culture
Show Choir Canada Nationals Hit Toronto
This weekend, glee choirs from high schools across Canada will compete in Toronto for the country's top jazz-handing honour.
2011 Wexford Collegiate photo courtesy of Victoria Schwarzl/DanCap Productions
Show Choir Canada Finals
Sony Centre for the Performing Arts (1 Front Street East)
Saturday April 14, 2p.m.
$18
The 2nd Annual Show Choir Canada championships are happening Saturday, and the event should more or less resemble what any casual viewer of the television show Glee might expect: high schoolers in costumes, dancing and singing, and possible variations of “spirit fingers” thrown into the mix for good measure.
What won’t be seen is the exhaustive preparation and behind-the-scenes drama leading up to the big, $25,000 prize event.
“The prep has been pretty extensive,” says Barbara Johnston, whose Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts show choir—the Wexford Gleeks—took first place at last year’s championships. In anticipation of this weekend’s big day, the students have been pulling after-school rehearsals five days per week and going over routines during their lunch breaks.
“Most of the kids don’t get more than five minutes to eat their lunches. And most of the staff, we eat while we work.”
For Pamela Maxwell-Steele, a drama teacher at York Mills Collegiate Institute and the director of the school’s Cheat Notes show choir, the process of preparing her group for Saturday’s championships has been challenging for an additional reason.
“In January was when we went full-out [with the prep process],” says Maxwell-Steele. “And then I was diagnosed with breast cancer.”
At first, the diagnosis seemed promising. At this early stage of discovery the cancer would, presumably, be easily removed. But then, following initial surgery, physicians discovered cancerous cells had spread to Maxwell-Steele’s lymph nodes. They would have to be taken out.
“My last day of school was February 15, and I talked to the kids in my grade 12 drama class—I have some of my show choir kids in that—and I said, ‘Guys, I’m going to have to stop glee,’” she recalls. “Instantly, I had two girls [volunteer to] take it over.”
With the students rehearsing after school and on their own time, without the supervision of their instructor, Maxwell-Steele is impressed by how far how they’ve come on their own.
“These kids are absolutely incredible,” she says, noting that the students have taken to self-organized Saturday rehearsals on the school’s back field in recent weeks, in a final pre-show push. “I said to them the other day, ‘You guys are my inspiration.’ They say I am theirs, but they are mine. What they have done is absolutely phenomenal. I’m so proud of them and how far they’ve come.”
Johnston, too, is pleased with the impact of her school’s show choir on the students involved. “High school is a really challenging time for a lot of people,” she says. “What glee groups do, what the arts do in general in schools, is provide a home for people when they otherwise feel they don’t have a place where they feel safe and comfortable. It gives them focus.”