Latest / Midlife Choirsis / Angela Sharp: Breaking the Mold

Transcript

Angela Sharp: Breaking the Mold · Midlife Choirsis

• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to Midlife Choirsis, community singing in all its glory.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: My name is Kerrie Polkinghorne and it's great to have you here with me today.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: I'm going to be chatting today to Angela Sharp.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Angela, or Ange, is a parent, a grandparent, a musician, a choir director, a CFS firefighter, and a native plant nursery owner on a wonderful piece of land in Willunga, which is a regional area in South Australia.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Ange has played piano forever and for the last 30 years has created and conducted choirs all over the Adelaide region.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Her strong sense of social justice has been the driver to create singing groups that fit the singers where they were and whatever their circumstance.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: She helped create groups for older singers who wanted to sing rock music, people who had mental health challenges, women who were incarcerated or homeless, or people who wanted to sing contemporary music but in harmony.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Angela has a vast array of opportunities over her career, and these are usually activated by her ability to say yes to an idea and figure it out later.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: Kind of my vibe. Welcome Ang to the show today.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: Hi, Kerrie.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: This is really exciting.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: It is great to have you here in this beautiful studio, which is my husband's studio in Click Films.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Just a little shout out.
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: I'm a little bit underdressed.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I should have not worn my Oodie today.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Why'd I do that?
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: But no, welcome Ange.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: It's great to have you here.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: And some of our listeners will have already heard of you and probably know you, but there will be a lot of people who don't know you and haven't met you, and we'd just love to know a little bit about your story.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: You're a musician of many different talents.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: So we'd love to hear a bit about your story just to give us a bit of a picture of who you are.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: I grew up in the northern suburbs of Adelaide and did the regular stuff, went to school, did all the things.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: But I was really fortunate to have piano lessons every week by a wonderful woman called Mrs.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: Bastian.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: Gorgeous woman.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: Her husband bred canaries.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: It was very strange.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: So I was really fortunate to have all that musical background.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: And when I left here 12, not knowing what to do, I went into biochemistry because that was a natural progression for a musician at that time.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, obviously.
• 2:23
  unknown: Yep.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: No one ever spoke about going to uni for music.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: It wasn't ever part of my conversations with anyone at school or with my family.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: So after working at a biochemist for eight years and still playing a little bit of piano, I did have a few children and then decided to change tack completely.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Went back to uni and did a performance degree and an accompanying degree and a teaching degree.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Took me so long.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: Part-time, part-time, part-time with three little kids.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: So I ended up with a career that I never thought I was going to have.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: But career for me was really haphazard and random.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: It really started with one day someone said to me, Did I know a good piano teacher?
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: And I said, I'll give it a go.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: And that was the career that started.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: And I ended up having maybe 70 students a week over the course of 25 years of teaching.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: Loved teaching.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: And that's where we met, didn't we, Kerrie?
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: We used to work at Highgate Primary together in in opposite rooms.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: Yes, you were a piano teacher with the little kiddies, and I was flute and saxophone and things, and we would catch up over a coffee or whatever during the lunch break and you would clean down your piano.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: Was I that diligent?
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: Well, there were some snotty kids, I guess, at that time, so.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Of course.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: So that was a wonderful part of my career, and I've I'm still teaching now.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: I still teach a few people down at Willunga.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: The next part of my career once again was random, that I saw an ad in the paper in the days when we used to have the Advertiser every morning, and there was a little ad that "said, Singers Wanted, Volunteer Choir to sing at the Big Sing Folk Festival at Victor Harbor".
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: And I thought, oh, that sounds vaguely interesting.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: So along I went to somewhere on North Terrace, can't really remember where now.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: I walked into a huge room full of people who seemed to know what they were doing, except I had no idea what to do.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: And met the beautiful Briar Eyres, Sarah Bleby, and Lyndon Piddington, I think, was also there.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: And they, over the course of four sessions, taught us all of these songs in three-part harmony, which was a whole new world to me.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: Loved every second of it, except for the really horribly ugly t-shirts we had to wear at the concert at Victor Harbor.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: And that was my first ever choir experience.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: And then someone rang me up, who apparently I'd met, and said, Ange, do you want to come to a rehearsal in this women's choir?
