Teaching on Khongor TV

Our new site mate, Anna, and old site mate, Peder, have been teaching English on TV with a Mongolian teacher for a couple of months now. Last week, Leslie was asked to play and teach a song.




On the studio's chalkboard, Leslie wrote the lyrics of the first and most recognizable verse of the Woody Guthrie classic, "This Land is Your Land." After reading the lyrics aloud, the Mongolian teacher, Dashka, translated the words for the over-the-air students at home.

Then all together, they sang the whole verse through:

This land is your land, this land is my land

From California to the New York Island

From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters

This land was made for you and me.

To break it down, first Leslie read the lyrics for pronunciation. Then she sang the lyrics, putting the tune with the words. And then finally, to cement each new portion, she accompanied herself on guitar and sang.

With the first line sent out and happily sung in gers throughout Bayankhongor, she continued likewise with the next three lines, finishing by once again singing the whole verse from top to bottom.

And that's how you teach an English song when you can't see the students.

Because the schools have been shut down all month due to the H1N1, teachers have commandeered the airwaves to teach lessons from UB. Regular classes start up next Monday bringing those to an end, but Anna and Peder's regular English classes will still air Tuesdays and Saturdays at 7p.m., so tune in to Khongor TV and learn your ABC's.

Eagle TV: The Behind-the-Scenes Look at Our TV Debut

As our fellow Peace Corps Volunteer Kevin put it with tongue in cheek, the best part of sharing the celebratory meal afterward, is that no one in the restaurant knew what big stars we were.

For the big summer festival of Naadam, Eagle TV, a Christian TV channel, wanted to do a show about foreigners performing Mongolian music. After seeing our swearing-in videos on youtube, they called Peace Corps. We met to discuss, and this weekend six of us made the magic happen. It will air on cable and streaming on the internet at 8 p.m. (8 a.m. EST in the States) during the third day of Naadam, July 13, 2009.

We were supposed to meet at 8:30 in the morning at the Peace Corps office, but the camera crew didn’t show up until hours later. We weren’t all that surprised because they’d shown up six hours and four hours late for the previous two meetings, but we were nonetheless naively prepared for a reasonably on-time arrival. They did send a handler at about 9:15 to make sure we were all there.

When the camera crew finally arrived, they took a quick shot of us heading out of the office and we headed out of UB to Tereelj National Park. The ride through the winding road included a few random stops along the way like when we parked near some folks selling camel rides to tourists, and when we checked in on an overturned SUV that had recently driven off the road scattering and trapping passengers and gear (everyone seemed miraculously OK).



















Our Trailer
We arrived at the consummate countryside oasis complete with a stream, trees and large birds of prey, including a pair of large hawks. For our “trailer” they set us up in a nice ger where we were able to relax and nap for a few hours before our lunch of tsuivan (how Mongolian's do chow mien).















Costumes
The rest of the crew arrived with costumes soon after, which we got to play around with. These are the finest quality traditional outfits, made by perhaps the finest tailors in UB, according to our producer. No one took our measurements, but everyone's deel fit well with the exception of the boots, which were a few inches too small for the guys.

Julia and Leslie pose in their fancy deels.

Nathan's feet are mostly up in the legs of the boots, high-heel style.

We all got a bit of the "pose fever" in our awesome costumes. Jaime [left] pauses for a moment at least a dozen feet in front of the trained eagle.

Jaime Ly
Once we were in costume, the real filming began. First was Jaime Ly performing her traditional Mongolian dance about nature and animals while the rest of us enthusiastically watched. Jaime, whose parents are Vietnamese, hails from Washington, D.C. She had some costuming problems because the outfit that was appropriate for that ethnic group was not the dance outfit, and there were no dancing shoes for her. No problem, though. Take after take using the cassette tape deck in the mini-van as her accompaniment, and despite having no formal dance training, she made do with what she had and put on quite a show.

Jaime performs her dance beautifully
in the afternoon sun as the crew rehearses how they'll film it.

Leslie and Nathan
Next, they set the two of us up with some creative direction. All in Mongolian, the producer pulled Nathan aside and described how the shot would work. He would sneak up from behind Leslie, pick a flower and hand it to her as a surprise before the music began. In two takes, with no accompaniment, we sang our love song. We haven’t seen the footage yet, but we felt the second take was about as well as we could do it. Fingers crossed!

