July 27, 2016
Making Music at Making Days: South
By Debbie Hodges who attends Making Days: South, with support from staff member Emma Bannon.
Today is concert day at Making Days South. Everybody involved are so happy and full of fun this morning. We are having a rehearsal to make sure our performance is the best it can be. The atmosphere is electric and you can feel how excited everybody is.
Rehearsal is very loud, there are songs being sung and instruments being played, the room is filled with sunshine coming through the window. All our groups practised their performances with determination and pride. We also had to organise our decorations. We made all of these ourselves in our art groups and our spare time over several weeks. We made flowers with paper tissues and wooden sticks, our floristry tutor Jane helped us arrange these. The Spanish bunting was made from fabric and we cut these out and glued different colours together. We made Spanish flags also from card. The group designed and made our own order of service cards.
It is just before lunch and we are all resting our voices. We used this time to take our decorations down to the hall at Bridge Chapel. Here with support from our staff we are decorating the stage. We also have to set up tea, coffee, fruit, pastries, and biscuits for our audience on the tables.
We have had lunch early and made our way down to the hall to meet our music tutor Will.
Parents and Carers started to arrive and we all assembled in our sections for our performances.
The performance started with an introduction about the concert and all the work that had gone into making this happen.
Order of service was as follows:
Folk Choir-You Are My Sunshine
Nicholas Crowe- She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain
Marlene Vines- Hey Jude
Spanish Group- Hola a Todos (Spanish Greeting Song)
Making Days Choir: Living Doll, 8 Days A Week, Summer Holiday
And a special version of You’ll Never Walk Alone which was dedicated to the families of those that lost loved ones at Hillsborough on service users requests.
The concert itself ran perfectly and everybody was really proud, the folk group got the party started the soloists were so confident and pitch perfect at every verse. The choir ended the concert on a fabulous high note. While the Spanish group added a touch of flare and culture in-between.
Our other friends came down to support us in the audience and they were singing along and dancing some of them even joined us on the stage at the end. It was so lovely to see all our hard work and effort pay off. Parents and Carers were taking photographs, recording videos, clapping cheering and singing along. Some of us found it very emotional and overwhelming with the responses we got from our audience. We loved it. Our close friend Marilyn Bracey came and visited too, she had to unfortunately leave the service, so it was beautiful to see her sitting on the front row supporting us all.
As much as we all worked together as friends and with our tutors to make our performance perfect, our support staff over nearly 2months gave us lots of confidence, encouragement and guidance with all the elements of the concert. They supported us to bring our ideas to life and were always there when we needed them even when we were nervous during our performance they were right behind us on the stage with encouraging words and calmed our nerves.
The end of the concert Pam Doyle gave a speech thanking us all for our performances and a thank you to everybody who attended in the audience.
After the concert we chatted with our friends, our family and carers before re-joining all our other friends and staff back in our day service. It was a beautiful end to our day.