piaf 2003/04/05

Martin Meader conducting the 1000 voice choir at the Perth Concert Hall for the 2004 Perth International Arts Festival.

..Opening Event
Journey Home February 6th 2004, Forecourt Perth Concert Hall

To celebrate the Festival theme of Journey, the Perth International Arts Festival assembled a massed choir of over a thousand voices to sing three folk songs of travel and homecoming as part of the Festival's Opening Event was on February 6, 2004. Today, for so many people, the simple phrase “going home” implies a journey, internally and externally, of unimaginably epic proportions. This part of the Opening Event was our gesture of support for the many people around the world who, due to war, poverty or oppression, are far from home. This emotional soundscape was accompanied by epic images of Journey created by projection artist Ian de Gruchy. Martin Meader was one of the conductors for this 1,000 voice choir.

..Perth, Western Australia February 2004
In recent months an international movement of Flash Mobs has swept the globe, in Munich, London, New York and Melbourne people have spontaneously gathered in mobs in department stores, railway stations and shopping malls, there for some minutes then dispersed. The Perth International Arts Festival in 2004 unleashed the next global craze - Flash Choirs. Spontaneously seemingly ordinary folk gathered in the Hay Street Mall and Myers to burst into harmony for one or two numbers then instantly dispersed.

The Perth International Arts Festival sent two of Australia’s leading Chorus Directors (Martin Meader and Rosie Johnstone) to develop a Kalgoorlie community choir over the period of the Festival. Rehearsing at the Kalgoorlie Performing Arts Centre, intensive singing workshops for the choir culminated in one massed choir performance accompanying a lantern parade of in excess of 150 Kalgoorlie Boulder school children to close the Kalgoorlie activity of the Festival.

The Real Sing perform Dvorak's Largo from the New World Symphony at the launch of the 2004 Perth International Arts Festival, held November 10th 2003 at the Perth Concert Hall