“It’s very different” Mt. Pleasant choir performs without in-person audience

MT. PLEASANT – Sunday, instead of an audience filling in the many rows of Heatilator Performance Center, the Mt. Pleasant High School Chamber, Concert and Freshman choirs populated the red seats.

Due to coronavirus regulations requiring choirs to wear masks, maintain physical distance by performing in larger spaces, air out auditoriums between performances and barring them from signing more than 30 minutes at a time, choir performances have a different look this year.

This originally meant that no choir concerts would be performed this year but middle school band director Adam Creiger suggested using the performance center instead of the high school gym.

This allowed for the choirs to perform their concert virtually with a camera on stage recording their performance. The video production was provided by the high school's video team, MPTV Close-Up. The recording of Sunday's performance can be found on their YouTube page.

Marlene DePriest, the high school choir director, came up with a plan to allow students to perform: the students stand 6 feet apart in the audience section at the Heatilator while singing with masks on at a video camera on stage.

DePriest decided that bringing the choirs in one by one and staggering performance times would allow them to meet the 30-minute limit on performance time provide sufficient time to air out the room in between performances.

Since singers are required to maintain physical distance, there was no room for an audience, DePriest said The lack of an audience makes performing much different.

'It's not what we want because they don't get that feedback from the audience right away. It's weird, it's strange,” DePriest said.

'When you are in that moment it's a totally different feel,” DePriest added.

Since the choirs are masked up at all times, it makes it harder for the singers to get the correct sounds and to enunciate properly. Senior chamber choir singer Grace Kelley said it can mess with your consonants

'It's harder because your sound doesn't project as far, sometimes consonants don't sound out and your words mumble,” Kelley said.

Freshman Elsie Lange said it can be stressful having to adjust your mask often during the performance.

'It's pretty stressful because when I'm singing I have to keep bringing my mask up, but it's been good [performing],” Lange said.

However stressful and different it may be for the performers, DePriest is confident they will have fun while doing it.

'The kids are doing great, they're singing out, they're doing choir, it's just restricted right now,” DePriest said.