You'd never know that the microphone is under that pile of leaves on that tree trunk.

It only took us two takes to get our performance on film. Hopefully they were the right two. We were a little nervous.

Julia Cannon
Despite delays, once the shooting began, there was no stopping – they moved right into shooting Julia’s “Ankhni Hair” (First Love). You might remember Julia from our Bayankhongor concert from a few months ago. Julia is from Winston-Salem, NC, and has a theater degree. For her performance, she and the crew crossed the stream, and she was set up in a bright little clearing. It took several takes for them to get what they were looking for because they started with her walking, but because there was just a boom microphone (that captures all sounds in the immediate area), they were picking up the crunching of twigs and leaves beneath her feet. She sang quietly seated a few times, and that seemed to do the trick.

No pole for the boom mic? No problem as long as you have a ger and mailing tape nearby.

Julia and the crew had to cross the stream for this shot. I was no problem once the shoes came off.

Amber Book
Next, for Amber Book, they went to a new location with fewer trees and more mountains because Amber has been volunteering in the far West in Hovd that has a different landscape. This region is heavily comprised of ethnic Kazaks, so though Amber learned a little Mongolian two years ago during her Peace Corps’ Pre-service Training, she has primarily been speaking Kazak since she went to site. Amber sang, “Tulan Jer”, a Kazak song about missing ones homeland. Amber, who’s from Pittsburgh, PA, and has a vocal performance degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.














The Eagle
In the Kazak region, eagle training and hunting using eagles is a big deal, culminating with the annual Eagle Festival in October. On the way through Tereelj National Park, we saw a guy with a trained eagle sitting next to the road, so the camera crew stopped and hired it and the trainer for the day. This thing was huge, standing about two and a half feet high with a wing span of over a few yards. At one point, one of the hawks that lives in this area was swooping down trying to provoke the competing bird. Thankfully, it was blinded with a leather mask because I would not want to get on its bad side.

The handler moves the eagle. What an impressive wingspan.

Julia, Jaime and we take turns posing
with the blinded eagle from a safe distance.

Kevin Johnstone
We took a moment to enjoy a specially prepared horhog, then the final sequence began with Kevin Johnstone from Cleveland, OH. He’s been playing guitar for about 16 years. He is mostly self taught with some intermittent formal education smattered in, and he recorded an original album in his ger this past winter. He’s been in Selenge Province (the same where Leslie and I trained) in a small village for about two years, and just like Jaime, Julia and Amber, he’s an English teacher. He’s set to leave in August after he finishes helping a monastery develop marketing materials.

Kevin entertained us and flawlessly performed a more modern selection, "Cetgeliin Jiguuree" (Wings of My Heart), on Leslie’s Martin guitar. We all stood by and cheered him on, dancing and acting a fool to finish the filming day.

Kevin's performance was the final of the day.

Deep in the trees, it began to get dark pretty early.

After some van problems, we finally made it back to UB after midnight, 15 hours after the day began. We Americans agreed that in the States, the amount of filming we did probably would have been done in just a five or six hours including travel, but we also all agreed that the day was a resounding success.

Studio
The next day, we made it back to the Peace Corps office by 10 a.m. to meet the camera crew that was also supposed to meet us there at that time. When they showed up after noon, our collective patience was a little frayed, but we sucked it up nonetheless for a ride out the airport. One shot of us coming out of the airport, and we headed for the studio.

In the studio, we each sat down with a reported who asked us various questions about our backgrounds. Five out of the six of us conducted the interview in Mongolian, but they asked Nathan to do his in English for the English speaking audience.

Finally, with our fates sealed in the hands of the editors, we all went out for hamburgers, salads and a cold drink to celebrate the making of our first music video in Mongolia.

Broadcasting – When, Where, How
To check out our performance live on cable and internet July 13, 2009, tune in to:

Streaming video at 8 p.m. in Mongolia (8 a.m. EST) http://www.eagle-tv.mn/mn/

or

Eagle TV in UB on cable and terrestrial broadcast at 8 p.m.

Our Concert Evening

Friday, May 8, 2009 we put on a show. All proceeds went to the Center for Children with Disabilities.

