A weekend to remember

Last weekend Annie and Helen travelled with Flick and Rosey to The Oakes, a wonderful Christian Youth Centre in Sheffield.  The team at the Oakes run youth and children's camps all year, and every now and again we go along to lead a performing arts weekend.  There were about 35 campers in total, aged between 8 and 15 and together we performed Simeon.  Quite a few of them had brought their instruments, some wanted to sing, and others wanted to dance.  The Oakes has a wonderful big team working there all year round, mostly on gap years, and they also took part in the performance.

It was great to have Rosey on team for the first time, although as she is regularly on team at the Oakes she was often stolen from us and made to wash up and clean toilets!  She did a brilliant job holding the choir together, singing solos and making sure the girls sang the descant at the right time.

Flick was in charge of the dancers.  Before the weekend she had planned for some girl dancers, but when it came to it she had almost entirely boys and had to quickly rethink.  She choreographed a wonderful 'soldier' dance for Caesar's Fractious.  She then tried to send the boys away to the choir in order to work with the girls on 'O little town of Bethlehem', but they wouldn't go, so we had some interesting lyrical boy dancing!  Flick says that the morning stars together were a bit more like supernovas.

The choir and orchestra went well - Helen had some brilliant singers in the choir, including quite a number of the house team, and Annie had a lovely group of instrumentalists.  She had three drummers who had to take it in turns, an Eb horn, a trumpet, a flute, a clarinet, an oboe, two violas and a cello.

Another delight of the Oakes is their proud decision that the gospel is always clearly told.  They do this by having some Bible teaching times, dorm time, and lots of memory verses.  Mes led the Bible studies, and did an excellent job keeping the kids engaged and focused.  We also learnt a brilliant song called 'Super Saviour'.

Click here to go to the CMM Facebook page and see the Oakes performance of song 2 from Simeon - Why should I be so favoured.