Wellington Young Voices Choir Performances! (two in one day) Part 1

Malvina Major Retirement Village

(I was so tired after doing   these two performances 😑)

 My first performance in WYV.   Huh. Weird that last week's   blog was perfomance related.     What a coincidence. But  anyway, here am I, scanning   the area, and by area, I mean     the inside of Malvina Major   Retirement Village. 

Other than staff strolling around the retirement village, it's practically a ghost town in here. Apparently my parents thought that coming 1 hour and 30 minutes early was an excellent idea. I assume that they wanted to maintain their punctual reputation. 

As normal, my mum snaps so many photos of me and her that I lost track of how many she took. It's a usual routine when they discover new environments and/or attend events. Especially at my first time performing in WYV.

I glance at my watch. Only 5 minutes have past. This comes to me as devastating news. Patience is not one of my characteristics.

Maya - a Wellington Young Voices Choir member - and her parents arrive. Since my parents have nothing better to do, they both walk up to them and have a normal parent conversation.

Now what am I supposed to do?

Since I have nothing better to do, I eye the hall at my left. Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to explore. 

I head straight to the hall and look for a toilet. But as I race through this maze, an old lady is in my side, staring off into the distance. Since I don't really know how to respond to that, I continue searching. And finally, I have. I open the door and shut it.

*

Hopefully that killed a lot of time, because I walk out of the toilet, expecting for more children to have arrive. I walk into the main area, back where I came from, to see a few people gazing at every inch of Malvina Major. I'm surprised by this. I spent a long time exploring, and not even more than 10 kids have come. It's roughly 30 minutes till the performance starts. Thank goodness for this. There are seats set out in, in rows, and in the middle is a pond with fish peacefully swimming in the water. And in front of the seats are where we're gonna perform. I take a seat, and just silently wait, having no idea of what the performance is gonna go like.

*

Eventually, all the kids have gathered in their seats, sheet music with lyrics in either lap or hand, and weirdly all look really nonchalant or tired. That's probably because it's a Sunday and it's a school day tomorrow, or at least that's why I look really tired. I also didn't get enough sleep, so that could be a key reason too.

But anyway, Rosie, our choir teacher, is sat down, poised in position, ready to play the piano, while our other choir teacher Jane is standing still, ready to conduct us.

They share the mike between themselves as they introduce all of us, Wellington Young Voices. 

Then once they have done so, Rosie and Jane look at each other in confirmation, silently asking each other if they are ready with their body language. Then Jane nods her head in beat, and Rosie starts to play notes, indicating for us to sing. 

We all do so.

*

Like I did at the Matariki performance, I go through song by song, growing tired as I open my mouth. 

There are two groups at choir, Kokako, my group, and Korimako, the younger group. Korimako are in ages from up to 10, whilst Kokako goes up to teenage years.

Kokako is teached by Rosie and Korimako by Jane. In each group, we learn songs and we sing them in performance all together as a whole WYV group, or by Kokako and Korimako groups. 

And because WYV works like that, it takes so excruciatingly long because you have to wait for the younger group to finish their song. It's quite annoying, and back-aching sitting there just waiting.

But eventually we reach the last song, Purea Nei. Rosie runs through her usual lines for Purea Nei; how it was made from an singer who's written many Maori songs.

This is okay, except that for the Sopranos, we need to do a higher harmony part, and well we aren't exactly good at it. We've been working on it. The piano once again plays, and I reluctantly start singing. It'll come out quite obvious that we haven't mastered the harmony. What are we gonna do??

...

But as we go to the part in the harmony, we hit the right notes. I sing as loudly as I can so I can push the note a bit stronger, since there are only 4 sopranos that have come today. 

We do the multiple bits of harmonies, and at times they're a bit shaky, but overall, it wasn't obvious at all. We did it.

We made a song sound fairly decent.

The crowd cheers and I feel this accomplished feeling exactly like in Matariki.

Proud.

But we're not done yet. We still have a performance at our heels, in a matter of an hour.

Performance 2, here we go.

Part Two will be released next Saturday!