Location
Buckfastleigh, Devon (near Exeter, Plymouth &Totnes)
Buckfastleigh, Devon (near Exeter, Plymouth &Totnes)
Singing sessions for all, singing sessions for people of colour and mixed/dual heritage.
I am passionate about the healing quality that singing together can have on our sense of belonging, freedom of personal expression, and our holistic wellbeing. Singing is our birthright as is shown by all indigenous communities who still retain connection to land, elements, tribe and family. We sing because we are, and therefore group singing is a radical act to connect us with our deep innermost nature as human beings. Colonisation and capitalism have eroded our living in and as the natural state, and my aim through my work is to help us remember our innate place in the family of things through putting voice to our hearts and singing together.
After the tragic murder of George Floyd, I set up a group within the Natural Voice Network called the Anti-Racism and Cultural Honouring Group with the aim of bringing together choir and singing group leaders to raise awareness of the need for proper honouring of songs that were being taught, including proper financial remuneration for the composers and legacy communities where so much music in community choirs had come from. We had been perpetuating a culture historically, since the blossoming of community choirs in the UK, where no money was changing hands in exchange for the beauty of songs from the African diaspora, from India and from indigenous cultures. Another aim of the group was to give guidance around the importance of being truly anti-racist and inclusive in our groups such that our groups felt inclusive and welcoming for people of the global majority. This depended on the necessary personal self enquiry and excavation, and regional sub groups were organised to work through Layla Saad’s excellent guide to this work – Me and White Supremacy.
I was a trustee of the NVN for two years where I led on ARCH (Anti-Racism and Cultural Honouring) work. During my time on the board I successfully helped implement a levy fund (original inspiration from Val Regan) which allocates a proportion of membership fees to projects run by choir leaders of colour, led on the Black Lives Matter Commissioning project, which raised £26K to fund the creation of 8 new songs by black composers and helped install annual anti-racism trainings for all board members.
In the Devon area I have run workshop days solely, and also with local choir leaders Helen Yeomans, Emily Roblyn and Rob Carney (Oh Happy Day! – Gospel music singing day 2018 & Sing Africa! in 2019). I have also run the DMFC (Dartington Monday Fun Choir), which became Connecting Voices online during lockdown, and also ran the Jubilation choir in Totnes/Buckfastleigh for 3 years from 2017 – 2020.
In 2019 I set up the Soul of the City Gospel Choir in Exeter, which has established itself as one of the leading performance choirs in the area, concentrating on uplifting music of African origin – Motown, Soul, Gospel, the Spirituals. I passed this choir on to a new leader in Dec 2022. It continues to grow and flourish. During the first lockdown, my choir and I made a fundraising video for NHS Heroes Support to raise money for essential PPE for healthcare staff. We raised over £10K, and it was huge amounts of fun creating it and kept up our community spirit during this challenging time.
Over the past year I have also been growing a new strand of work which is very close to my heart and that is organising singing and sharing days for people of colour and dual/mixed heritage in Devon. A network called ‘Colourful’ has sprang from these events, which has a WhatsApp group to arrange community connections and to share news social events which people of colour can meet at. These singing days are aimed at promoting celebration and resilience for people of colour, a space where we can luxuriate in the qualities of our black and brown ancestries, and have those qualities magnified through seeing them in others. Feedback has been that these days have been very much appreciated and valued by all who have attended them. They have been funded by National Lottery Awards for All funding, and guest leaders have included Bruce Ncube (song leader) and Kennedy Chinyere (mbira player) from Zimbabwe, and Tommy Khosla (sitar player, dual heritage Indian/British). These days also provide an opportunity for people of colour to take part in circles sharing around what it is like to be a person of colour living in a rural area such as Devon. These events really have felt like a joyful healing balm for those of us of colour living in the South West.
After a very intensive few years of work, I am currently taking a sabbatical from singing leading work until Sept 2023. I very much look forward to singing with you again on my return!
