Siobhan Robinsong will be celebrated at the Honouring Siobhan! concert June 29, presented by the Gettin’ Higher Choir and the Wavelengths Community Choir.
Siobhan Robinsong has a superpower, according to those of us who’ve felt it. For decades, the Victoria choir leader has been on a mission to bring people together through the joy of singing.
“She’d say: ‘I want you to have an experience here and leave with a song in your heart,’ ” recalls Rebekah Demirel, a friend and chorister. “She helped heal that wound in people, that they couldn’t sing. I feel so honoured to be one of the thousands of people she’s impacted.”
Robinsong will be celebrated at the Honouring Siobhan! concert presented by the Gettin’ Higher Choir and the Wavelengths Community Choir with guest singer Ann Mortifee.
This is a special tribute concert because Robinsong, who has Alzheimer’s disease, no longer remembers the lives she’s changed. She can still connect through singing, though, so she’ll be there to feel the love.
“She may join in or want to come up. We’ll just roll with it,” says Wavelengths director Denis Donnelly, who co-led the Gettin’ Higher Choir with Robinsong for more than 20 years. “All the songs have a deep resonance with Siobhan and her spirit. We sang them so many times.”
Robinsong started the Gettin’ Higher Choir in 1996, after moving with her young family to Victoria from Cortes Island – where she co-founded the Hollyhock Retreat Centre with friends she met in the early days of Greenpeace.
Two years later, when she ran out of African freedom songs to lead, she asked Donnelly to work with her. Formally trained and a longtime director of the Victoria Conservatory of Music, he was coincidentally looking for a way to follow his passion as a song leader.
“I was the music history and theory stuff. Siobhan was instinctual. We learned from each other,” he says. “At the time, non-auditioned community choirs weren’t really a thing.”
And so, in 2004, the pair started the Community Choir Leadership Training program to share the concept, which remains a hit. “It mentored hundreds of choir leaders,” Donnelly says. “And now thousands go to choirs and song circles. Siobhan believed people need to sing together. It’s a balm for the world.”
People came from all over to take the training, including Maggie Wheeler — a Hollywood actor known for her role as Matthew Perry’s girlfriend Janice on the ’90s sitcomFriends.
“By the time I returned to LA, I was ready to gather people regularly and to ask for that commitment so we could build a choir community and spread that joy by holding fundraising concerts,” said Wheeler, who led the Golden Bridge Choir for 18 years.
I met Robinsong in 2008 when I was a reporter for theTimes Colonistwith a fellowship to write about Victorians supporting development projects in Sub-Saharan Africa.
For a decade, the Gettin’ Higher Choir had partnered with Joseph and Perpetua Alfazema, a Victoria refugee couple from Mozambique wanting to fundraise to build a school for their rural, war-torn village.
Sitting with Robinsong in her Fairfield living room, I watched her face light up while telling me how that first concert’s success, then a trip to Kapasseni village to witness its first school open, launched a mission for her and the Alfazemas — a charity that would become the Caia Connection and raise more than $1.5 million in aid.
Soon after, I visited the village area and saw firsthand the school’s impact on the community as well as how food, music, HIV support and hospice inspired local people to help each other.
“It changed everything for me to see Siobhan and that first concert give so much to people they didn’t know,” says Perpetua Alfazema, who now supports the projects in Mozambique with a local team. “Singing is really about sharing, sharing light with people you might not be connected with. And sharing the resources that come with it. She never took anything in return but gave a lot.”
MyTimes Coloniststory about the choir and the African village touched many readers, who sent in letters and even speaking invites. The response thrilled Robinsong. She spoke with me again about her choir leadership and her experience of donating a kidney to a dear friend, eventually asking me to join the Caia Connection board — which I did in 2018.
In 2020, Robinsong retired from leading the board and Gettin’ Higher Choir, too, passing the torch to choir couple Dick Jackson and Cathy Baker.
Baker recalls that while helping her to lead a soprano section at practice, Robinsong joined in to sing along. “[Siobhan] looked me in the eyes. I don’t know if she said it out loud, but I remember her mouthing what I heard as, ‘I see you.’ ”
Now, more than five years later the choir is thriving under Jackson and Baker.
Robinsong lives in a care facility a few blocks from her former home, where family and friends sign up for daily visits.
“We usually go for a walk. We always sing,” says Kim Willoughby, a long-time friend who joined the Gettin’ Higher Choir right at the start, after a bad car accident halted her singing career.
“She provided me with a way to express myself in song at a difficult time. It was very healing for me.”
When I visit Robinsong now in her room, she asks who I am and listens sweetly as I babble on awkwardly, then put on a choir CD so we can sing along.
Standing face-to-face with her, her smile wide as she sings with me, is when I feel it again, her superpower of making you feel seen and the heartfelt joy of connecting through song.
Gettin’ Higher Choir and Wavelengths Community Choir with Ann Mortifee and guests
When:2 pm, June 29, 2025
Where:Farquhar Auditorium, University of Victoria
Tickets:$35 available through theUVic Ticket Centre