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: To which I always say yes, because you never know what's going to be around the corner, so you always say yes.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: I said, That'd be great.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: When is it?
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: She said, Oh, it's tonight, in two hours' time.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: I must have gone.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: And the rest is history.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: That was the start of my choir career in 1998, I think that was.
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: And have been singing in or in front of choirs ever since.
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: In my life, it's been lots and lots of random events, mostly good.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: And so you found yourself singing in that choir or directing that choir?
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: Initially singing in the choir and learning what it all the skills you need to sing in a choir.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: As much as I was a musician, I had no idea about blending and holding your parts and all the intervals and how to take all the nuances into a piece of music.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: And just following someone else's direction.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: Because being an only child, that was really hard for me.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: Follow my own drum most of the time.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: Anyway, it was so exciting.
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: And then she left.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: The director left.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: And someone said, Oh, we'll try and find someone else.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: What are we going to do in the meantime?
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: And me being me just said, Oh, look, I'll give it a go for a couple of weeks.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: And five years later, I was still doing it.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: So it was a very, very steep learning curve, but luckily had a wonderful bunch of women in that particular choir who supported me through all of my mistakes.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: But I managed to go to workshops, learned some conducting, and learned some of the skills that I didn't even didn't even know you needed.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: Many, many weekends to upskill.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: But it would have been very useful training because you would have used those skills immediately.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: Used those skills immediately and made all the mistakes you can possibly make in front of a group of people and then get better the next week.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Any funny stories of funny mistakes that you made?
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: Well I did go to a conducting workshop with I can't remember her name, but she was astonishing.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: And we all had to sort of come out one by one and conduct a piece and be masterclassed on your technique and your performance and your posture.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: I failed everything.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: And I'm the main one I failed is I my whole body moves when I conduct.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: I conduct with my whole body.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: And she said I had to stand really still up against a wall with my heels, my back, and my back of my head against the wall, and then conduct.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: I thought I was gonna explode.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: It was the most unfamiliar and ridiculous.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: I can see your point, was just to give the choir one point of entrance rather than my whole body.
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: No, it completely failed.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: But you've got to go through that, you've got to learn all the techniques, and then you get to decide what works for you.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: But that day I decided quite quickly that standing still with a baton in my hand was never gonna be my happy space.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: So you found a groove when you were conducting that first choir?
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: I think my groove took a while, as it should, to get the confidence to arrange a song the way I could hear it and the way I wanted that particular group of people to be able to sing it because of their skill set.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: And that took a long time to get the confidence to go, yep, this is how I want to do it.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: Because we all know that you compare yourself all the time to everybody else, and you're always going to be the weakest link.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: Took me a long time to trust my judgment.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: Still probably working on that now.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: Tell me about when you said you wanted to arrange things the way you heard them.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: How did you hear them and how did you eventually find that that was well received?
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: I've long been a fan, probably for the last 20 years, of choosing repertoire for the choirs that I run, that is not standard repertoire.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: I think there are a lot of choirs doing lots of wonderful things.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: This isn't by no means a criticism of anyone.
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: I wanted just to have the choir sing some other songs that were perhaps not deemed to be choral songs.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: I was intensely curious to see if I could write an arrangement to make that particular song sound fantastic by two, three, four, five part choir, whether it's females mixed.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: And I still get really curious about that.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: And I lay in bed many, many nights singing different parts of the harmony, much to my poor husband's demise.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: Because I can still hear all those harmonies going on in my head, and then sometimes I have to get up and write them down because I can't sleep until they're out of my head.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: But it's also really exciting.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: It's really exciting to hear different pieces of music in different ways.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: And choirs who bring that to life, because you've got these ideas in your head, you've written them down.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: It must be really cool hearing your ideas sung by a huge group of people.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's so self-indulgent, it's so exciting.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: Really.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: It's one way incredibly selfish, because when you they first try it, usually they hate it.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: Or it's really negative, lots of whinge and wine.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: But after a couple of weeks, you can see the eyebrows changing and they go, Ah, actually, this is kind of cool.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: And when you get to week four or five, they're completely in love with it.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: And that's when they sing it and you go, Yeah, there it is.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Will they trust the process now, these days, a bit more?
