• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 06 / 02 / 2011

---

Gulf Islands Secondary School music students — many of whom took part in a recent trip to Cuba — perform for ressidents at Meadowbrook. The GISS music show runs tonight (Wednesday) and tomorrow night at ArtSpring.Photo by Derrick Lundy.

High school music director Bruce Smith’s exuberance for Cuba — its culture, people, music and dance — makes it tough to keep him on track as he chats about the recent trip he and 18 choir students took there.

The 10-day trip, which involved several performance exchanges, workshops and an eye-opening immersion in Cuban culture, marks the third time Smith has taken Gulf Islands Secondary School music students to Cuba.

“When I step off the plane . . . I feel as though I am part of Cuba and it never leaves me,” Smith says, as our conversation dances between the recent trip, Cuban history, past and present Cuban politics and his over-riding appreciation for the humility and talent of the Cuban people.

The experience, Smith stresses, was about so much more than the official itinerary, with life-altering lessons that go far beyond the realm of a classroom.

However, the itinerary itself reads like a manifesto for baptism in Cuban sound. The students, who practised choral pieces for months before the late-April trip, took part in six performance exchanges, among them three Cuban schools and a professional choir. They also participated in music and dance workshops and attended several shows.

Add this to history tours, travel between Havana, Cienfuegos and Varadero, lunch at an orphanage, beach time, salsa lessons and sight-seeing, and you have a jam-packed, well-rounded trip.

But it was the stories amid the travelogue that so impressed Smith, who said one of the highlights for him was “watching the students realize how incredibly humble and beautiful the Cuban people are.”

Some of the students, he added, really “got it.” They saw that they “have everything” — wealth, technology and access — but they lack musical discipline and patience.

“They suddenly saw themselves as so entitled . . . so spoiled rotten,” he said. “Musically, we are like the wealthy children [to the Cubans] . . . we have everything, so why aren’t we better?”

The Cubans, on the other hand, “all have the music,” Smith says, recalling how stunned they were at a jazz club in Havana to stumble across “the best piano player I’ve ever seen in my life . . . you couldn’t see his hands they were moving so fast . . . they were just a blur.”

The trip also included “dropping off” several suitcases full of donated goods — quietly and “without fanfare.”

One of these stops included the national ballet, located in an awe-inspiring, “Hogwarts-like” building with a staircase made of marble. Here, they left a massive collection of ballet shoes donated by Toes and Taps in Victoria. They also left small donations, collected on Salt Spring, with the principals of each of the schools they visited.

But probably the biggest highlight for Smith was the three hours spent at an orphanage in Cienfuegos. Typically, Canadian groups visiting an orphanage give a concert and then leave. But Smith wanted to do “something real,” so they decided to make a spaghetti lunch for 45.

While some of the GISS students cooked (in the tiny, 15x15 square-foot kitchen), others sat and played with the children — a novel experience for the orphans, they discovered, because “no one had ever played with them before.”

The GISS students bought an over-abundance of food at a nearby market — leaving behind extra garlic, buckets of ice cream and even a china dishware set.

“Not only did we fix the food, but we sat down and ate with them — we shared a common thing. It was so pure, so beautiful.”

Back on Salt Spring, several of the Cuba trip students moved straight into rehearsal for the Gulf Islands School of Performing Arts (GISPA) show, held shortly afterwards, and are now getting set for this week’s GISS music shows, which run tonight (Wednesday) and tomorrow night at ArtSpring, beginning at 7:30 p.m.

No doubt, a little bit of Cuba will shine through the those 18 students, who each brought home some life lessons and a whole lot of music.

Source: www.bclocalnews.com/vancouver_island_south/saltspringislanddriftwood/ent...