Find Your Group’s Home
Most of people have some place that they would call home. It may be the small town in which they grew up. It may be the big city with which they most identify. Regardless, home tends to be a place that’s relaxed, that matches a person’s ideals, that offers any range of familiar comforts.
The concept of home might sound like a funny one for a collegiate a cappella group to consider. After all, college tends to mark a transitory time between leaving a childhood home, and choosing where to build the home that will follow. Nonetheless, members of an a cappella group will typically be together for at least one year—often longer than that. It’s worth thinking about laying some roots.
An a cappella group’s home may be its favorite performance space in which the group is accustomed to singing and fans are accustomed to coming to see them. Home might be the rehearsal room where your group meets night after night, singing in circles, drawing stage formations on chalkboards. Home might be the diner where you all grab a bite to eat after a show, or the apartment where the aca-after parties tend to go down. It might be the place where your group goes for an annual retreat before the year or over spring break.
Having a group home adds to a sense of group identity, culture, and tradition. It lays the foundations for group members to view one another as more than just colleagues, but rather friends, or even family. It creates a comfort zone, and offers the group a space around which it can center itself.
Where possible, a group’s home space should be unique to the group—not just the big auditorium on campus because that’s where all of the groups sing their big shows, or the only room you seem to be able to reserve for rehearsals. Think about what a home says about the group—is it comfortable? artsy? dimly lit or bright? Is it a place where the acoustics seem to hit every voice just right, or a space that has character and that you begrudgingly appreciate because of just how unfit it objectively is for your purposes?
Where do you call home?