An Out and Loud pop-up concert outside Auckland Art Gallery Auckland has put on a spectacularly good day weather-wise for the closing stages of the Auckland Pride festival and the closing days of the Out and Loud Choral festival and the Proud to Play sports festival. For the past three days eight glbti choirs from around New Zealand and Australia, hosted by the Gay And Lesbian Singers (GALS), have been singing informally in pop-up concerts and members have been attending choral and singing workshops. A Grand Matinee Show will bring all eight choirs together at Western Springs College this afternoon, with a massed choir opening and closing the show and individual choir items in between. Traditional, pop, contemporary and songs from Maori and Aboriginal repertoires will be performed. The concert, scheduled months before the Auckland Pride Festival dates were confirmed according to a GALS source, will have to keep close to time if the GALS singers are to make it across the inner-city to the marshaling point for this evening's Pride Parade down Ponsonby Road. GALS has had to put on buses to get their members to the Three Lamps area where their float, along with almost 50 parade entries, gather. The Pride Parade, preceded by a ribbon cutting is schedules to set off southwards down Ponsonby Road at 6pm. Prior to that the organisers say there will be a photographic exhibition, Thirty Years Proud, on digital screens, "fun and games" on Ponsonby Road and a 5pm Rainbow Pride church service at All Saints Church. A two-hour open-air event is lined up at Western Park, the end point for the parade. It will feature a speech by Fran Wilde, the MP who fronted the Homosexual Law Reform parliamentary campaign thirty years ago and a re-formed straight girl band called True Bliss, who were popular in the 1990s. Today also sees the closing ceremony of the Proud to Play sports event which has been running through the past week. Little detail has been able to be confirmed about the ceremony, but several participants say they will be marching in the Auckland Pride Parade's Proud to Play entry this evening.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Saturday, 20th February 2016 - 9:24am