In March this year when the Country went into lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic, activities in the Arts completely shut down. Facilitators had to learn new skills in a quick and steep learning curve to enable music making to continue, not only to protect our livelihoods, but because it soon became apparent that the Arts were needed more than ever for people’s wellbeing.
My response was to launch a new service to deliver remote participation in group singing direct to people’s homes in place of my much loved community pop choir – see details on www.patreon.com/metimepopchoir. In addition to that I moved one-to-one lessons to an online format via Zoom. Out of adversity comes opportunity for creativity, and more and more creative we became indeed!
I am so proud of my choir members and singing students for continuing their passion for singing and working with me to find a way to continue doing what we love. We may be in a second lockdown right now but hope and creativity and togetherness are still very much alive amongst the iwant2sing family. To inspire us to keep on keeping on, check out some of the highlights of the things we’ve achieved this year despite the struggles of 2020.
We recorded 2 lockdown recordings as a choir, one in support of the Black Lives Matter protests, have a listen below.
Many students have shown resilience and adapted well to lessons online, even continuing to work towards their vocal examinations. Thanks to Rock School allowing video entries, students have kept on achieving their goals. I’m really proud of Claudia Paolucci who has just received her results for her Grade 5, passing with Merit and a score of 88%!
This year’s annual singers’ showcase would have been the 5 year celebration for the choir – one of our members created this video collage to commemorate all the fun and achievements we’ve accomplished since its birth in 2015.