Exciting Plans for the 2014-15 Season!

Hi everyone!

We are so excited to share with you our plans for the 2014-15 season! We know that many of you are already looking ahead to the fall in planning your schedules, so we wanted to make sure you had as many details as possible for our exciting SEVENTH season (!!)

As usual, we will kick off our season with a three day Xara retreat (evening of Friday September 5-afternoon of Sunday Sept 7), hosted again in Glen Margaret, NS in a similar fashion to our retreat this past year. You can already start planning ahead to doing a lot of sight singing, because...

The major project for our fall will be the recording of our first, professionally produced, full-length CD! We are so excited to be embarking on this process that will allow high-quality recordings of our music to be distributed for all to hear! We'll be recording on several dates throughout the fall, mostly taking place during our regular Sunday afternoon rehearsals.

Once the CD is finished, we, of course, have to throw a launch party! This event will be a mix of big Xara singing music from the CD, and XYE performing their short winter production. Our plan is to use dozens of candles and candelabras to make the room sparkle and glow with super warm holiday spirit. This event will also be a fundraiser for the whole organization. The date is tentatively set as Saturday, December 13th, 2014.

Also in the fall, we'll have two smaller gigs - one as part of Nocturne 2014, and the second in an exciting collaboration with LunaSea Theatre, a women's theatre company based here in Halifax. Taking place in an historic Halifax home, Xara will play the part of Scandinavian 'huldras' (think sirens, but in the forest!). This is an exciting paid collaboration that will help us bridge our work into Halifax's theatre community!

From January-April we'll be preparing for our spring performance - we have decided to remount our very successful 2011 show "Fatty Legs". This show is based on a children's book of the same name and tells the story of a young Inuit girl and her experiences in the residential school system. This performance will use many of the same elements as the original production (including working with Sarain Carson-Fox, the contemporary dancer who played the part of Margaret!) but will be a slightly extended version with some new pieces of music added and more choreography for us. We are targeting this production for the weekend of May 1, 2 and 3, 2015.

We are currently applying for many grants and, if they are successful, we will be able to look at doing a tour of Fatty Legs in May or June. This tour would bring the show into schools and different communities across Nova Scotia and potentially the Maritime provinces. Once we know whether we have sufficient funding to make the tour go ahead, we would look to creating a balanced touring ensemble based on who was available to tour.

So as you can see, our seventh season is going to be a very exciting one!! Going forward, we are endeavouring to create a season that is fulfilling for our singers, exciting for our audiences, and that will have a powerful impact on our community. We want to make the experience rich and enjoyable for you, and will be taking on limited external performances as they come up. We recognize that this past season has been very demanding on all of our singers - and while we are so grateful for your energy and dedication, we want to assure you that we have taken steps to make the workload more manageable for the future.

To that end, we think it's important for you to know that the board has approved a decrease in choir fees for the 2014-15 season. The fees have been dropped to $150/singer for the year. We hope this is the first step in making the Xara experience more accessible for everyone. As well, the amount of fundraising expected from singers will drop significantly for next season, with Christmas wreaths as the only fundraiser for the year.

Thank you for everything you have put into this season, and for all the exciting things we have yet to come in this great year!!! You are all such incredible performers, and we couldn't do it without you!

Love, Claire & Christina