Creativity Australia News

Diversity is a Big Part of Who We Are – Liz Lipski on St Kilda Sings

November 5, 2012

Do you sing in the shower? Or was the school choir the last time you opened your mouth in song? Well, guess what? It doesn’t matter. If you like to sing, come along to St Kilda Sings choir nights, at 12 Chapel Street, St Kilda. You do not have to have a trained voice!

We meet on Monday evenings from 6.15pm to 7.30pm, have a sing, then this is followed by a scrumptious supper. And at the end of every term, we have an informal soiree for friends and family, followed by an even better supper! We also perform at events in St Kilda like the Homeless Memorial.

Currently, we are practicing for a massive end-of-year concert to be held in the Melbourne Town Hall. Some of the songs we’re rehearsing include: Let the River Run, Africa (Toto), We are Australian, Imagine, Siyahamba (African) and some of the songs we’ve sung this year include El Ritmo de la Noce, Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel, Inanay (Indigenous) and Tears in Heaven to name a few.

Our members come from all walks of life. There are students, pharmacists, a youth worker, a yoga teacher, an ESL teacher, retirees—you name it. Diversity is a big part of who we are. Here’s some of what our members have said about being part of St Kilda Sings:

‘The music (we sing) stays with me all week!’

‘I love the complex harmonies…they sound magical.’

‘(I love) the people who are so generous with their voices and with their spirits.’

‘Singing makes me feel very grounded. I also enjoy the social aspects, including the tea and snacks.’

‘I love singing in such a supportive environment.’

Our conductor this year is Marianne Black, who is a born teacher, and who only gives us as much as we can handle. Her musical knowledge and experience are very impressive, so we know we are in excellent hands.

Come along! You’ll enjoy it!

Written by Liz Lipski, member of St Kilda Sings.

Pozible – Get Rewarded In More Ways Than One!

November 5, 2012

Get discounted With One BIG Voice concert tickets and some awesome rewards through our Pozible campaign! Click here to see how you can get involved!

Pozible is an online crowd funding platform that allows individuals to help fund creative projects and ideas, making great things possible.

Creative Universe Gala Dinner: Who Will You See There?

November 5, 2012

As part of the Creative Innovation Conference which features over 40 world class Australian and international keynote speakers, leaders, artists and thinkers, Creative Universe will be hosting a Gala Dinner.  We would like to invite all of Creativity Australia’s partners, members and supporters to book a table and be part of this very special evening.

The Gala Dinner will take place at the Sofitel Melbourne on Collins Grand Ballroom, and the fine food and wine will be complemented by outstanding entertainment; including Creativity Australia’s own Heidelberg and Melbourne Sings choirs, sensational Australian group Pot-Pourri (recently named Australian Event Entertainers of the Year) and brilliant pianist Stefan Cassomenos.

Aside from enjoying a spectacular evening, there will be chance to rub shoulders with a number of the Ci2012 keynote speakers, who will be attending the event as guests and hosting tables.  Imagine sharing a fantastic dinner with Baroness Susan Greenfield (UK), or having a drink with Google CTO Michael T. Jones (USA)!

The dinner will support Creativity Australia’s With One Voice program – supporting the running of our 13 choirs across Victoria, 1 in Sydney and 1 in Canberra.  To help us sustain and continue to grow the With One Voice choirs, join us at the Gala Dinner and feast your eyes on the marvellous entertainment, the fabulous food and the feeling of knowing you are a part of something great – when many diverse voices come together as “one voice” on a regular basis the outcomes are transformational!

Thursday 29^th November
7.00 – 11.00pm
Sofitel Melbourne on Collins, Grand Ballroom
25 Collins Street, Melbourne

Individual tickets are $250 each (incl. a $150 tax-deductible donation) and Corporate Tables of 10 are $5,000 (incl. a $4000 tax-deductible donation)

Click here to book your tickets!

Song-Speak: Singing Your Way Back To Speaking

November 5, 2012

Imagine having just completed a 28 km run in preparation for a marathon; you’d be bursting with energy and vitality and feeling pretty much on top of the world. It’s hard to contemplate that world caving in but that’s precisely what happened to Tim Adam and his family two years ago when, without warning, he had a stroke. He woke up several weeks later, paralyzed on his right side and having lost the ability to speak. The latter condition, non-fluent aphasia, is a common byproduct of a stroke affecting the left frontal lobe of the brain, which is where the language and speech production faculties reside. Tim’s wife, Julie, thought she’d never hear Tim’s voice again until the day she walked into his hospital room and heard Tim singing along to a song on the radio. When Julie informed the staff neurologist of this incredible development, he matter-of-factly said, “It’s well known that music is on the other side of the brain.”

