When She Stops Being Dramatic

Chapter 228: Chapter 95: Top Sister of the 1960s Song and Dance Troupe (34)_2

All the carelessness, the burnout from their day jobs, and the defeatist attitude of just going with the flow—in that moment, it was all swept away.

”Teacher Xia, what about me?” Yao Yunying couldn’t hold back any longer. She had been itching with anticipation as she listened to Xia Zhaoyun assign one fun role after another to her friends.

Xia Zhaoyun raised an eyebrow and smiled. ”Didn’t you already pick a role for yourself? The flight attendant who makes an absolutely epic entrance, flying down from the ceiling on a wire!”

”It’s definitely eye-catching, but it also means you’ll need incredible control over your body while you’re in the air. Do you dare to take on the challenge?”

Yao Yunying didn’t think about the role’s demanding requirements. She just followed Xia Zhaoyun’s description, imagining her entrance. ’Oh, how thrilling...’

She nodded again and again. ”I dare! I’ve been a daredevil since I was a kid; there’s nothing I can’t do. It’s just dangling from a wire, right? I’ll take it, I’ll take it!”

”I think I have a distant relative who’s a flight attendant. I’ll ask my mom to borrow a uniform for me later...”

After that, she asked curiously, ”Teacher Xia, what about you?”

Xia Zhaoyun was, of course, the lead dancer. But in a musical like this, what kind of character could be a special, key figure from beginning to end, without seeming out of place?

Xia Zhaoyun raised an eyebrow and chuckled. ”A reporter!”

She tilted her elegant chin up and said, ”I’ll wear straight-leg trousers, a white shirt, and a plaid vest, with a beret on my head and a camera hanging around my neck. A real camera, mind you—the kind that can actually capture your brilliance on stage!”

The girls couldn’t help but gasp. They all started asking at once, ”Teacher Xia, if you’re taking pictures while we’re dancing, won’t they come out blurry?”

Xia Zhaoyun shook her head. ”How could they? I’ll be moving at the same speed as you. We’ll be in relative stillness to each other, so there won’t be any camera shake or motion blur.”

The girls...

’Just how high are the requirements for the person doing the tracking shots?’

’A non-professional, with no tripod for support... An ordinary person might have trouble just taking a picture of a still object, let alone with the huge movements of their dancing!’

”Alright, hurry back and get your costumes ready. You don’t need to come back this afternoon. Go and properly learn from people in your assigned fields. Understand the characteristics of the job you’re playing, what its most iconic movements are, and how to express that through dance...”

”I need to slowly compose the score for you all. As the saying goes, ’Sharpening the axe doesn’t delay chopping wood.’ I hope you can all bring the roles you’re playing to life. This doesn’t have extremely high requirements for dance technique, but it demands you express the professional spirit and essence of the job. That’s the hardest part!”

”At the end, you’ll all do a group dance with simple but powerful and infectious moves. As long as you’re sensitive to the music and can stay on beat, there won’t be any major issues.”

Hearing they’d been given half the day off, everyone was a little dazed.

”Teacher Xia, is this really okay?” They were excited, but also afraid of Xia Zhaoyun having to take all the responsibility. Their consciences pricked, and one asked weakly.

Xia Zhaoyun nodded as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. ”Why wouldn’t it be? Our mission for the next half-month is to prepare for the variety show for a partner unit. How we do it doesn’t matter. As long as we deliver spectacular results, who’s going to care about half a day off?”

”Besides, I’ve given you a field assignment. I’m not sending you off to play, I’m sending you to borrow costumes and learn from the experts.”

”You need to take this with the utmost seriousness. Of course, if you’re content to let people keep calling you useless failures, seat-warmers who only got here through connections, and practitioners of ’hogging the sty but producing no dung,’ then by all means, do as you please!”

”The worst that can happen is you lose your perfect attendance bonus and a day’s pay. For you all, with your comfortable family backgrounds, that’s just a drop in the bucket...”

Teacher Xia had such a sharp tongue. She held nothing back, and her words left no room for rebuttal.

Still, someone couldn’t help but ask weakly:

”Teacher Xia, what does ’hogging the sty but producing no dung’ mean?”

Xia Zhaoyun shot the girl a look with a cold laugh. ”In plain terms, it means ’hogging the toilet without taking a shit,’ got it? In situations like this, when you can clearly tell it’s not a compliment, you’re supposed to pretend you understand and go look it up in a dictionary later.”

”I really didn’t expect you all couldn’t even appreciate my painstaking effort to save you some face...”

Everyone’s faces turned beet red...

’As expected, when an educated person scolds you, there’s just no way to fight back.’

They were all just young women; none of them had ever been labeled so harshly and rudely before.

To avoid becoming practitioners of that... that ”’hogging the sty’ thing,” they had to properly complete the field assignment Teacher Xia had given them.

The roomful of young women hurriedly left the classroom, their hearts still pounding. ”Yunying, is it just me, or does everyone in our troupe who becomes a teacher, director, or troupe leader develop an impossible personality?”