It is not often you get to see things from both sides.
As a member of the QPAC choir, I recently participated in the Songs of Hope and Healing concert, performing a few choir songs and This is Me as the backing choir to Isaiah. It was a concert I would have liked to have watched myself and I felt that I almost did that, planting as I did, my daughter in the audience.
She was visiting for a few weeks from her home in Berlin and was most gracious about watching her old mother lurching her way around the songs. Her enthusiasm to see her mother perform is not always shared by the rest of the family who spend a good amount of time themselves on QPAC stages as members of Opera Queensland and The Ten Tenors and who are watched most avidly by myself.
But I digress. There I was trying not to do the Muller under-the-chin secret wave, trying to remember the words and the harmonies and when to stand, not unlike my time as a fledgling Coorparoo Music Maker back in the 1960s.
My daughter was most complimentary giving me her critique of the performance, including my own (apparently I mostly opened my mouth at the right times). And as she spoke to me of the joy of watching a community on the stage, I realised that seeing this particular concert from both sides represented in fact a microcosm of the whole concept of the show. This was a show intended to open people’s eyes to “both sides”.
Songs for Health and Healing was a benefit concert towards creative arts and health programs for young people with a refugee background. The program featured the brillliance of Vietnamese born Hoang Pham, Zimbabwe born Tichawona Mashawa and Tibetan composer Tenzin Choegyal. The world is richer for these people and their talent, talent that has been spun here in Australia but originates from another place. And here they were sharing their talent and being watched by fellow refugees in the audience.
The circle broadened as we learned more about the program and how it affects and assists. The audience benefited by the performance and the performance benefited those in the audience. Songs of Hope and Healing may have been designed to assist refugees, but it dragged in many people in its wash. I think it gve hope and healing to us all, myself and my daughter included.
