Fox and Fine Feathers- Performance by Toowoomba Concert Orchestra at University of Southern Queensland Toowoomba

An initiative to get children to read. Funded through the new Toowoomba library. Free. The audience came in eager. The children dressed in paper hats, and the parents keen to relax with some classical music. Clear colour coding to help the young people identify the different sections of the orchestra, and costumes to keep consistent with the theme of foxes and birds. Then the reading began. A section was read. That section was then interpreted by the orchestra who played an evocative piece. It was totally engaging. For a child this engagement lasted about two minutes. Squirmers,and criers, and wanderers were rampant. Which is all part of a family concert. Babies were hard to manage on laps. Some went out to retrieve snacks in order to placate the bundles of energy. Sitting still is not natural to them. Here they were being exposed to classical music, and the orchestra was a beautiful ensemble. It continued for an hour. We were promised dancing. The squigglers were ready. And then it happened. As it often does in performances. A handful of special children were arbitrarily selected from the audience, and given the one special prop, and asked to dance. These children did a wonderful job. It was hard not to feel the disappointment from the other children. It was a palpable lesson. You don't always get picked. And yet the conductor was keenly aware of this, and acknowledged the multitude of unnoticed waving hands. The real dancing begun. If you're a fox and you know it, swish your tail, then head shoulders knees and toes, then marching, faster and faster, and faster. The adults quickly exhausted themselves. The bundles of energy had barely expended one iota of theirs. The performance was over,and they left. Some stayed behind to say hello to the musicians. The people who created sound out of strange looking bits of wood and brass. Overall what good value for a free concert. Accessibility- Well you need a car to get to USQ which for many is out of town. Parking is free, and plentiful on a Sunday. A reflection. To have performers that engage the bundles of energy right from the beginning. A family of lyrebirds, and so on. So the bundles of energy could feel the music in their bodies. And play. This is something not often done in tandem with an orchestra, due to the high volume of space an orchestra takes. They need to see the conductor at all times, and not be distracted. Is there a way to experiment with the spacing of an orchestra to allow movement happen in between the instruments? If you applied something like Winfred Ward's story dramatization technique in tandem with a piece like this. How much more engagement could you generate? Would it be possible to allow the bundles of energy to have an introduction to an instrument? Where is the learning beyond the performance? Where are the bundles of energy employing their reading skills? This show was an exciting thing to witness in Toowoomba. It's given me many ideas that I want to play with.