This month's blog is related to the Denmark Festival of Voice, which we went to at the beginning of the month. We stayed a week - the Festival was on during the 4 middle days - and the weather was kind, although we did have a little rain at night.
It was a fantastic festival and all of John's family were involved - Maya and Benjamin in their school choirs, Emil playing with the Denmark Senior High School bands, Silvia doing excerpts of her play (no photos or videos of that, I'm afraid, as there were too many heads in front of where we were sitting, but we bought the CD, chuckle!) and John performing with the group De Nada.
Here's some photos, mostly taken after the festival or during breaks between performances, and videos of family performances we took while we were down there.
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| Maisie, Jo and Mike at the start of the Festival - early to get good seats the the grandchildren's performances! |
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| Seagulls and a pelican on the Denmark river |
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| A busy street in Denmark town during the festival |
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| Emil and John jamming at home |
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| Maya, Benjamin and Emil cooking 'twisters' over the fire...... |
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| ....dittto - John, Benjamin, Emil and Maisie |
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| Jo cooked a roast pork dinner for us all one evening. |
Examples of John's sand printing around the town, with the machine he invented and made ....
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| ....Benjamin enjoyed helping. |
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| John with his sand printer |
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| Mike and Maisie reading through Mike's effort! |
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| John |
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| Jo |
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| Jo again |
Video clips:
Maya (far right) playing guitar and singing 'Gypsy Road' and 'Great Spirit' with the schools choir
Benjamin (2nd right) singing 'Imagine' with the school choir
Emil playing guitar and singing his own composition 'Ocean Calling'
John playing with a group called De Nada, Cathy vocals, Barry guitar on the right, though he's a bit in the dark as the lighting was not very good. They actually played 9 songs and here are clips from 3 of them.
John with De Nada playing clarinet, .....
......John now playing Ukelele.......
......and finally bass clarinet.
......John now playing Ukelele.......
......and finally bass clarinet.
As you saw in the photos, John did lots of sand printing around the town, mostly being well known sayings etc. Here's Mike having a go with John's sand printer, programmed by John to write the first four lines of a poem my sister Marion wrote while she was at school!
Here's the poem in full:
A smile is such a funny thing,
it wrinkles up your face
and when it's gone, you'll never find
it's secret hiding place.
So when you're walking down the street
and feeling rather blue,
you smile at one, he smiles at you
and thus one smile makes two!
© M.A.Russell
Apart
from all that, which we went to see, as well as many other performances
by various groups and artists, we went to a workshop with 6 Italian
singers called Compagnia Sacco who had come all the way from Ceriano.
It was a great experience and at the final show they called all the
workshops participants onto the stage to perform the song we
had learned with them. We were not allowed to take videos but here is a link to
their YouTube performances - well worth a watch.
There are lots of other clips on the right hand side of this link page.
That's all for now, until next time - enjoy!