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Or you still get the whinging?
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: A little less.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: No, they they don't whinge at all.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: I love my choir.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: So from your first choir, where you sort of took on the role for two weeks, as you said, or a few weeks, or five years, where did you go from there?
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: When I was conducting Women with Latitude for many, many years, I made a really good friend, a woman called Lisa Lanzi, still a very dear friend.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: And she and I had lunch one day, and on the table we put a big piece of butcher's paper and we said, What do we want to do with all these skills?
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: She's an amazing actor and a dancer and a singer.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: And we wrote this big list, and what we came up with was an idea that we would like to create choirs for people who could not go to a regular choir for all sorts of reasons.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: We thought about people who were homeless.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: Where can we put a choir opportunity for people who don't have a regular home?
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: We looked at people going through domestic violence.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: Is there a safe place that we could possibly run a choir for those particular people?
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: We looked to people with mental illness, with disability, people who are incarcerated.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: We decided we'd love to run a choir in prison.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: So we wrote this big list of possibilities.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: You know what?
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: We've done nearly every one of them.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: Because we just set to task of talking about it.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: And I'm a great believer in just keep talking about things, and the universe does present you with opportunities.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: You just have to jump on them.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: Someone came to me and said, Hey Ange, would you like to run a choir in the women's prison?
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: I well, okay.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: It's on my list, whadda ya know?
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: And we he did.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: We had three opportunities to go into the women's prison.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: It taught me a huge amount about music, choir, people, the system we have here, the jail system.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: I've met some fantastic women.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: The inmates were amazing.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: The people who run the prison had a really challenging job.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: But we were given this opportunity, something that I never thought I'd ever have the chance to do, and it was amazing.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Tell me about that first day when you were there at the jail teaching choir for the first time.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: What was that like?
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: Well, it starts a bit earlier than that because you have to get there and go through this incredible process for the security.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: So you're not padded down, thank goodness, but my keyboard had to be stripped apart, everything you took in had to be examined and x-rayed, and we had to go through an induction walk, what not to do.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: And then we got walked all the way to the low security wing, which is where they allowed us to run this particular choir.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: And the staff were quite intimidating.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: I'm five foot one.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: They all felt like Amazons.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: We walked into this room, we set ourselves up, and nobody came.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: And we waited, and we waited, and nobody came.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: And after maybe an hour, a couple of women trickled in.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: You hit with this question in your brain.
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: You can't hit them with everything at one go.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: I mean you're so passionate and excited about what the possibilities are, but you can't go, hi, I'm Ange, and this is Lisa, we're gonna do all these amazing songs now.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: They just walked in the door with a little bit of curiosity.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: So that really made us communicate very clearly and very calmly.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: And to their credit, eight of them kept turning up most weeks, and we put together, I can't remember now, maybe five or six songs with a bit of harmony, with a bit of piano backing.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: And one of the women said to me one afternoon, she said, And I feel like an onion.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: And I okay, what do you mean?
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: And she said, I feel like you're peeling off my layers and I'm finding my voice.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: I could cry now by saying that.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: That's awesome.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: It still affects me.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: And we were able to help her record.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: She wrote a song in the end, and we helped her record it.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: I've got goosebumps even saying that story.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: But so they're the opportunities that arise and it was an honour and a privilege to be part of it.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: You really wanted to seek out people and groups of people that struggled.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: And you wanted to bring music to those people and allow them to participate.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: Where'd that come from?
