Sarah Gatford: Young Voices Concert and a Guinness World Record attempt!

Over 360,000 young people from all over the world will experience BSL this week during a double Guinness World Record attempt, live streamed from the O2 in London. My good friend and colleague Rebecca-Anne Withey and I have something to do with it. OK, breathe. This is quite a thing.

Let me explain. I work with Young Voices, interpreting a performance at every venue they perform at.

Well, that was until Covid-19 hit. This year we’ve not been on tour and the team at Young Voices wanted to do something special in an attempt to make up for this. So, an idea was suggested to break the world record for the biggest simultaneous sing.

Schools haven’t been able to do much singing though, so I put forward the idea that if there was a signed version, more schools could be involved. This is what’s now become the Young Voices Biggest Sing and Biggest Sign event.

Young Voices are the largest school choir concerts in the World. https://www.youngvoices.co.uk/ I got involved after they’d had a request from a Deaf parent who would be attending one of the Sheffield concerts a few years ago, so they put a call out and I agreed to work with themand we’ve not looked back.

Sometimes, as an interpreter, you feel like the one who hasn’t been picked for the team, you’re an afterthought and people have to put up with your presence – that’s not the case with these lovely people! There’s a feeling of being totally included and being a respected member of the team.

As the event is going to be rather big, I knew we’d have to do things properly. By this I mean, having a deaf person involved in preparing the song and performing on the day. Who better to do this than Rebecca?! She is after all, a big name in the deaf community and beyond and is well known for her signed song performances. The Young Voices team agreed this would be a great thing to do.

Rebecca and I got together remotely in lockdown and created a signed version of Lovely Day, the Bill Withers song, which will be sung and signed on simultaneously by thousands of children. This has been shared with all the schools taking part.

On the day, Rebecca will be on stage at the O2 performing the signed version of Lovely Day along with thousands of children from across the world, it’s going to be quite a day.

It’s great to see how far Young Voices have come on their accessibility journey. They’ve taken huge stridestowards making this accessibility thing normal. I’d like to congratulate them on doing this and seeing the value of it, not just for Deaf parents and children but for everyone involved. After the big event on Tuesday, my hope is that there’ll be more young people and teachers thinking that having events interpreted, and songs signed in BSL by a deaf performer is a positive thing for everyone.

It’s a privilege to be making this World Record attempt event accessible. I really do hope it’ll be a Lovely Day and we can all wake up with a bit more sunshine in our lives.