Bealtaine Festival Dawn Chorus with Drimoleague Community Choir

The Dawn Chorus is a nationwide choral event in which older people come together with a choir in their locality and sing at dawn to welcome the day and the season. This Age & Opportunity Bealtaine Festival event takes place in partnership with Sing Ireland.

For the flagship event, Drimoleague Community Choir in Cork will open the festival on Sunday 5 May, celebrating the Bealtaine theme of ‘Lust for Life’ in style.

About Drimoleague Community Choir
Drimoleague Community Choir was founded in 2018 as an initiative of the Drimoleague Singing Festival. The choir is open to all and encourages participation in singing, friendship and fun with no previous experience necessary. They meet weekly to sing a wide repertoire of pop, folk, spirituals, classical and Irish traditional songs. The sharing of the joy of song is at the core of all they do.

The choir provides a year round means of nurturing the town’s singing culture and is seen by its members as an important social outlet as well as being an interesting and creative collaborative activity. Drimoleague Community Choir has performed in a number of concerts in its home village, raised money for charity singing Christmas carols, performed as a pop-up choir during the Drimoleague Singing Festival and performed with Jack O’Rourke (2019), Jessie Lloyd (2023) and Jack L (2023). They most recently performed at Singing for our Sisters in Kilgarriffe Church, Clonakilty in April 2024.

About Bealtaine Festival
Established in 1995, Age & Opportunity’s Bealtaine Festival is one of Ireland’s largest co-operative festivals and the world’s first national celebration of creativity in older age. The Festival has inspired a number of international festivals including Luminate in Scotland, Gwanwyn in Wales, the Age of Creativity in England, and others across the world.

Bealtaine takes place each May for the entire month.  The ancient festival of Bealtaine or Beltane (held on 1 May), marked the midway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, and heralded the start of summer. The word Bealtaine is still used in the Irish language and translates as the month of May.

The Festival brings together people from all over Ireland to foster and inspire creativity among older people and to promote the skills, experiences and exposure that can lead to a rich creative life for all older people.

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