It all started in February as our good pal Tysen began seriously working up some grad school audition pieces on piano. He wanted to do a recital so he could have a practice benchmark and to show off his stuff. He asked Leslie to sing a few songs, and they set a date.

Then, while we were in UB on other business in March, we ran into Julia Cannon, theater degree holder and performer extraordinaire. She signed on to join us in Bayankhongor as well, singing her own stuff and collaborating with both of us.

A few weeks later, our Peace Corps coordinator came for a site visit and recommended that we call a second-year volunteer, Dwan, who has an extensive dance background. One phone call and Dwan was in and wanted to dance with Nathan.

As the performance date approached and details were arranged, the Mongolians at Leslie’s theater were beginning to make it a much bigger deal than any of us had anticipated at the start. We just wanted a small, fun recital we could be proud of. There were big questions of, “Who will be your producer? You can’t do a program without a producer.” They said, “Who will pick your songs for you and in what order?” and “Who will tell you where to stand and when?” and “Who will print the tickets?” We already had the songs picked out, it was easy enough to decide the order, and where to stand was based mostly on the grand piano placement.

The grand piano. Though the theater proudly boasted having the piano, we found out a few weeks before the concert that it hasn’t been played since glasnost and perestroika were all the rage, and it had presumably seen better days before. The keys on the last quarter of each side didn’t work, it was more out of tune than Florence Foster Jenkins, and it was looking like if we didn’t get it fixed, there wasn’t going to be much of a concert. Tysen rightfully refused to play a classical concert on a cheap Casio and the clangy upright in the practice room wasn’t a better option. After some hemming and hawing over it (including the theater director insisting that Tysen only play in the center if that’s where the keys worked), they called in a “specialist” from UB to put the piano back together again – sort of. Almost all the keys worked, though the tuning left much to be desired.

As the concert week approached, the piano repairman had come in on the preceding Friday, Julia came in on Sunday night, and then Dwan came in on Monday night. By Monday the piano was “fixed” and it was looking like we might just pull this thing off. Dwan and Nathan began blocking their dance, working with the dance teacher at Leslie’s children’s theater. Tysen began putting the final touches on his pieces and learned much of the accompaniments for the ladies, and the ladies worked the kinks out of their songs. At some point, Tysen, Julia, Leslie and Dwan sat for an interview with the local TV with Leslie’s theater and children’s center counterparts to promote the event, which aired that week.

By Thursday, the pre-order tickets, which were to be sold to businesses as the producer’s big idea for securing attendance, finally came in from UB effectively killing the “pre” portion of the pre-selling concept. That meant we weren’t sure if anyone would show up at this point because there was no sign, almost no promotion, and the only real word we had around town was from us and one TV news story.

Finally by Friday, hours of rehearsals during the week and frayed nerves later, which included a rousing dry run that made us all a little nervous about the lighting and sound, not to mention a problem that left the “E” key (two below middle C) ringing every time the sustain peddle was depressed, the show was to go on. One carpenter and a host of last-minute onlookers and well-wishers later made the last few minutes eventful, nonetheless.

Earlier in the week, our friend and English teacher, Bayarmaa, translated a summary of each vocal piece into Mongolian. She stood on one side announcing in English and Leslie’s young theater counterpart, Baagi, stood on the other, announcing in Mongolian.


Tysen started with a two-part Beethoven sonata (Sonata in E Major, Op. 101 movements I & II). After he stopped between the movements, the announcers came out and began announcing his next piece, causing him to craftily scrap the second Beethoven movement. He went on to expertly work his way up and down the keyboard, often eliciting “ooos” and “aahs” from the crowd as he played Bach (Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 84), Chopin (Ballade, Op. 38) and Glass (Wichita Vortex Sutra).

Then Julia and Leslie alternated intermittently, performing some really great musical theater and foreign language numbers. Because the theater sound guy is so bad (the mics are always, always wildly screeching out feedback and are turned up too loudly with a tin-can sound), that both opted to sing without mics, which balanced well with the piano. They each nailed their performances with energy and flair while Nathan turned pages for Tysen.

