The Waikato Show

From Eight to Eighty - A retirement village choir and a primary school combine to enchant the crowds

The sensational Eight to Eighty concert first delighted crowds at the Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival in 2010 and will feature at this month's New Waikato Show.

This year’s Eighty choir are made up of members of the Vision Forest Lake Senior Singers, a choir of nearly 30 singers, who sing a wide variety of styles of music, the Hilda Ross Glee Club have contributed five singers, also in the group are the Rotokauri Festival Singers, an auditioned choir of 22, who sang at the Gardens Arts Festival and 12 talented children from Hamilton’s Rotokauri School.

Founder of the joint choirs, Dr Julie Jackson-Gough, who was a senior lecturer in music education with the University of Waikato’s faculty of education for 15 years, said she was impressed after hearing the Rotokauri Tuis sing in a Sunday Showcase concert in 2009 with various choirs from around Hamilton, and subsequently gave them some tuition in singing technique.

Songs at the New Waikato Show will be a combination, and there will be opportunity for the audience to join in with the choruses of the Music Hall songs, such as “My old man said ‘follow the van’”, “Sister Suzie’s sewing shirts for soldiers” and “I do like to be beside the seaside”. The You/me songs will tug at your heartstrings as you see the children and the seniors interacting as the younger and older voices enhance each other. The sum, says Julie, is greater than the parts.

“There is a unique delight in this sound, that brings much joy to the audience,” she says. “And the benefits of the concert experience are far more than the actual performance.

“Firstly there are the relationships established between the girls and the 80 choir members, who are effectively the age of their great-grandparents. Whether or not these are ongoing, the interaction has happened and the children have been able to find out how competent these ‘old people’ are and they enjoy the relationship that have developed between themselves and their buddies and the feeling has been mutual."

One Eighty choir singer said: “I felt, at first, that it was going to be a bit of a shambles with the children so excited, and they were going to be, you know, dashing around madly with great excitement. But when it came to the actual time, they just pulled themselves into line. We took up their exuberance with our singing.”

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