OLDS — On Dec. 8 at 7 p.m. in the Olds First Baptist Church, the Olds Community Chorus will perform their first concert in recent years with no masking protocols.
Director Theresa Wasden is looking forward to that experience.
“Oh, we are so excited,” she said during an interview. “It feels so good to get back together.”
Wasden said trying to perform as a choir during COVID restrictions was challenging, to say the least.
“We had put a few of us together to try doing a little bit of a concert in the spring, just for the seniors’ lodges,” Wasden said.
“Both times we got backed off because they had an outbreak of COVID the day before we were coming in or two days before and so we didn’t get to go and sing for anybody.
“But we did get to sing for the people in the church we practise in (Hope Pointe) so they got to do a little bit of a concert, which was nice,” she added.
“We tried that to see if we could manage, if we had to sing with masks. We didn’t, which was great.”
A week ago, the chorus performed at the Seasons Olds Encore seniors’ facility.
“They let us go in and we took our masks off to sing when we were in place and then we put our masks back on to leave. That was our protocol and that worked really well,” she said.
After a break, the Olds Community Chorus began practising this fall at the Hope Pointe Community Church of the Nazarene.
Initially, Wasden said everyone was spread out.
“It took us about a month and then we were starting to get into our groups with our voicing,” she said.
“A couple of weeks after that, we were all sitting in the centre, feeling like a choir and we could hear the parts and everybody’s voices had started to come back in full voice.
“It probably took us the first month for us to get where we could actually sing for two hours of rehearsal time.”
All that practising will really pay off not only during the performance in general, but at the end in stirring fashion when the choir sings the Hallelujah Chorus, Wasden indicated.
