Winter Show 2018 round up

Our students have made so much progress in the last six months and worked harder than ever to prepare for their show this winter. Due to the heavy snowfall in North London back in December 2017, we had to postpone the event by one whole month! A hard but wise decision; the roads were so slippery it was too treacherous to venture up and down the hill unless you could ride in a sleigh. So after the Christmas holidays we re-grouped and by this time we were super-ready. More challenges came to our club though in the shape of nasty viruses we caught and sadly one adult student could not make it to the final performance, which was such a shame after all the preparation that went into the song. The Show did go on, my very own virus toggled along with me uninvited and did the best it could to disrupt me, but first off were our four fabulous Ukulittles, who played three songs altogether in their glittery star shaped masks. They just looked and sounded beautiful. For all of them, except Timmy, this was their first public performance with their ukuleles after picking it up for the very first time last summer. They had previously met and played with each other at the Ukulittle parties I run for them twice a term, which are a great opportunity, on top of their weekly individual lesson, for them to meet other ukulele players in their age group. Then it was first, second and third year students all opening together with an anthem type song called 'Waving Flag' brought to us by talented special needs school teacher – and now also my ukulele student! – Sandra. We also had a drum box for some of the students and teachers to play, which was a lots of fun to try out and added extra rhythm and dynamics to the ensemble pieces. It followed an eclectic mix of unique covers by favourite musicians and iconic bands that have influenced our generation as teachers and parents and have captured the imagination of our juniors too. From The Who to The Beatles and Cat Stevens to Roger Miller we ended by launching into a Chuck Berry tribute with Rock'n'Roll music. All students were fantastic. They worked with enthusiasm and commitment to achieve the amazing results at their showcase last Sunday. This meant they practised every day throughout the term to learn chord progressions, strumming patterns and songs structures, solos, lyrics, voice warm ups and forward projection, arpeggios and finger-picking parts. Once the songs were memorised to a confident standard during one-to-one lessons, we shared and practised altogether as group. We did voice and body warmups to promote mindfulness and get rid of stage nerves, built in additional stage skills, where on top of playing the ukulele and singing, we came up with fun moves. Working to a goal such as a show or a recording really helps everyone come together as well as creating a community feel. A heartfelt thanks goes to all the parents for helping out heaps on the day, supporting their children throughout their music journey with us, to Emily Byron, Principal of NLPAC, to my mega-talented collaborators, teacher Luca Comencini and patron Alexander Karl Gold, to the lovely Persia who provided much needed logistic support, to delightful Kim, who compèred the show and video producer Zac Denman for filming and editing our videos. Please don't forget to visit our Instagram, Twitter and Facebook feeds, and for those who were not able to come on the day click on this link to watch us on our You Tube Channel.