We are very pleased to have five inspiring women on our Marché des Possibles team this year! We wanted to find out more about the crew making the magic happen behind the scenes, so we decided to ask these five entrepreneurs to interview each other about their implication in the market as well as their day-to-day lives.

In this third profile, meet Pamela Hart, sound engineer at the MDP as well as co-director of The Forever Chorus and Femmes Farine, interviewed by Nora Jones-Chenier, our family activities programmer. Stay tuned for our fourth profile next week!

Nora: What is your professional/personal background?

Pamela: Professionally I identify as a jack of a few trades... Mostly sound, singing, music, educating and making stuff. I’m mostly self-taught but took a program in sound technology about a decade ago, aced it and have been working in live sound professionally ever since. I also took singing lessons with a cool librarian for years. Personally, I'm a working class Queer femme who grew up all over the commonwealth.

N: You mentioned you run a sound program as well as "The Forever Chorus". Can you explain in detail what both of those are?

P: I started the Forever Chorus about 4 years ago and it's the best project I've ever run. The group is an 'all voices' chorus, meaning that there are no auditions; it's a space for people with any amount of experience in singing, including people that think they can't sing at all! It's also a queer affirming, feminist space with a focus on posi-core learning and making music accessible. Myself and the co-director Sarah Ayton arrange all the music choosing songs written or made known by women/queers/underrepresented voices that we love with lyrics we can get behind :)

This year I also ran two live sound programs, first in collaboration with the festival Lux Magna, then in collaboration with Suoni per il Popolo. It's an idea I've been humming on for a while as I've seen so few women come into the sound tech world. Basically I teach women and gender non-binary folks how to set up and mix shows and they work multiple shows through the festival under guide from other female/gender non-binary techs. The over-all goal is to help create safer spaces for marginalized artists to feel empowered to be heard and take up space… Starting with the sound tech.

N: What do you bring to the field that is unique to you?

P: I dunno, I just really like people and want folks to feel good. I'm not sure that's unique but I'm also a 5'10" homo with a New Zealand accent and a giant ass so… I guess that makes me a bit special.

N: What gets you going every day?

P: Third wave Coffee. I'm fancy like that.

N: What do you want to be remembered by?

P: Being super nice and super cool.