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: I have a very strong sense of justice.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: Social justice is very important to me.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: And trying to find a way for everyone to participate.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: We all know that singing is good for you.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: But what's really difficult is to create spaces and opportunities for everyone to be able to participate.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: It's all very nice saying, oh, you should sing, it's good for your mental health, because we know it is.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: But where do you go?
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: Where do you go if you can't you have no money?
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: Where do you go if you can't drive?
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: Where do you go if your mental health is really unstable?
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: Where do you go if you're homeless?
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: So I was trying to find a way to communicate or connect rather with organizations.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: We were very passionate about working with Catherine House, and the women that we met in there were amazingly brave women.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: So it was about creating a choir for them.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: It didn't have to be three-part harmony, it didn't have to be always piano-backed, it didn't have to be a black folder and serious songs.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: We created one that suited them.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: They didn't always turn up because that, you know, everyone they've had huge issues.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: Choir was so far down their list, we were lucky if they turned up at all.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: It was a privilege that when they did.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: So it became really important to Lisa and I to create choirs in different molds for different groups.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: And that's really exciting.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: We didn't always get it right.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: We made lots of mistakes, but most of the groups we worked with were very kind and generous and allowed us to pretty much muddle through for a little bit, and we always came out in a good place.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: People came back, which means they like what we were trying to do.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: So we got support from Elizabeth Council, we had us for a while.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: We had the ACH Group who gave us an opportunity to run four different choirs with them.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: Once again, the prison gave us three more contracts.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: So it really, really sparked my curiosity about making choirs outside the norm.
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: There's nothing wrong with the norm, but I think they can be broader because we are broader.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: We've all got different ways of trying to get something out of singing.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: And so that's really been driving me the last probably ten years as much as anything else.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: So, Ange, 20 years ago when you started doing more social justice-oriented choirs, was there anyone out there who inspired you or showed you what it could look like?
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: Jonathan Welch.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: Jonathan Welch is one of the most generous humans I've ever met.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: He started up the Choir of Hard Knocks in Victoria in Melbourne, and the ABC made a doco of the Choir of Hard Knocks, and I to this day can remember sitting on the couch watching that documentary on telly, bawling my eyes out, watching these really brave humans, some with all the things they were dealing with, come together and sing, and Jonathan creating a space for that to happen.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: And I said to my husband, That's what I want to do - just that.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: And he said, How are you going to do that?
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: I've got no idea.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: Anyway, within a month, I had met Jonathan Welch at Glenside Mental Institution and got hooked into running a choir for people with mental health challenges, and things just rolled on from there.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: And I took one of my choirs, Allegria, across to Melbourne a couple of times over the years, and we've sung with Jonathan Welch's group, and they are the most generous, inclusive, damn funny people to be with.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: And Jonathan is a real inspiration.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: He's still doing good work out there.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: So it's one of those things if you if you can see it, you can do it.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: I love that you've sort of tried to be creative around how music can serve people because that's what music is for.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: And I really love that you've been able to just keep stretching the boundaries there and asking the questions, who are these people and what do they need?
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: And how can music serve them?
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: You've helped so many m people that you probably wouldn't even know.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: If I go out with my kids who are now in their 30s and we go into a big public place, someone will see me and go, Hey and remember me, I sang in the Yada Yada Choir, and they and then my kids will just roll their eyes and go, like, You gonna be long?
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: Because I've had the privilege of meeting so many people around South Australia who've sung with me and for me.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: And when COVID took all of my work away, as I'm sure it did to you, Kerrie, took away my teaching, took away my choirs.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: We were stuck home.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: The neighbours, I now live in a beautiful part of South Australia called Willunga, and a few neighbours said, Can we have a bit of a sing on Zoom?
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: Which is a hideous thing to do.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: We all know how hideous Zoom is.
