Hit it, Carol King!

Friday night, Exeter Soul Choir had its first concert - it was organized at the beginning of the semester by one of my friends from Music and Theatre, and they got their act together and performed in the chapel, which was built to have amazing acoustics.

The chapel is also staged in the traverse, so the audience sits on either side of a long isle, and at one end is the entrance, and the other is the sanctuary. So when you're sitting there, you can watch what's happening in the sanctuary, or you could watch the people across from you.

And I took a big advantage of this. Soul music is great, all well and good, but it's not exactly... the most British thing ever. And we were in an Anglican chapel - these are the people who made fun of the Methodists for getting to into their worship (which is sort of the spirit of Soul Choir. No grudges of course, because it looks like the Anglicans and Methodists in England might reunite after all...). And it was just strange, because here is this amazing choir, downright knock-your-socks-off amazing, singing songs like "Itty Bitty Pretty One" and dancing and clapping, or "Oh Happy Day" and going full out Gospel, or "Man in the Mirror," or "I Feel The Earth Move," or "Zero to Hero" - in which they outright acted the muscles and the oogling comments. So there's this crazy choir, and then us, the audience. We were partially drama students who were totally into it, but there was just as many brothers and parents who were slouching and looking bored. I almost got the impression there were people scowling, but maybe I was on crack.

And so much of soul music involves audience participation, clapping and all, and we were just the WHITEST crowd - and by WHITEST I mean boring and out of beat and lame, not necessarily entirely caucasian. We never sang along if we were asked, and when we were asked to clap we only did so for a little while. Everyone loved it, as far as I can tell, but it just seemed like the whole point of Soul was sidestepped by manners. I wanted to stand up with my hand high in the air and start clapping and, like, do call and response or something. Just to shake things up.

At the end everyone raved about it, people shouted for an encore (which we got), but it was like watching Chekhov in an elementary school, or Footloose done by the RSC ... they were doing this fantastic stuff, and here we were in the audience, potato-faced just staring at the choir, who were clapping and dancing and having a great time. It was a kind of exercise in incongruity.