We humans take all kinds of things for granted. Most people know virtually nothing about the brain that controls every aspect of our being. Changing this and enhancing lives is at the heart of the Music, Mind and Wellbeing initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration at the University of Melbourne that looks at the fascinating collisions of social import at the intersection of music, psychology and neuroscience. An abiding tenet is that music is central to human life, and in Find Your Singing Voice, the third public talk in the Music on the Mind series, Sarah Wilson, a neuropsychologist and the director of MMW, presented research findings that deepen an appreciation of what music and singing do for us.

When that staff neurologist matter-of-factly said that music is on the other side of the brain, he was saying that physically separate parts of the brain are concerned with music and language. Comparing the brain scans of individuals making sentences to the scans of their brains making melody, it is apparent that language ‘lives’ on the left and music ‘lives’ on the right but the regions are side-by-side and there is some degree of overlap. MMW has been carrying out clinical studies to explore how the overlap changes when the individual has different skills or training in vocal singing. What brain imaging tells us is that singing training does make a difference; singing becomes more specialized in the brain. With less training, there is more overlap, more activation at the front of the brain, as the individual is largely singing with their language network. With voice training, the singing network is developed and overlap is reduced. The key question then becomes this one: since singing training changes the brain, what can it do to change the brain after a brain injury? Can singing be used to bootstrap language networks when they have been severely damaged?

Following a therapy called Melodic Intonation, the stroke patient sings with words, intones with words then speaks those words, in face-to-face sessions with the researcher and practicing alone with DVD aides. After six weeks of this training, scans of Tim’s brain showed significant difference in brain function, the front of the brain activating in areas more associated with speech patterns in normal brains. It looks as though singing and voice training have figured in this and Tim and Julie certainly believe it has. In addition, they believe in the benefit of joining a choir and singing in a group. Tim has recently joined the Stroke A Chord choir and the members, who are all affected by aphasia, enjoy making music in each other’s enthusiastic and supportive company. Some members have not recovered their speech and particularly for them, “Where words fail, music speaks”(Hans Christian Andersen).

Written by Miriam Potter, member of Melbourne Sings.

Hume Sings update

October 26, 2012

Hello Hume Singers,

Have you checked out our Pozible campaign?  Pozible is an online ‘crowdfunding’ website where individuals contribute to creative projects and ideas.  Click here to check out our campaign and help produce the With One BIG Voice concert, and earn some rewards for your contribution – including discounted With One BIG Voice concert tickets! Please pass the campaign on through your networks – time is running out!  If we don’t reach our target, then we will receive none of the pledges made – and you miss out on discounted tickets!!

With One BIG Voice update:
You can download a With One BIG Voice concert poster here.

Don’t forget the deadline for returning your ticket envelopes to your conductor is Monday 12th November.  If every member sells 3 tickets, then you’ll have a full house to perform to!

The Best Years Of My Life- Ray McAlary, Footscray Sings

October 8, 2012

Late last year my Fiancée, Denise, and I were invited by friends to attend the ‘With One BIG Voice’ Concert at Melbourne Town Hall. We were singing with a Community Choir at the time but that Choir had lost its direction and no longer was fulfilling our needs. We left the Town Hall that day with a firm commitment to be part of the family that is ‘With One Voice.’

What inspired us, apart from the beautiful music, was hearing the stories of Choir members of how the program changed their lives, gave new Migrants a place where they were included, helped struggling people find the education and employment they needed to fulfil their lives, and treated all people equally.

My background has included 32 years helping people find jobs, specialising in the employment of Migrants and people with Disabilities. I have involved myself in Community Organisations for many years. Denise has a talent for including lonely and needy people in her life. Here was a beacon shining its light for us. We joined ‘Footscray Sings.’

Singing has been part of my life as long as I remember. I love to sing solo or in groups. As a Choir, there is the added advantage of performing and brightening the lives of people for whom we perform. I get a buzz out of creating enjoyment for others. If I can make a slight change in the lives of other people, I have made my life worthwhile.

‘Footscray Sings’ is a very happy, friendly group that includes anyone who comes along. We have people from various Ethnic backgrounds, and a wide age spectrum. What binds us together is the love of singing. Our Conductor, Bridget, is an effervescent person who brings out the best in us without seeming to push us hard, but we learn things very quickly. I love this atmosphere as Bridget’s upbeat style helps me to bring out the best in myself and challenge myself to achieve more in my music.