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: But we muddled through and we had a little group of people singing, and we'd make little recordings and I'd mash them together to make some sort of little product.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: And we did okay, and we muddled through for 18 months, I think.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: And then when we were allowed to sing together again, I will never ever forget the look on those people's faces.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: When we sang the song in three-part harmony, they would only ever sung on Zoom and we sang it face to face.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: Everybody cried.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: Because it was, oh my god, we can do it together.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: I've got goosebumps again.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: It was unforgettable and watching everyone's face just light up and go, yeah, we can do this together again, because that's how it should be.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: And that's the magic of it.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: So you did choirs for a long time.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because choir is fun.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: Choir feeds me, it feeds my soul.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: I love the work it makes me do, I love arranging, and I just love creating a space for people to do something they didn't think they'd be able to do.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: I like that you said it feeds your soul because we talk a lot, as we said before, about how choir singing is good for singers and it's good for your health, but we don't talk about what it does for directors.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: How does it change you or how does it give you life and energy?
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: Leading choir is such a privilege and it really is about creating a space.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: I mean, we could talk safe spaces, Kerrie.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: We could talk about a space where you know everyone's voice, you know everyone's name, everyone notices if Kerrie doesn't come for three weeks, someone will notice that Kerrie's not there, we'll follow you up.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: So it's creating that safe space, that respectful space.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: I don't think we've talked enough about humour in in singing.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: Choir has to be fun.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: I'm quite happy to be the dumb bunny up the front, making a fool of myself all the time, because often people come to choir with the notion of it has to be very serious.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: It's coming to choir for new people who they've never sung before.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: It's very scary.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: You put yourself there and someone's going to hear your voice.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: That's terrifying for most people.
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: So if you don't have some fun with it and some humour, and everyone goes, Oh - they probably won't come back.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: It's too scary.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: It's that shared experience of terror.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Nicely said.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: Nicely said.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: And then you feel like it's not so bad.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: And taking a group of people to a performance, and at the end of that, they look at you like, We just did that.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: That was cool.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: And that's exhilarating.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: It is, yeah.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: Utterly exhilarating.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: About ten years ago, the State Theatre Company put on a production called The Events.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: And as part of that performance, there was a community choir on stage for the whole performance, singing a few of the songs and one of their own.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: Carol Young, who was on your show recently, Kerrie, was the musical director at the time.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: And I was lucky enough to run three choirs at that time and got all three choirs on the timetable.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: So we got the privilege as a little community choir of sitting on the stage of a professional auditorium as part of a professional play.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: Working with such professionals in a professional space was so exciting.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: So having those opportunities with a community choir are rare and so special.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it really lifts everybody's confidence, doesn't it?
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: It lifts their confidence and I think it also gives them self-respect.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: Because I think often community choir are seen as the lesser choir.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: So it's always been my goal just to raise the standards of what we do as a performer.
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: Validate community choirs.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Gives them credibility.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: Absolute credibility and they and they sing well.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: The choir will always sound its best, singing the song that's best for them.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: And I think that's what gives community choir absolute credibility.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great because it is easier, of course, to find an existing arrangement.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: I have done that a lot of times just simply because I don't have the time to arrange, but sometimes when I do, it's it's a great opportunity to sit down and go, right, well, who have we got?
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: And what do we sound best doing?
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: And I think having some freedom around that, often things like as we get older our voices get a little bit lower, especially for menopausal women, that's a big factor.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: So just changing the key.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: Just stop singing it in the higher key, just drop it down a couple of notches and suddenly it settles really well.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: Just making some simple changes.
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: The music should always suit the choir, should always suit the group.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, always serving the people.
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: Always serving the people.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: So tell me a bit about some of the other choirs you've run, Ange, because I know you've done lots over the years.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: What's really wonderful about all the choirs that Lisa and I started and and I was involved in, they're all still going.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: And I think that is so amazing that the enthusiasm of the first group of singers is still going.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: Women with Latitude, it was my first proper job, I think, got so big and so popular.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: We had a waiting list.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: So we decided that waiting list got so big, let's start another choir.
