One Voice - A Celebration of Song

There’s nothing like singing for bringing people together – and for the last few weeks at Lawrence Batley Theatre we’ve been proving this statement true with our festive celebration of our different communities through song.

For the festive season we thought it would be wonderful to share winter songs from across our different cultures, so we asked our friends at Song Geet South Asian Women’s Choir and the Ukrainian British Friendship Group to help us out. They said yes and the idea was turned into reality!

A series of public workshops have seen over 30 members of the public learning songs in Hindi and Ukrainian as well as a traditional English folk Wassail.

The first workshop was led by our Community Ambassador Madiha Ansari-Khan together with the Song Geet South Asian Women's choir who shared the upbeat Hindi carol Mahisa Aaya Hai and told us about the Christian community and traditions in India and Pakistan.

In the second workshop Natalia Mirkun from the Ukrainian British Friendship Group shared the beautiful traditional song, Shchedryk, which tells of a swallow arriving to promise a bountiful year ahead. She told us how in Ukraine people gather to sing the song as the first star emerges on Christmas Eve.

Our final workshop was led by our very own Head of Participation, Jenny Goodman, and her acapella performance group, Far Cry – soon our Attic was filled with people enthusiastically singing a traditional English Wassail. Jenny shared that wassails are sung to apple trees to bring a good harvest in the year ahead but were also a creative way for poor agricultural workers in the past to beg for food, drink and money. We threaded the traditions together by translating Silent Night into Hindi and Ukrainian too.