Welcome to Term 2
We have lots to look forward to this term including 25 Winter Showcase Concerts across the country in June. We sincerely hope that all of our girls will have fun refining their performance items in class and at their production rehearsals.
The Winter Showcase will be held over the weekend of June 3 and 4 at George Wood Performing Arts Centre at Yarra Valley Grammar School in Ringwood.
Saturday June 3 – All choristers from Berwick, Box Hill, Glen Waverley and Ringwood venues including Camerata Burwood East and Performing Choir
Sunday June 4 – All choristers from Caulfield North, Cheltenham, Essendon, Greensborough, Heidelberg, Ivanhoe, Kew and Yarraville venues including Camerata Kew and Performing Choir
All performance and ticketing details will be sent to you next week.
We’re confident that the girls will be looking forward to performing in front of big audiences and we hope that they’ll enjoy all aspects of preparing for the shows. For parents of girls who are new to the organisation, we’re sure you understand that rehearsing for a performance involves some repetition. While there is still plenty of variety in classes, we have found that for some girls their enthusiasm can wane. Should this be the case for your daughter, we encourage you to talk to your Venue Manager or your daughter’s Tutor as we can help to keep the girls engaged. Shorter days and cooler weather can mean that staying home is more appealing for some than going out. Please aim for your daughter to attend weekly as consistency is undoubtedly the best plan.
Another aspect of returning to pre-COVID activities is that we’re busily planning tours for our senior girls. In September, we’ll be touring for the first time since 2019 and the selected girls and staff members are starting to get excited. 58 girls will undertake a two week tour to South Australia while 56 Performing choristers will be singing and dancing their way through a three week tour to France and Italy.
Ahead of these tours though, we’re especially excited to be undertaking our second ‘reverse’ Travel Program. Many families are committed supporters of Girls from Oz, our official charity partner and we are very grateful for the growing interest that AGC families are showing in g-oz. Each year girls from our remote communities travel to a capital city for a week of educational and employment activities and the week culminates in a performance with the AGC. We’re looking forward to having our Lockhart River and Kowanyama girls spend a week in Brisbane (Nov 13-20) while the Halls Creek, Carnarvon and Bidyadanga girls will spend a week in Perth from October 30 to November 6. The two way learning that is experienced on Travel Programs is invaluable. We’re proud to be taking 12 senior AGC girls to Carnarvon in May and this reverse Travel Program will coincide with National Reconciliation Week. The theme this year is Be a Voice for Generations which speaks to our long standing charity partner relationship.
At a recent meeting ASPA Board members unanimously agreed that we support the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through a Voice to Parliament. We embarked on our Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) journey in 2022. Long before this journey began, ASPA Directors founded Girls from Oz Ltd (g-oz), a not-for-profit sister organisation to the Australian Girls Choir (AGC), with the goal of delivering high quality performing arts education to First Nations girls in remote communities. This 15 year old philanthropic partnership has seen company directors, staff team members and choristers in the AGC learn so much as we’ve travelled to remote parts of this country to join in song with communities in Western Australia and on Cape York in Queensland. Hundreds of AGC families have benefitted from welcoming g-oz girls into their homes and reliably comment about how much they’ve learned about the country in which they live. In the beginning we had high hopes and accurately predicted many things about how this this relationship would grow but we didn’t know just how much two way learning would happen. This formalising of our commitment to reconciliation is an important but also natural next step for us. We are committed to continue walking together with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in a movement “of the Australian people for a better future”.