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: The waiting list became Allegria, and Allegria I directed for 17 years.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: I resigned from a couple of years ago, but they're still going strong.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: Allegria had a waiting list.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: So we started another choir about 10 years ago called In Good Company.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: In Good Company are still going.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's just makes my soul very happy.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: What we probably both do, and many community choir directors do, is upskill people really quickly.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: You're trying to give them a sense of ownership of their choir.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: It's their choir.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: It's not my choir, it's their choir.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: And you need to give this group of people ownership.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: So if I move on and someone else comes in, that's okay.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: The energy will change, but the group doesn't have to change.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: And now I run this wonderful big bunch down at Willanga called the Terribly Loud Choir.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: That's my favourite name.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: Did you come up with that?
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: It was a name we came up with during COVID because I live on the corner of Mount Terrible Road and Louds Hill Road.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: So it just sort of came out in some sort of random Zoom conversation.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: So the Terribly Loud Choir, there are 55 of us on a Tuesday night in the show hall at Willunga making wonderful, wonderful music.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: And we honour our name by dressing terribly loud when we perform, and as Kerrie knows, our only rule is no black.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: Yes, so we performed together, Vocalize Choir and Terribly Loud Choir, probably uh two months ago, and that was the rule - no blacks.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: So we performed out at uh the farmer's market, and it was all in big, bold, bright colours and textures and patterns, and it was hoot.
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: I think the the photos were magnificent.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: They came out really nicely.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: It made me think about the mold, going back to the mold of yep, we wear blacks.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: Well, why?
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: Because we always have?
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: I think I coined the phrase a group of individuals from Lisa Lanzi when I was we were working together.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: And I always thought about having a group of individuals means you can look similar, but you don't have to look the same.
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: And I think that was really important.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: I've always had that with my groups.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: How do you approach that uniformity of sound with individualism, in terms of the people who you're working with?
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: Continuity of sound to me is connection with the people you're singing with.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: We do a lot of work looking at each other while we're singing.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: Because often, as they should, they should look at the director, which in most cases is me.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: But sometimes I'll say to the basses, Can you sing your part to all the gorgeous altos?
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: And instantly the sound changes for the better.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: Because people focus more, they listen more.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: If I'm trying to work on just a simple two-part harmony on a part but the rhythms are not quite locked in, if they sing to each other, it fixes it instantly without me doing a thing.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: Often singing to someone else takes the focus off themselves.
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: They really, really hone in on the other person.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: It's it's remarkable.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: That's a great tip.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: You can have it.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: I'll take it.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: You can have it.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: Won't cost you much at all.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: So Terribly loud choir down at Willunga once a week, having a great time.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: We have a great time.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: We have got lots of performances coming up.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: We've been really privileged to be part of the State Theatre Heartbreak Choir, Community Choir Bunch.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: Yes, I think Vocalize are doing that as well.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: Which is really exciting.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: We're singing at the Fleurieu Folk Festival, we're singing for Adelaide Sings, we have an end of year concert, and we always do, always we've done once, the McLaren Vale Christmas Parade, which was an interesting exercise last year.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: They asked us to sing Christmas carols for nearly a kilometre of walking, which is probably the most exhausting thing I've ever done.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: And what we ended up doing was singing Feliz Navidad for probably 14 or 15 minutes straight.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: My choir can't stand that song.
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: Neither can we anymore.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: But the audiences all that lined the street loved it.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: They loved it.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: They loved it, but we didn't want to ever sing it again.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: I'm keen to know a little bit more.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: I know we talked earlier, but I'm keen to know a little bit about when you mention the humour, because that's one of my favourite topics.
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: Having a humorous approach or having a fun approach to what you're doing and how you run it, it doesn't mean it takes away from any of the content and the musicality of what you're doing, but it makes it accessible.
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: If you don't have a great time at something, why would you bother coming?
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: Singing requires a lot of energy - mental energy and physical energy.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: And if you're singing a piece that's three minutes long, by the end of three minutes, you're exhausted.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: So the way I find to revitalize and get some energy back in the group, you crack a joke, you do something stupid stupid.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: I might do a moonwalk, I might I don't know, you just whatever comes to mind.