Julia sang:
“Show Me” from My Fair Lady
“This Place is Mine” from Phantom of the Opera
"How Could I Ever Know" from Secret Garden
“All the Same” from Man of La Mancha

Leslie sang:
“Se Florindo è fedele” by Alessandro Scarlatti
“Nel cor piu non mi sento” by Giovanni Paisiello
“What Good Would the Moon Be?” from Street Scene
“Les berceaux” by Gabriel Faure

Together, they sang “By My Side” from Godspell.

After the piano was pushed off stage, Nathan and Dwan danced their ballet number to Mozart’s Klavierkonzerte Nr. 20 (II. Romance). Dwan played a doll and Nathan played the doll maker. Here is the synopsis of the 10 minute dance:

Scene 1: The Doll Maker
The story began with Nathan at a workbench while the doll he was building sat awkwardly in a chair on the other side of the stage. He walked around his doll with a sketch pad and pen, made improvements, and tested the working order. He mimed drawing in eayes and a smile.

He decided the last touch should be to wind up the doll and let it move freely, but the doll moved rigidly and eventually fell. Nathan reset the doll, tested the moving parts, looked at his watch and left stage.

Part II. Magic Dust Brings Life
As the music changed, magic dust (confetti thrown from the curtains) entered the workshop and caused doll to sneeze, and then poof, the doll became filled with life. She jumped up and became aware of her body parts and began to move with limited range. As the music changed, confidence built and she danced freely with joy and excitement!




Part III. Discovery of A Life Created
The doll maker arrived the next morning concentrating on how he might improve on his mechanical creation. The doll was still dancing with excitement but hid as Nathan’s back was turned to her. Nathan finally noticed the doll missing (from a musical cue) and then frantically searched until he found her behind the chair. He reached for the animated doll and they danced together. She gleefully showed off her new moves and the they ended in a joyful pose as the music wound down.




During the middle of the third act, about 7 minutes into the 10 minute routine, it began to rain on the front of the stage in one long, heavy stream. Luckily it turned out that if the announcers hadn’t cut off Tysen’s second movement in the Beethoven piece, Leslie would have been on stage singing her Faure number as the open grand piano turned into a kiddie pool. Crisis was coincidentally averted and all were counting their hindsight lucky stars.



The final number was a resounding success as the two of us sang “Hairlan Duumaar Baina” (our now routine love song) with Julia. The only hitch was the electricity kept cutting out, so the accompaniment hiccuped a few times and the microphones kept cutting out. Nonetheless, it was the decided crowd pleaser of the evening.






Though it was raining and snowing outside, and the concert wasn’t promoted much, we were amazed that the house was full with around 400 audience members. It was made up of our Mongolian friends and counterparts, but mostly it contained people under the age of 12, which was exciting at first. The problem was, we had prepared a program for businesspeople who were going to buy pre-sold tickets to a classical concert. As you might notice by the selections, we didn’t have a lot to keep the attention of anyone who might have been born after we graduated high school, with exceptions of the dance and the Mongolian number.

In fact, during nearly the entire concert, children and adults were talking at normal levels (not even whispers), one kid toward the middle back started listening to other music on his cell phone (boombox style), and people were taking phone calls like they were waiting in line at a mall food court. To say it was a tough crowd would be an understatement. It reminded us of the cheap movie theater we would sometimes go to near the bus station in Philadelphia or one of those clubs with the metal cages the Blues Brothers played in the movie. If David Letterman had been there, he would have been tugging at his collar with a grimace. When we talked to a Mongolian English teacher about how rude we thought it was, she just laughed and said that’s how Mongolians are. Just then we realized why every concert we’d been to had the microphones and accompaniment turned up to full blast. It occurred to us that maybe they just want to drown out the crowd noise. Either way, we all earned the evening.

Once the bows were finished, instead of the curtain coming back down, there was an anticlimactic moment for us Americans that seemed to be the Mongolians' entire reason for the concert. In Mongolian style, there was a long, gracious presentation of gifts and flowers and commemorating certificates issued to each one of the volunteers who performed. Speeches of congratulations and appreciation were delivered by the Mongolians who helped us plan and execute the performance, and we all posed for pictures.

Afterward we all went out to dinner and recalled the triumphs and difficulties of our first concert in Mongolia. May 8, 2009.