Saturday - outreach

Every winter The Girl heads off for a week of Salvos' creative arts camp - QPAS (Queensland Performing Arts School). The 'kids' (from 13 to 25) choose two electives, focusing heavily on performing arts, but also including painting, preaching, stage tech and other interesting choices. At the end of the week each elective presents a short, 2-3 minute, sample of their learning, in a concert for family and friends.
This year the organising team decided to do something a little different. They organised the use of an area at Southbank and asked various Salvo groups to set up an information/display booth for the day. Instead of one private family concert, there were two concerts open to the public. I thought it was a much more valuable experience for the QPAS kids; far less insular and inward looking that usual.

Southbank Parklands

There is an amazing amount of talent in the Salvos' young people. The Army has always had a proud musical history and in recent years has started to embrace other performing arts. When I was teen, if you weren't musical, didn't have any musical training, you really didn't have a lot of options for creativity. There is still a very heavy focus on music, but drama, dance, and static art are all being featured (although still not so much in the day-to-day church).
The Girl chose "Show Choir" this year. A new elective, it's a mix of dance and singing. Her second elective was drama, which she has done for three years. It was more interpretive dance than 'drama' per se. I'm not sure I entirely understood it; however, I recognise the difficulty of creating a more traditional drama piece for 15 or 20 kids that only takes 2 or 3 minutes and gives everyone fairly even exposure.
The only downside of the day was that I wasn't thinking when I left home. I was wearing a jacket, but no socks, no singlet, no scarf. Thankfully, there are Saturday markets at Southbank and between concerts I wandered along til I found a scarf. Couldn't find any socks or stockings though. Took me an hour or so after we got home to defrost enough to sleep. Once I was in bed, I was warm externally, but shivering anyway.