A Your Stories in Song event.
Crowborough Community Centre is a bit special – it’s a HUGE hall with an enormous stage suitable for several levels of flats. Seating for 300 and a built in PA. We’d taken out own PA which was OK as the audience was about 100 and we have the desk right next to us on stage so can adjust as and when necessary. We were greeted on arrival by the centre caretaker which showed us where everything was and helped us get loaded in. We were able to park close to the side doors – a space had been reserved for us with a ‘reserved for speaker’ cone. We set up on the apron n front of the curtains which was plenty big enough. There was space behind the curtain to put all our bags etc and to sit quietly and have a sandwich. When the U3A members started arriving, Gill who had booked us came to say hello and make sure we were happy, got us a cup of tea (very civilised afternoon gig) and the afternoon ‘chair’ came over to meet us and explain how the afternoon works.
There was a table in front of the stage where we put our merch (which we referred to a few times during the afternoon) and a table by the entrance where we had all of the Your Stories In Song forms. Now, it seems that there was a slight misunderstanding about what we were looking for in response to our request for stories as people arrived – most of what we had were things like ‘a song about the sea’, or ‘windmills’, not actual stories, so that’s something we need to make sure we are clear about for future events. It made it a bit tricky to do the group writing of a story based on their ideas, but we did have one suggestion of ‘Nutley Windmill’ which meant we could open up questions and get some feedback to help with the song. It worked – a very simple tune, a few lines and we got many of them singing along.
The whole performance was about an hour so we did a few songs and had a lot of chat about the stories behind them, which was really what the audience were interested in. The U3A covers many areas, this was the Crowborough U3A and they have monthly meeting open to all members ( I think about 500 in total but usually only about 100 come along), and lots of smaller interest groups that meet at different times, covering subjects such as history, photography, dance, there’s an ‘outing’ group, so the audience had a broad range of interests.
We went down really well and had some lovely comments at the end, a few people came up with more ‘stories’ and many took away leaflets. We had some emailed responses after the event and all are on thewww.yourstoriesinsong.co.uk website.
As this was part of the Your Stories In Song project, we got paid by Summer Trifle from Lottery funds and the fee that the U3A paid went into Summer Trifle funds. No merch sold but we did have an interesting discussion with a man who was looking for entertainment for refugees at the Crowborough training camps.