Singing with the Roma boys!

Our Director, Gail, has recently spent the day singing with Roma boys (and some of the wider community) at a Community event in Rotherham.

Clifton Partnership in Rotherham approached YY&M for help; they wanted to develop the activities on offer at Eastwood Village Community Centre to attract local communities to use the Centre. In recent years Roma people have come to live in the area, and the centre wanted to encourage them to visit. They already had an idea that music would be popular, but they weren’t sure exactly what to offer.

We were already working in the local school, St Ann’s Junior and Infant, on a singing and football project with Year 5 boys, many of whom were from the Roma community. We’d also been working with partners in Doncaster on a project to develop our understanding about traditional music from central Europe, and through that work we’d come into contact with Roma musicians in the area.

We offered to provide live music performances as part of the consultation, and suggested to the partnership some questions to ask in the consultation – whether people wanted music performances, and what they wanted to listen to. Or whether they wanted opportunity to make music together, and what instruments they were interested in playing.

We invited the boys from St Ann’s school to come to the event to sing with George Morton, one of the musicians working on the singing and football project, and Gail Dudson, our Director, and they all came along. We booked the Duo Khomora Roma band to play.

By the time we turned up for the event, the street outside the Community Centre was already crowded with many more people than the building could hold, but it was a warm evening so all the windows were opened so that people who couldn’t get in could at least hear. The boys from St Anne’s sang their songs beautifully, and taught Gail to say ‘Good Evening Ladies and Gentleman’ in Slovakian. Duo Khomora played traditional songs which many of the audience knew and were able to join in with, and the consultation resulted in more than 30 requests from people who wanted to play instruments in music workshops. We’ll be catching up with them in September for the next steps...