BCC joins the Boston Arts Academy!

Guest Writer: Grace Thompson

On Thursday April 17th and Friday April 18th, the BCC's Premier Choir had the delight of performing with the best of the Boston Arts Academy at their spring concerts. I found the experience to be quite enjoyable! Premier, myself included, was reunited with many of the dancers who joined us in our annual MLK Holiday concert to dance the Dravidian Dithyramb. Once again, Dravidian Dithyramb was performed with BCC on vocals and the dancers gracing the stage with their expressive movements. We then had the chance to perform two new songs with BAA, Nick Page's Niska Banja, a flirty Serbian Gypsy dance with soloists Casey Accardi and Georgia Halliday, as well as Stephen Hatfield's fabulously zany work, Uberlebensgross, both of which incorporated dance, song, and percussion. Both of these pieces were a bounty of fun to sing. In Niska Banja we had the privilege of watching the amazing dancers flit across the stage, but of course we also remained focused on delivering the Serbian language to the best of our abilities. For our finale we gave every last bit of energy to Uberlebensgross, a piece in which some of BCC's very own singers get the oppurtunity to incorporate bamboo sticks, drums of all sorts, rainsticks, bells, chimes, and even body percussion. The event took place at the Back Bay Events Center, which had fantastic acoustics and was a splendid performance space overall. It had a spacious stage with the perfect amount of room for both our chorus and the dancers, which is very important! What really caught my attention while performing were the great lighting effects. The fabulous people at BAA managed to create a spectacle of colors, which came as quite a surprise to the BCC singers, as we did not rehearse with lighting and thus saw it for the first time during performance! I am sure it made our part of the concert look quite impressive from the audience's perspective. It was really a fun time, and since this went so well, we are bound to have more performances with BAA in the future.