Hey, WorldSurfers!
We are delighted to provide you with a detailed report of our very special event which took place on Saturday, September 26th – Jazz it up! meeting in Skolkovo.
First of all, we once again would like to express gratitude to our long-standing partners, American Center of the Library of Foreign Literature, for granting such a fantastic opportunity to participate in Skolkovo Jazz Science 2017 festival and to practice our public speaking skills in the atmosphere of innovation and modern technology.
Music has always been much more than just a mere sound for us. So it is not coincidence that the theme tune of the meeting set by the Toastmaster, Nastya Kolodina, was chosen to be comparison between the composition of an orchestra and a Toastmasters meeting.
Just like orchestra performance often starts with one musician’s solo who sets the tone for the whole concert, the tone of our meeting was set by a gorgeous Thought of the day delivered by Marina Petrova. Marina sang a famous jazz song entitled “It don’t mean a thing” and even encouraged the audience to sing along with her!
Next the floor was taken by the drums family of our Toastmasters orchestra – the evaluation team: Grammarian, Timer and Ah-counter. Alexey Lobzov, Nigyar Yusifova and Dmitry Trapeznikov, serving the roles correspondingly, had an important task of ensuring that the rhythm and the timing of the meeting are maintained, and that all the speeches are free from unnecessary sounds and are as clean as a whistle.
The most crucial part of any orchestra is the string family. These are the most expressive and emphatic instruments that generally play the main theme of the composition. We had two outstanding violin players, our Speakers – Kristina Sharykina and Sergey Saprykin, who delivered their inspirational projects about music.
In her CC project #10 entitled “Let’s muse” Kristina spoke about the positive impact of music on our physical and mental state. Kristina also touched upon what music meant to her personally and ended her performance with a bright and lively Zumba dance that came so timely to warm the audience up a bit in the drizzle.
Sergey delivered a breathtaking thriller under the title “Three days of mud and glory” devoted to his personal experience at 2017 Nashestvie festival. Watch the video of Sergey’s advanced project #4 “A dramatic talk” so that you could share our most stunning impressions about his speech!
After that our keyboard family, the Table Topics participants, started their improvised playing. The session, led by charming Gaya Oganesian, was organized in a form of celebrities’ interviews where each participant was given a role of a famous musician or singer and asked some provocative questions. That was not only a perfect chance for guests to take the stage, but also a valuable opportunity for experienced Toastmasters to test their skill of dealing with unwanted questions.
Finally, the stage was once again given to our drummers. The Evaluation Session was as vibrant and concise as the strokes of castanets, thanks to the General Evaluator, Maxim Silin, masterly calling the tunes and Personal Evaluators, Pavel Kaptel and Larisa Zorina, who marched to the same positive tune in their evaluations of Kristina’s and Sergey’s speeches.
Thank you all for taking part in our special event and staying with your bells on till the very end, even despite some portions of sprinkling rain:) Looking forward to seeing you at our regular meetings!
You can see all the photos from the meeting HERE.