Street Choirs Festival 2018
Join Festival hosts, Hullabaloo Community Quire, in welcoming over 900 singers from all over the UK to the Brighton Dome stage. These singers, plus special guests, have gathered to bring you songs of passion, protest and celebration for an evening of uplifting splendour!
The Annual Street Choirs Festival, a much loved, community choir tradition, began in Sheffield in 1984 and was inspired by the powerful songs sung by the protest choir movement, in support of the miners, unionists and gay activists demonstrating at that time. Social change and justice is still very much at the heart of this Festival, and the 37 featured choirs will be bringing their favourite rabble-rousing rebel calls (and responses) - songs featuring, written by and/or honouring movers and shakers, libertarians and visionaries throughout history and from all over the world.
The Festival is a nomadic tradition and is held in a different location in the UK and hosted by a different participating choir each year. Hullabaloo Community Quire hosted it for the first time in Brighton in 2008… and hope to host it again in 2028! As the Festival is historically more of a ‘North of Sheffield’ phenomenon, Hullabaloo is especially proud to be able to bring this enlivening and enriching event to the South – please do join us to welcome over 900 singers to our beautiful city.
Friday
Compared by: Award-winning comedian and humourologist Lara King
Brighton based choirs: The Acabellas, The Dawn Chorus, DeciBelle, RiSing and UpRoar People’s Choir welcome visiting choirs: Zu Choir from Lewes, Bletchingley Community Choir, Raise the Roof, Gin and Harmonics and Raised Voices from London, Sound Women from Penarth, Côr Gobaith from Aberystwyth, Wales, East Lancs Clarion Choir (Burnley), and The Honest Singers from Musselburgh, Scotland.
Special Guests: Poets' Corner Laureate Robb Johnson, alt-Americana balladeers Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds, Jamal and Alaa from The Brighton Syrian Orchestra, queer crooners Qukulele, and the incomparable Attila the Stockbroker with his medieval punk band Barnstormer 1649
Saturday
Our Saturday night show features 25 choirs hailing from Leeds to Leicester, Aberystwyth to Edinburgh and Bradford to Brighton who will perform ‘6-minute showcases’
