Date and time of event: Sat 18 Sep 2010, 5pm – 9.15pm 

Role of volunteers:
As an EY volunteer during Moonfest, you can choose from either of the following roles:
1) Choose to dress up in traditional Chinese costumes to help us liven up the atmosphere during the event and interact with our guests during the lantern walkabout
OR
2) Choose to be attached to the various VWO groups that will be attending the lantern walkabout and help us host the beneficiaries in your group.
  How to register: If you are keen to help make the event  meaningful for these beneficiaries, send an email with the title “I wanna be an EY volunteer for Moonfest!” to ksianeng@esplanade.com by Fri 3 Sep 2010, 12pm.

Please indicate within your email:
- Your full name
- Your contact number
- Which role you are keen to volunteer for 
About Moonfest
Moonfest is Esplanade’s annual festival celebrating the well-loved Chinese mid-autumn festival with a delightful array of traditional Chinese arts programmes including opera, dance, music, puppetry and lantern riddles.  Click here for more information about Esplanade’s Moonfest activities.

Run Neon Tiger performs at the Baybeats Arena (Esplanade Outdoor Theatre) on Sat 21 Aug 2010 at 7pm, be sure to catch them!Visit the Baybeats website for more info about the festival (Fri 20 Aug – Sun 22 Aug 2010).

For those looking for a spot of excitement in August, the Singapore Youth Olympic Games won’t be the only event you can look forward to as Esplanade is holding its own celebration of youth! YFest, tailored for the young and young-at-heart will take place from 13 to 22 August and is a 10-day festival that promises an exhilarating mix of activities and performances featuring music, dance, art, and spoken word  

Kicking off Yfest is 4 Flo’, an all-new hip-hop festival that will feature the main elements of hip-hop – dance, DJ-ing, music and graffiti – brought to you by established and upcoming hip-hop artists and dance crews from Singapore and the region. With a mix of performances, masterclasses, an all-star jam and a dance crew battle, the evenings of 13 to 15 August look to be full of nonstop action.  

Be sure to check out the exciting lineups at both the Concourse and Outdoor Theatre (which will be covered with projections of graffiti art) during 4’Flo’. Kicking off the evenings with some R&B will be upcoming singers Fathin Amira and Rozé Kasmani together with musicians from The Music Lab, followed by a variety of sets – including the powerful sounds of the band Sixx; local duo and breakout successes Sleeq; funk-soul DJ collective Pushin’ On; and acts by local music industry powerhouse Don Richmond, radio DJ Vanessa Fernandez, and rap artists Sheik Haikel and Saykoji. Watch out also for Kartel Coalition, a mix of some of the best MCs and DJs in the region, including heavyweights such as Malaysian hip-hop icon Joe Flizzow, along with Singapore’s own young talent Richard J and others – and remember to turn up and show your support at the Singapore-Indonesia Beatboxing battle as the Singapore Beatbox Crew take on the Indonesian Beatboxing Community! 

Be sure to also catch the hip-hop dance crew performances that will be taking the stage. In addition to six local dance crews, making their appearance will be The Philippine All-Stars, known for their numerous international competition wins including the World Hip-Hop Dance Championships in Los Angeles in 2008. Also come to support Redeafination, Singapore’s only hip-hop dance group for the hearing-impaired.  

At the same time, wordsmiths and avid literary buffs can look forward to a poetry slam competition during Yfest. where ten teams will compete in groups of one to four. The competing groups will perform their original poetry to audiences and five judges with one winning team emerging after three rounds of poetry slamming. The event will take place at the Esplanade Recital Studio on 14 August 2010 and the best part is, it’s free to watch with tickets available on the day at the Esplanade Box Office or at the door on a first-come-first served basis. 

The above highlights aside, the other exciting activities at Yfest include a Festival Village with Street Art demos, a Swop Shop, as well as over 30 masterclasses and workshops for you to get in on the action! Need more reasons to check out Yfest? All performances – like the best things in life – are free!  

For more information about Yfest, visit www.yfest.com

My initial reaction to the audition call for the Esplanade Youths emcee mentoring programme was, “Wow, that’s going to be easy!” I figured I would have nothing to lose by trying out for the programme, so I sent my name in for the auditions. I would soon realize, however, that the only thing “easy” about this was the signup procedure. 

