Would you give up most of a year of your life to travel the world teaching and performing music? That's what Judith Clingan was asking for and she found a group of people willing and able to do just that. They will take part in the biggest ever tour of her long-running Wayfarers Australia performance project, which she began in 1997.
She's spent the past two years travelling around Australia to rehearse with 23 singers, actors and instrumentalists, ranging in age from 12 to 70, who are now in Canberra.
For their first month they are acting as tutors for Imagine Music Theatre, a holiday workshop for children which Clingan has run since 1994. But, she says, she's never run it in quite this way before. ''I have at my disposal as assistants and teachers 23 amazingly clever, creative and talented people who will tour with me all the year.''
Imagine, she says, ''is a bringing together of things I happen to really love''.
Combining music - both sung and instrumental - language and theatre, the workshops being held at Orana School in Weston are in full swing. The first two weeks included children dramatising such works as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. This week - the third - children aged from five to nine will sing, play percussion and other instruments and mime, as the Wayfarers portray, through music and blackboard drawing, the fable of creation in a new piece by Clingan.
And next week (from January 23) they will help children aged from eight to 16 learn to sing, dance and work on the production of Clingan's 1990 work Kakadu, about life in Australia before the coming of white settlers. Places in some of these sessions are still available.
After the children's workshops, the Wayfarers will spend the next two months rehearsing and performing in Canberra the pieces that will be taken on tour.
The concert series begins in March with 1000 Years, a survey of European music from AD1000 to AD2000. It will also include The Planet We Share, featuring music by Australian composers including Clingan, and My Spirit Rejoices, a concert of sacred music centred on Bach's cantata Jesu, meine Freude, and a children's program, The Dancing Wombat.
After Easter the Wayfarers will spend seven weeks touring south-eastern Australia before embarking on an international tour. It's a huge commitment, and not just in time, for the participants. ''Some had to sell a house to come,'' Clingan says. ''People have rented their houses, stopped studying. They've had to leave a job, even leave a spouse.''
They will perform in Taiwan, China, Mongolia, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, Britain and Ireland and finally two weeks in India before they head home at the end of October.
Participants will pay for their major plane fares but other expenses will be covered by performing concerts, teaching, and conducting workshops along the way. Arrangements have been made with schools, community choirs and churches in various countries.
''Our hosts will very often be Steiner schools, as I have been working as a teacher and music consultant in Steiner schools in both Australia and New Zealand,'' Clingan says.
And it's coming together.
''By the time we set off we'll have seven-eighths of it set up,'' she says. ''The other eighth - I have no idea! I hope we'll be able to set something up - or we'll busk.''
Clingan has been a significant figure in the Canberra music and performance world and beyond for the past five decades. Her many ACT activities have included founding and directing the Canberra Children's Choir (now Canberra Youth Singers), Gaudeamus ACT (now Music for Everyone) and Carers Choir Canberra as well as being co-director of A Chorus of Women from 2003 to 2009. And that only covers some of her activities.
Asked why she is so heavily involved in performing and teaching in Canberra, Australia and internationally, she says, ''I heard a lovely phrase in an interview on the ABC with the cellist Howard Penny. He said, 'I just want to share the joy'.''
It's a sentiment with which Clingan wholeheartedly agrees. ''I love performing; I love sharing.''
For more information about the Wayfarers Australia workshops, forthcoming Canberra performances and the tour email info@wayfarersaustralia.org or visit www.wayfarersaustralia.org
.gif)
