International Day

My class had been given the task to perform on the International Day. For the past few weeks we had been working on it. During this all time, we were separated to different groups of different sizes, some of us decided to dance, other decided to play an instrument, to sing, and others to perform as a band.
In the first place, I was in a pretty large group, but at the end, me and a friend of mine (Almira 10AA) decided to separate ourselves from our original group to be able to decide something smaller and different.
After discussing what exactly we should do and how we had the idea of playing this few songs:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9BNoNFKCBI - We are the World
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8I-7Wk_Vbc - Bailando 
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ_1HMAGb4k - Riptide

The first song "We are the World" written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and sang by various artists, talks about the importance of the world and charity and helping other people from around the world, which perfectly links to International Day because as mentioned before talks about the world, and as we are all only one.
The second however, "Bailando" (Dancing) is a popular song sang by a Spanish singer (Enrique Iglesias) it links to International Day because as mentioned previously because is a popular song sang by a Spanish singer, also because there are two versions of the song, the Spanish version and a English version that also includes words and sentences in Spanish.

We choose to perform our last song choice "Riptide" by Vance Joy.
We choose this song because it's also a really popular song, it's very catchy and also repetitive. However, in my opinion our only major problem was trying to fit this song into the theme of International Day and being more open minded. This song, is originally sang in english.
After discussing and asking our music teacher for her opinion and once I'm Portuguese and Almira is from Indonesia, we decided that we would try singing this song in our own languages, so this way we were being open minded.
This idea wasn't that good because even tho I'm fluent in my language (Portuguese), Almira is not very fluent in her language. So, because of this we ended up singing two of the chorus in Portuguese and the rest of the song in english. I believe that this idea was much better than the previous one because in this way, people who are listening to our performing can relate to the originally song and can still be interested.

As I just mentioned before, the only thing that me and Almira changed was two of the three choruses from English to Portuguese. I sang this two choruses and Almira sang all of the verses as well as the bridge in English.
We couldn't harmonise while singing our own parts.
Something we believe we did quite good was staying in the right notes and also keeping harmony.

However we had a little bit of a struggle in the chorus part, in which I sing alone and in Portuguese. This happened because when I first tried to translate the chorus to my language I couldn't keep the right beat and also the number of syllables and words are far more than in the originally song sang in English. It was really hard to find a solution at first, but on the end I just tried changing a bit of the words to another words that mean the same, so we could get the name of syllables down just right to fit the amount of time that we had for the chorus and also to try keeping then song simple.

Our next problem was that while singing the chorus (the part that I sing in Portuguese) some of the words were hard to pronounce while trying to say them fast, at the same speed as the song is sung originally. We had the idea of while we were practising, at first to slow down and with time in our next lessons to try to speed up a bit.
So with time I was singing my part much clear, I was more confident and I was also singing at the same speed as the song is originally sung.
However I still think that I could have work on more on this issue.

The part that enjoyed the most was singing in Portuguese even tho it was a bit challenging.

As mention previously my group consisted of me and Almira, we both sing and play the piano. So this was another issue because we only had one instrument that we could play.

We basically played the Bflat chord, then the Gsharp chord and finally the Csharp chord. Sometimes we would just play each chord just once is each bar so the singing would be less upbeat.
The only thing that I feel that we could improve on in the piano part is the chords. Maybe we could have tried to find another chords.

In general, I really liked the idea of the project, what me and my college did and how it all worked out pretty well. Of course there are things that we could always work on to improve our skills and to find solutions for our issues, but apart from that I believe that we did a pretty good job.