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: Because you have to just take the seriousness out and get everyone to relax and be silly.
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: And luckily, Terribly Loud Choir has many, many, many people with great sense of humor as well.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: It's not just me running this place.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: Or moonwalking.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: Or moonwalking, or shout out to you, Dave, for always having a great joke.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: It's all part of it.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: And don't take it so darn seriously.
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: We can still sing really beautifully and sing beautiful songs really well and have a really fun time at it.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: But they don't have to be mutually exclusive.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: They don't have to be mutually exclusive.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: And I've I've been to many choir rehearsals with other people and the break between singing and learning something, it's it's so tense.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: The atmosphere can be very tense.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: I don't think you get the best out of people having a constant tension in a room.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well we talk about having a relaxed body when we when we sing.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: So having a relaxed mind as well is part of that too.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: I mean we always do a warm-up at the beginning, we do all sort of ridiculous calisthenics and moonwalks and John Travolta moves and just to sort of shake the body up and get it relaxed.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: And everyone's had a really busy day, so you wanna that's part of that process is to bring your mind into the room where we are and stop forgetting about what you did this afternoon or what you're going to do tomorrow.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: And I like being silly.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: Silly's fun and useful and inclusive, and I'm not gonna stop.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: I don't think you should stop.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of people love it, and I sure loved watching you run those rehearsals when we had our combined workshops.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: They were great fun.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: Because you can also approach technique by doing silly things.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: Like every choir I've seen really approaches certain techniques by doing funny gestures or moving in a certain way, and as soon as people can just sort of get over that, the quicker they can actually access those techniques.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: And I often conduct with my eyebrows.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: If you want to get some people smiling in your choir, start conducting with your eyebrows or your knees, why not?
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: One of the choirs that I was part of probably eight years now, with Lisa Lanzi and a few other amazing women that put this choir together was called the WOW Choir.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: It was called the Women of the World.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: I think we ended up with about 150 women, and we did eight performances of all sorts of amazing songs.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: And I met women from all over South Australia from all different cultures.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: It was truly incredible to be part of.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: My point is going to be that I still meet people to this day in all sorts of random places that say, Oh, I sing with you, that wow choir.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: That was so great.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: Can we do it again?
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: And trying to figure out what was it about that particular choir.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: Now I didn't I wasn't the only one that ran it, it was five of us.
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: So everyone contributed.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: I'd love to get all those people in a room together and figure out what was it that made that choir so memorable.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: The It factor.
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: What was it?
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: Probably once a month I would run into someone who go, Oh, what was that choir Ange?
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that Wow Choir.
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: Oh, that was so good.
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: Can we ever do it again?
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: To which I answer, probably not.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought you said yes to everything?
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Oopsy daisy.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: Not every thing.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: That was a massive job, and I could not do it on my own.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: What do you think it was?
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: Inclusion.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: Creating the mold that fitted that group of women.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: It was diversity of culture, of skills, of ages.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: The other women that ran it, it really was making it up on the run.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: However, I think it was so damn successful.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: We did about eight performances all over.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: But I think it was about making the mold fit that group of people.
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: And it leaves a lasting impression.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: That's what I want to affirm you in today is like how much of an impression that you leave on people.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: And we talked earlier about how choir directing affects us as directors and how much it feeds us as directors.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: But I also want to focus on what an impression it leaves and what a lasting memory it leaves for people who have been part of whatever it is you've been creating.
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: We all have moments where we question whether what we're doing is worth it.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: Everyone has bad days, everyone has long days.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: And those stories of where people have remembered you and remembered the time when they were in that choir or they remember that particular performance, we have no idea what that actually means for people.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: So thank you for all the work that you've done and you are doing for music and for people involved in it.
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: Oh, thank you, Kerrie.
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: That's really kind.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: Every Tuesday night at about 10 minutes before rehearsal, I get this wave of anxiety that no one's gonna come after all these years.
