iamthewitch.com

Posted: 28 Sep 2011 07:30 PM PDT

During our third lesson in Modeling Advanced Catwalk at Amber Chia Academy, we had a special instructor in the house. She’s Esther Tan, the slim, sweet and gorgeous lady who won the Miss Chinatown Pageant 2004 and who’s now a constant figure in most major runway shows. Her forte is in dramatic modeling and she has this ear for music that makes her walk according to the song and beat played, with the right mood. It’s pretty amazing watching how she transformed from one song to another, walking with different speed and portraying different facial expression.

Esther Tan

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Esther Tan talking about feeling the music and mood while walking

Esther Tan at Amber Chia Academy

The class started with listening to different types of music with different beat, and Esther would show us how to walk according to the mood of the music, when to turn, when to pose and when to stop. I would be lying if I said it’s easy because it’s not. Perhaps we’re not that skilled with our walk yet, because most of the time, I find myself concentrating on my steps and poses instead of listening to the music. In the end, I ended up walking completely disconnected with the music because I wasn’t even listening!

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with the sweet & gorgeous Esther Tan

Group picture of the students with Esther Tan

Now it’s hard to articulate what we learnt from that class just from writing or pictures alone, since it has a lot to do with music. Therefore, I have compiled a short video of us doing the elegant catwalk following this slow music that had a pretty dramatic beat to it. In the process, we were taught how to pose at the end of the runway too – pose, turn around, pose again and turn around to walk back. Each step had to be correctly executed according to the basic elegant catwalk lesson we learnt last week.

Picture when half of us were not ready

Group picture with Ben the Catwalk Guru

Take a look at the video below and see how the students tried to walk according to the dramatic beat of the background music. It’s still one of the earlier lessons so I’m sure we had plenty of room for improvement!