Older adult choir wraps season with holiday songs
BY GABE HERMAN
A singing group for older adults
is set to wrap up its fi rst season
in the East Village with a free
concert on Wednesday, Dec. 18.
The 7:30 p.m. performance at St.
Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, at 131
E. 10 St., will last about an hour and be
split between two groups from Encore
Creativity, a choral organization for
adults over 55.
Encore Chorale is a choral group that
will sing a variety of more traditional
music, including Beethoven, spirituals
and folk music. The other half of the
show will feature Encore Rocks, a rock
& roll chorus that performs more contemporary
tunes.
The Encore Creativity organization
was founded in 2007 and is based in
Annapolis, MD, but has held programs
in Manhattan for the past couple of
years. This fall was the fi rst time at
Third Street Music School Settlement,
at 235 E. 11 St. in the East Village.
There is no audition required to be
part of the groups, which include 15
weeks of rehearsals and have been led
this season by conductor Bernadette
Hoke.
Despite the range of experience in
the groups, there are some challenging
aspects to singing, like harmonies,
sight reading and vocal techniques. But
Rehearsing with conductor Bernadette Hoke at piano.
the mood at a recent rehearsal was decidedly
one of fun and good cheer.
“I love it,” said Hoke after a recent
rehearsal in the East Village. “We’re
all fortunately on the same page, so I’m
having a great time.”
Hoke said she approaches training
the singers as if they were professionals
that she works with. “You have to go
for the highest standard,” she said, and
added that everyone in the groups takes
it seriously. “Everybody has really done
their homework,” she said.
The choral group has about 30
people, including just two men, and
the rock group is all-women, and participants
include retirees, widows and
a range of ages over 55. The groups
rehearse on Monday afternoons, and
tuition is $295.
Studies have shown singing to have
physical and mental health benefi ts,
and the singers say it gives a sense of
community.
“I think people help each other,” said
Jonathan Parker, who lives on East 9
PHOTO BY GABE HERMAN
Street and is a returning participant
in the program. “There’s no sense of
trying to get people out, quite the opposite.
So to me, it’s an empowering,
safe space.”
Parker added about the health aspect,
“For older people there’s isolation
sometimes, but learning to read new
music, training the brain to do something
new, that’s really stimulating.”
More information about the program
can be found at http://www.encorecreativity.
org/new-york-ny.\
LES gallery exhibit showcases death of a mall
BY TEQUILA MINSKY
Yearning to see Santa? Want to
avoid the crowds? Questions
about the North Pole? Santa
will answer them when he (re)appears
at the Front Room Gallery on Saturday,
Dec. 14.
He was there last Saturday sitting
amidst photos of the ruins of Wayne
Hills Mall, his former staging area
where he greeted delighted children
from 1998-2006.
Santa is a special guest at the exhibit
“Mallrat to Snapchat: The End of the
Third Place,” with images by Phillip
Buehler whose photos document the
death of Wayne Hills Mall in Wayne,
New Jersey.
Large photographs of derelict storefronts
and even larger ones of shattered,
plaster-fi lled interiors are the main element
of Buehler’s exhibit, which is part
photography and part cultural critic.
Part installation, a bin of vinyl LP’s of
music popular in 1973 when the mall
opened welcomes visitors to play their
selections on the vintage turntable.
Buehler has genuine nostalgia and
affection for “this very American economical
and sociological experiment.”
At the gallery last Saturday, Buehler,
wearing his Sam Goody tee shirt, posed
Phillip Buehler at his exhibit Mallrat to Snap: The End of the Third
Place. In front of “The Courtyard” and “Art World.”
in front of his photo of the ruins of the
Sam Goody store, where he spent a lot
of money.
The exhibit’s subtitle: “End of the
Third Place,” a term coined by urban
sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s in 1989,
refers to places where people spend
time outside of home and work, hence
their third place. The American mall
was among many other public gathering
spaces, essential to community and
PHOTO BY TEQUILA MINSKY
public life.
To a packed reception, this exhibition
opened on Black Friday, a wink and nod
toward what the mall represented and
presumably where the suburban shopping
public may have been that day.
The years between 1970 and 2010
saw the burgeoning growth of shopping
malls in America. There were fi lms set
in malls. But most recently retail has
changed dramatically leading to the
“slow death of indoor shopping malls.”
Buehler’s photos of iconic hangouts
and teenage meeting places, so familiar,
are now ravaged and destroyed. The
photographer doesn’t see what he does
as “ruins porn,” a genre of documenting
beauty in decrepitude and debris. He is
hanging onto a sort of last respects, to
the spirit of what was.
This Bushwick-based photographer
has a number of other photography
projects documenting deterioration
and remnants of neglected architecture
constructed in the recent past, of places
that have or will disappear.
The installation includes some pages
from a 1973 local newspaper supplement—
the year the Wayne Hills Mall
opened. “It was a time just before the
Nixon impeachment hearings,” says
Buehler, recognizing the historical irony.
By 2006 so many of the mall’s stores
had closed or moved and the very last
ones left in 2014. By 2019, demolition
was underway.
Front Room Gallery’s very experienced
Santa —played by Dave Conley—
will be on site chatting with kids and
handing out candy canes at 48 Hester
St., from 1-4pm on Saturday.
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