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: And then the door opens and the you know, 55 people walk in the door.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: But every single week I'll have anxiety that no one will come.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: And every week I get reassured by, oh yeah, still doing some some things that are okay, obviously.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: But I certainly have not got past that, what if maybe I'm not good enough imposter syndrome that I know we all have it and to various degrees.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: And we have to remember those moments where people roll in the door, and there's a waiting list, and the performances are amazing.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: Those are the experiences that we live for.
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: And they still want me to be out the front, they still think that's okay.
• 33:17
  Speaker: They still what you moo nwalking out the front.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: I need to practice that some more.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: I've got to see some of that.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: You don't, you really don't.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: Well Ange, to finish up our chat today, we are doing a sing-along segment.
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: And that's where the guest gets to choose the song.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: And so it could be completely random, or it could be a song that relates to whatever we're talking about today.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: So I'm wondering if you've got a song that we could sing together.
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: I've thought long and hard about this, Kerrie.
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: And I decided on a little song that's called Bring Me Little Water Sylvie.
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: And I think I've been teaching it for probably 25 years.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: But when Lisa and I went to one of the first prison choirs, we taught them a few songs and we taught them this song called Bring Me Little Water Sylvie.
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: Didn't think any more of it, la la la la la.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: On we went.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: And then the prison decided that they liked what we were doing and the women could have a small concert, obviously in the prison.
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: And we sang in the workroom, and all of the officials, so the head of corrections, basically the people who had funded this program, came as the audience, as well as the women in the workroom.
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: We got to this song called Bring Me Little Water Sylvie.
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: And as we were singing it, I suddenly was worried about the bridge of the song.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: The words go, "She brought me a little coffee, she brought me a little tea, she brought me nearly every damn thing, but she didn't bring the jail house key." And it's what was said after that that would go down in history in my brain of being the most terrified, thinking we're going to be escorted out in a paddy wagon, but it was fine.
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: But I will always tell the story of that word that the women uttered unbeknownst to Lisa and I came out.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: At the end of the line.
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: At the end of the line, there was an expletive, and we all just went, oh no.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: So maybe we'll just bleep it out, and people have to use their imagination.
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: I reckon they'll probably figure it out.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: Love it.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: Alright, shall we do this then?
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: So Bring Me Little Water Sylvie.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: We're gonna do the chorus and a verse, and then back to the chorus.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: Bring me little water Sylvie.
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: Bring me little water now.
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: Bring me little water Sylvie.
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: Every little once in a while.
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: Well she brought me a little coffee.
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: Well she brought me a little tea.
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: Well she brought me nearly every damn thing, but she didn't bring the jail house key. (....) Bring me little water Sylvie.
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: Bring me little water now.
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: Bring me little water Sylvie.
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: Every little once in a while.
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: Every little once in a while.
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: Every little once in a while.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: Love that song.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: And I wonder what uh people did with it with the bleep there at the end.
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: Take that as you like.
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: This moment was in the prison.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Hey Ange, we really appreciate you coming on the show today and talking to me about not just the different things you've done with choirs, but also your particular perspectives about choir being for the people and the mold of choir singing, needing to be flexible for whatever group so it serves the people.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: That's really, really encouraging.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on and sharing a little bit about your story.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: And we look forward to your moon walks in the future and whatever adventures come your way.
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: Thank you, Kerrie.
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: It's been a buzz talking about it.
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: I could keep on about it for hours and hours and hours, but thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about something I'm really, really passionate about still.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah awesome.
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much.
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: Thanks, Kerrie.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: Well, that was my chat with Angela Sharp, and I hope you enjoyed the conversation that we had today.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: If you did, I encourage you to spread the word and share it to other people who might be interested in hearing a little bit about our conversations, that always helps a lot.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: You can also subscribe to this podcast on whatever app it is you're listening from, and then you'll get updated whenever a new episode becomes available.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: You can also follow Midlife Choirsis on Facebook, or if you've got ideas, thoughts, or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: My email is mlchoirsispodcast@ gmail.com.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for being with me today, and I'll see you next time.