After attending the audition – which, I must add, was everything but easy – I did not expect that I would eventually be one of only eight Esplanade Youth emcees selected to continue on with the programme. When I got the selection email, I was quite pleased with myself for having pulled through a rather difficult audition process! Although I was still fairly unaware of the details of the programme and did not know what to expect, I never doubted that I would be comfortable working with people my age. So it was a little surprising that arriving at a briefing session about a month before the show felt like entering a different world. I had no clue who was who, and everyone just seemed so…old. The only thought in my mind was “I thought this was an Esplanade Youths programme!” I’m only 16 and pursuing my International Baccalaureate Diploma and here were fellow emcees who were 22 and already in university! But I’ve come to appreciate that that’s the great thing about being an Esplanade Youth, we can be several years apart in age and probably never meet through school, but taking part in the Esplanade Youth activities gives us all an opportunity to meet new people and make new friends from different backgrounds! 

As the briefing progressed, we were told that the eight of us “chosen ones” were going to pair up and each pair would host one weekend of the Outdoor Theatre programme series, On The Waterfront. “Not too bad,” I thought, “I can handle this for sure.” But then the briefing proper started, and I found myself being showered with so many pointers on emceeing that I was forced to reconsider my stance that emceeing is an easy job!  

From where to stand on stage, to how we ought to carry ourselves when ‘representing’ Esplanade, the things I had to take note of were endless! Surrounded by Esplanade staff who were much more experienced than me, I had one of those all-too-familiar “What am I doing here?” moments. Not one to allow myself to be easily daunted, I decided to focus on the task ahead – my emceeing debut at the Outdoor Theatre in a couple of weeks! I had been paired up with a complete stranger, was expected to write a script with him and show up on the day of the gig to go through my script with the Esplanade staff who were our mentors and then go straight to emceeing! Thank heavens he turned out to be a great guy to work with!  

After putting hours into writing a full script with little to no guidance (which was a good thing because it forced me to really think about my choice of words), I sent it off to my Esplanade mentors for their advice and editing. Soon enough, ‘our’ weekend finally came and we found ourselves together again waiting at the same office where everything started. The real mentoring started here, where I began to pick up all sorts of skills – what makes a good script, how to use my cue cards, how to stand, how to say certain words – the list goes on. I picked up something almost every minute! 

Aside from the overused “personal growth” elements, what I actually enjoyed learning were the practicalities of this industry. I got to meet and work with people I probably would not have easily gotten a chance to work with otherwise – everyone from ushers to sound technicians. How the stage is prepared, how the artists are managed – you name it, we experienced it. And then, of course, we learnt the specifics of emceeing, which are too tedious to go into here. Overall, this has been a real whirlwind of an experience, and I will probably not forget it for quite some time. I really appreciate all the help I’ve gotten from the wonderful mentors, and I hope to have an opportunity like this again in the future. 

For the full festival line-up and more information, check out www.baybeats.com

Heard of the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure?” 

If you subscribe to that belief, look no further than the Swop Shop at this year’s Yfest at Esplanade to start looking for your treasures! Designed to promote the notion of “free-recycling” – the act of giving away usable unwanted items to others instead of throwing them away – the Swop Shop operates on a zero-dollar economy and encourages us all to be mindful of wastage and to think twice before we throw something in perfectly usable condition away.  

The Swop Shop will take place from Friday 13 August to Wednesday 18 August, 3pm to 8pm daily at Esplanade.  

Here, we speak with Esther Lee, the Esplanade Programming Officer behind the idea of the Swop Shop and share with you, right from the horse’s mouth, why she decided to put in motion the idea of a Swop Shop and what we can expect from it! 

Why is Esplanade, an arts centre, organising a Swop Shop? Connect the dots for us?The whole thing about the Swop Shop is that we want to encourage youths to think twice about the kind of things that they use and the longevity of these products because recycling, freecycling and reusing things is not only part of the green movement but also helps us develop more environmentally-conscious youths.  

And, we believe that a person who is environmentally-conscious is also someone one who will think about everything else around them, who will be conscious about their surroundings and who will likely have a strong interest in culture and be an appreciator of the arts. In a nutshell, we’re just creating a fun opportunity to bring like-minded youths together for a good cause! 

Okay, I’m sold on the idea… but how do I go about taking part in it?It’s recycling,except you give things out for free and get to take some back at no cost too! So if you have items lying at home that you may not have use for but are in perfectly good condition, repeat gifts for example, or stuff that you loved at the time of purchase but later changed your mind and never used,  just bring them all down to the Swop Shop and contribute them to our pool! 

In return, you can go through the stuff that others have brought and take whatever you like from the pool! 

What if I bring great stuff but others only bring trash?These items available in the Swop Shop will not be not bad things, we will have curators who will ascertain the quality of the items brought by everyone and only allow into the pool those which are deemed as good enough!  

And just so you know, we’ve briefed our curators to be very stringent!

For more info about Yfest, click here