Chance Loos, says she felt like a star performing at the Performing Arts B.C. festival in Fort St. John.
At age 10 and in Grade 5 Chance was chosen by vocal adjudicator Melanie Nicol during the 2016 Cariboo Festival in April to attend the provincial festival as an observer May 31 to June 4.
It was her first time attending the provincial festival and proved to be as an “amazing” experience as she thought it would be.
While observers don’t compete, they do participate in workshops, have an opportunity to watch the competitors perform and are given their own opportunity to perform for an audience.
“The best part about the whole trip was the Future Stars concert,” Chance says. “I performed Be Kind to Your Parents from the musical Fanny. There were purple twinkling lights and trees decorating the stage. I got an owl stuffy for doing a great job and my mom cried. I felt like a star.”
Chance says that observing delegates competing in classical voice and musical theatre gave her some good ideas for songs she can sing in future.
“Musical theatre is my favourite category to compete in,” Chance says. “I love dressing up in costumes and becoming that character in the song.”
She participated in two different workshops, one on posture and how to improve on projecting your singing voice and the other on musical theatre performance.
She is looking forward to practicing the new techniques she learned.
She says every delegate received a shoulder bag with lots of fun stuff in it. In her free time she enjoyed going to Menchies Frozen Yogurt and swimming in the pool at Fort St. John with a giant water slide, and hanging out with the other delegates.
Chance started singing with the Angelkeys Children’s Choir at age five and now sings with the Coda teen choir, which are both conducted by her vocal instructor Angela Sommer.
She started taking private voice lessons with Sommer at age seven and competed in the Cariboo Festival for the first time at age eight, singing in both the concert class and musical theatre classes that year. She has won numerous awards at Cariboo Festivals.
For the 2016 Cariboo Festival in April she performed My Dog Spot, Coraggio Ben Mio, Someone and the musical theatre pieces Naughty from Matilda and Be Kind to Your Parents from Fanny. She won a gold medal, gold certificate and junior A scholarship for the concert class and a gold certificate in the musical theatre class along with a recommendation from adjudicator to attend the provincial festival as an observer this year.
She enjoys singing in other languages and has performed songs in German, Italian and is learning a Spanish song.
“When I’m not singing I like to draw, play soccer, ride my bike and pretty much anything to do outside,” Chance says. “I am thinking about taking dance next year as a lot of the competitors at the provincials also took dance. I think it would be helpful when I do musical theatre.”