel about things, and it’s great to be able to open up my perspective on that and do this kind of work in a facilitator role as well. It’s creating art in a whole different way.

Every single one of these amazing individuals is a talented gem of a human being!

Most of all, I feel incredibly glad to be part of this community of people who share similar worldviews as myself, with a similar approach to life and how we interact with the people around us. I hope to always keep learning and growing with them!

Community Performance at Our Tampines Hub

June 23, 2018 by Sasha M

Work

acoustic, community, covers, event, guitar, live music, live performance, performance, public, show, Singapore, vocals

Hello hello hello!!

So I recently did a public performance at Our Tampines Hub (if you’re on my Instagram, or Facebook page, you’d probably have seen my post announcing it; if you aren’t yet, go follow/like so you see my posts!).

For this show, I had Anthony Poi accompanying me on guitar. We did a set of stripped-down acoustic covers through the ages, from Oasis to Swedish House Mafia (can’t escape the EDM music!).

We also did a couple of Lady Gaga tunes, some wedding songs, and some really heartbreakingly sad songs (those were my favourites).

It’s been quite a while since I did a public event like this, and it was fun to be able to interact with the crowd. I’m happy that many of them stayed throughout our set, and were smiling, clapping and singing along as well.

Just wanna give a big THANK YOU to my friends and fans who came down all the way to Tampines to watch me perform. It meant so much to me to see you guys there. So much love for y’all!

Check out the video above to have a listen to the music, hear me chat with the audience in between songs, unsuccessfully attempt to convince people to come up and dance, and enjoy the chill vibes 🙂

Performance at HDB Community Week

June 8, 2017 by Sasha M

Work

a cappella, arrangements, auditions, beatbox, covers, gig, HDB, improvisation, jam, live looping, loop, music, performance, show

Last Thursday, my a cappella/beatbox crew Little Red Dots went for a performance as part of the HDB Community Week celebrations. It was a 30 minute set in the afternoon, outdoors (under a shelter though), and it was h-h-h-HAWTTT (mostly because we turned up the heat with our kickass performance!!!!!) We had a great emcee and sound guy though, and a nice crowd that cheered for us, and it was so nice to perform there 🙂

Yes, this is the only photo we took, and it was during soundcheck. LOL.

A little backstory on this gig:
Actually one of our members couldn’t make it for the gig. So we were going to go in as a three member group, and had to come up with all new arrangements for three people instead of our usual four. Then suddenly… another person couldn’t make it!!! So we held an open audition for someone to sub the person.

Quite a few people came to audition, and we’re very happy and grateful for the turnout… but after the auditions we realized that it’s Really Difficult to sub an a cappella singer whose parts are not scored, but improvised and then fixed afterwards by memory lol. (Yes, a little insight into the esoteric ways in which our a cappella-ish group thing works.)

We did manage to find a sub in the end, from within the a cappella / show choir community. But that sure was a lesson learnt, that a cappella singers who can improvise parts sure are difficult to substitute!

(Oh, and if you haven’t seen or heard Little Red Dots before, here’s a video we made:)

One thing we realized during the rehearsal process is that it’s very difficult to do a cappella with just three people (essentially only two people singing). So we had initially held aspirations of doing some incredible mindblowing arrangements like Freedoms Boombox:

Or even something simpler like this:

(Okay I am obviously a huge Freedoms Boombox fangirl but I guess these two videos are more than enough for you guys HAHA)

Anyway, the point is, we realized we are not Freedoms Boombox or anything close. So we scrapped the idea and went with a loop pedal. Which worked out great!

I have some video footage of our gig somewhere, so I’ll post an example or two up on my YouTube channel soonish. Meanwhile, many thanks to the very talented John Khoo from John and Deneice Glee Studios for performing this gig with myself and Jacky aka JK47! Hope we can perform together again in future 😀

Yeaa!