I think the main benefit I get from Footscray Sings is good mental health. Whatever worries I have in life seem to disappear while I am with the Choir, either singing or chatting over supper. When I leave the Choir I seem to take extra strength with me that will help me deal with any problems that arise. I am inspired by members of the Choir who have their health problems, but contribute to the Choir as if there is nothing wrong in their lives. We follow up on members who have not come for a few weeks in case there is something we can do to help them. One of our members was recently in Hospital for a long stretch. When we found out where she was, one of the members went to see her with a gift, and a card signed by all the Choir. Just a little thing but it says, “We care for you.”

Since joining ‘Footscray Sings’ I have embarked on a Charity Fundraising project that has been on my back burner for nine years. I had wondered if I was capable of fulfilling my dream. Since joining ‘Footscray Sings’ I feel that I am capable of achieving anything I am prepared to put my mind to. If others leading harder lives than mine can achieve, so can I.

I love my Choir. I love the Creativity Australia program. These are the best years of my life.

Written by Ray McAlary.

Moved By Music: Is It What You Think?

October 4, 2012

If you think Melbourne is marvellous (I do), it could be because Melbourne is both mindful and musical. By mindful, I mean that this city is serious about exploring all aspects of our world, trying to understand how things work so they can be made to work better for us, its inhabitants. Applying those insights has certainly helped Melbourne develop into the World’s Most Livable City and it’s not by chance that music figures strongly in Melbourne life. We all know music is important to wellbeing but there’s much yet to learn about the precise ways the two are linked. Some groundbreaking research into this complex relationship is going on here in marvellous Melbourne. There’s University of Melbourne’s Music, Mind & Wellbeing initiative (MMW), linking neuroscience with music and social wellbeing through collaborations across the music, science, health, education, and industry domains. And at the Melbourne Recital Centre, the Music On The Mind series contemplates the relationship between music, the human brain and the human experience from several interesting angles.

The latest lecture in the Music On The Mind series is Moved by Music, which was delivered by Professor Jane Davidson on September 25th. Davidson presented an arsenal of information to stimulate thinking about musical performance and the movements that musicians make. The talk opened with videos of spontaneous musical play and movement ‘culture lessons’ in South Africa, one of the many societies where there is no word in the language to distinguish music from movement. Music and rhythm optimize performance and synchronization of tasks, so in an ensemble, how does individual artistic expression work? Davidson suggests that expressive gesture, the movements that musicians make in the process of making music, is the key. Expressive gestures are readable, shareable, distinctive and necessary. To make a musical sound involves some movement, additional movement is the expressive component or gesture that often conveys an intention. This is something unique to an individual that other musicians and audience members must recognize, decode and internalize. Davidson introduced musical expression studies that seem to indicate this is precisely what happens. Davidson concedes that the academic researcher’s explanation is only partial because the more we learn, the more questions there are to be asked about what remains unexplained. A well-known jazz musician was more pragmatic when he said that movement simply helps get the music out. And perhaps it’s the same situation in reverse on the receiving end; the toe tapping helps the listener to get the music in. What we know without a doubt is that’s hard not to be moved by music and that thinking about it makes us understand a lot more about ourselves in the world.

The next lecture in the series is Find Your Singing Voice:
What happens in the brain when we sing? Singing and speaking are our two main forms of communicating with sound yet we still know very little about how they are related in the brain. This presentation reviews what we do know about the brain when we sing, speak, or sing with words. The findings are important for understanding how the brain changes with singing training, and how we can use singing to retrain the brain to speak after injury.

Written by Miriam Potter.

ADEC “One Destination: Different Journeys” Forum

October 4, 2012

Action on Disability within Ethnic Communities (ADEC) is proud to announce their upcoming Mental Health Forum “One Destination: Different Journeys” on the 17th of October 2012 at Bell City Event Centre, Preston.

The forum will explore and acknowledge the importance of beliefs, cultural practices and traditions dealing with mental illness and well being within ethnic communities. Consumers and carers from ethnic backgrounds will share their lived experiences during the session. The forum will showcase some of the cultural practices and highlight their importance to people from different communities. An Expo of Mental Health and Multicultural Services will also be on display.

The forum will also feature a range of speakers, including Karen Toohey Acting Commissioner – Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, Mr Arnold Zable – Award winning Australian writer, educator and human rights advocate, and consumers and carers, from culturally and lingusic diverse backgrounds.

You can register here, or download a flyer here.

ADEC aims to empower people with disabilities from ethnic backgrounds, their carers and families to fully participate as members of the Victorian community, ensuring that service systems are inclusive and responsive to their needs.

Contact ADEC for further information about their services or the Forum here.

Sorghum Sisters Support St Kilda Sings

October 4, 2012

Pictured L-R: Souzet, Samya, Nina, Nuria and Rahma in the Sorghum Sisters Kitchen

We are proud to announce that thanks to AMES Social Enterprise, the ever-popular Sorghum Sisters will be providing the St Kilda Sings choir with supper! The sell-out Sorghum Sisters special dining events as part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival have added to their reputation for quality food and great services, providing a mix of modern and classic Horn of Africa cuisine.

The pioneering Sorghum Sisters was founded in 2005, and comprise of Siti Ibrahim, Nuria Khalil and Rahma Ibrahim, all of whom were refugees from the Horn of Africa. Aside from providing an excellent catering service, the Sorghum Sisters are constantly involved in a diverse range of local community projects – including a offering a 12 month traineeship in Certificate II in Hospitality, provide Injera bread for local African communities and make healthy (and tasty!) lunches for the Carlton and South Brunswick Primary Schools.

The Sorghum Sisters not only prepare incredible meals, but also work tirelessly to preserve the traditional recipes, which have been handed down through the generations!  The recipes have never been written down, but have been lovingly taught by grandmothers and mothers over time.  The Sisters cook as their grandmothers did, preparing and cooking everything from scratch, again proving the dedication the Sisters have to sharing truly authentic and delicious food – cooked from the heart.

Welcome aboard, Sorghum Sisters!

With One BIG Voice 2012 – Tickets on Sale!!

October 2, 2012

You’re sitting in the dark.

There isn’t a sound to be heard until the pitter-patter of rain begins.

Lights flash before your eyes, and that gentle pitter-patter turns into a deep, thunderous rumble. The lights continue to flash and your eyes dart left to right, madly trying to find the source of that rumble.

Those brief flashes of light slowly turn into one continuous glow, and as your eyes begin to focus, the voices stream from across the room and come together as one, singing the opening lines of Toto’s Africa…You may need to see it to believe it.

Suddenly you hurtle back down to earth, safe from the thunder inside the Melbourne Town Hall and gaze at the 400 singers before you.

When was the last time you stopped to listen to someone’s story? Join us at Creativity Australia’s annual With One BIG Voice concert and be inspired by the uplifting voices of over 400 people, the emotional stories and timeless songs from our 14 With One Voice choirs from Melbourne and Sydney. Listen as the choir members tell their stories – proving that there is always far, far more to any person than what meets the eye.

Need more? Click here to read more about last years concert, and have a look at our video gallery and photo gallery!

When: Sunday December 2nd
Time: 3.30 – 6.00pm
Where: Melbourne Town Hall, 90/120 Swanston Street Melbourne 3000

Click here to get your tickets today!

Download the Press Release here.

CREATIVE INNOVATION 2012 Asia Pacific Gala Dinner

September 10, 2012

Sowing Seeds – A Feature On Shaun Islip

September 6, 2012

I love stories. I believe in the idea of stories being able to show us what it means to be human. One person’s story can be unique and very different from our own and yet its deeper meanings we know and feel in our bones. I think that is universally true; we can all understand another’s personal experience in some important and mutually enriching way. Shaun Islip, our fearless choirmaster, participates in an interview.

Miriam: We probably all have little stories that family or friends like to trot out and tell about us. Sometimes they capture something about our true character that was clearly evident at an early age. Do you have a story like that?

Shaun: Not exactly but there’s a recent experience I’ve had that I think is that kind of a story. When I was 8 or 9, my mum enrolled me in a church choir, in Durban, South Africa. The choirmaster introduced us to all kinds of beautiful religious works and I built up a huge background that embedded itself through music. It wasn’t until my late 20s that my faith firmed but looking back now, I see that the seeds had been sown at an early age. I didn’t stay in contact with the choirmaster but just a few weeks ago, I went to tea at the home of a cellist I have come to know. She is from South Africa and I told her about seeds being sown through my choir experience and she talked about her dad and his church, St Paul’s in Durban. It turned out that her dad and my choirmaster were one and the same. I realised I was carrying the mantle and it was now me who was sowing seeds. It was confirmation and affirmation of who I am and my mission.

Miriam: When did you know that music was going to be something of defining importance to you and what form did that realisation take?

Shaun: Music has always been a big part of my life. It is a precious gift that I never take for granted. I have experienced and observe daily its power to unite, to uplift, to bring joy, inspiration, healing and hope. It is such a privilege to help others discover and enjoy this amazing gift for themselves.

Miriam: What would be one of your favourite sayings? Does it influence how you face challenges?

Shaun: It would be a saying by a Christian martyr who reached out to a tribe and who ultimately was killed by that tribe. He said, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose.” This is about the promise of Eternal Life, in the face of all the questions for which mankind has no answer. These words are a source of strength and reassurance; they reaffirm where I am going so I can help others through encouragement, inspiration and care. I am sowing seeds of hope in the footsteps of my choirmaster, Errol Slatter.

Written by Miriam Potter, and thank you to Shaun Islip.