Teen Traveling Camp I

Bongani Magatyana is a professional singer /music director /composer /theatrical producer living in Khayelitsha Township in Cape Town, South Africa.

He was born in Cape Town in a township called Old Crossroads. His father was a self-taught choir conductor in the Old Apostolic Church and taught hims son how to read and write tonic solfa music notation at a young age. Today Bongani conducts a 120-voice OAC choir himself, as well as a community male choir and a large children's choir. A dancer as well as singer, and he is particularly adept at communicating the elusive rhythms of South African songs.

Currently Bongani teaches at the Zolani Centre in Langa Township, leads an educational musical theatre company and the Khayelitsha Children's Choir, and continues to compose music in a variety of genres, bringing vibrant performances to communities across Cape Town.

Bongani’s folk-inspired choral compositions—popular pieces for South Africa’s major choral competitions—are sung by choirs around South Africa and internationally. Both Yale and Harvard Universities have commissioned Bongani to write choral works for their ensembles.

Sinead O’Mahoney, a native of Montpelier, VT, has been singing with Village Harmony and Northern Harmony for over a decade. She has traveled abroad with Village Harmony in Corsica, France, Switzerland, Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and has made three trips to Caucasus Georgia, including an intensive Georgian language course. She has been active in Sacred Harp and other shape-note singing throughout New England, and became a co-director of VH’s community choir Boston Harmony in 2018. Sinead will be leading songs from the American shape-note tradition as well as several pieces from Bosnia.

She has been praised for her sure command of rhythm and clear and efficient teaching style. Sinead earned her bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of Vermont in 2016. She currently lives in the greater Boston area.

Polina Shepherd (Skovoroda) was born in a Russian Jewish family in Novosibirsk. Whilst living in Tatarstan, Central Russia in the 1980-1990s, she was one of the visible young Jewish activists during her student years, just as the Jews of Soviet Union began to turn their focus back to their roots. Helping her father to bring a Jewish community together in an industrial town Naberezhnye Chelny, recording the remaining memories of Yiddish songs from her locals, performing, forming her own band, she was learning about being Jewish in Russia. At the age of 17, she joined Russia′s first professional klezmer band after Perestroika, Simcha, and toured with them all over the Former Soviet Union, at the same time studying her musical heritage further.

By her early 20s she was a Yiddish choir leader, composer, bandleader, an international touring musician and festival organizer. Having witnessed the phoenix of Jewish culture rising from the ashes of Communism and helping it is flourish and develop throughout the FSU, she is now part of the international world of Ashkenazi culture. Moved to the UK in 2003.

The latest and so far most ambitious project is 150 Voices, a recorded collaboration between Polina, the lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning Klezmatics Lorin Sklamberg and choirs in the UK and the USA (CD 150 Voices, 2020). It explores the connection between the Steppes and the Shtetl through folk and art songs, arranged specifically for this project, and newly composed originals. Apart from the original choirs, the Sklamberg - Shepherd Duo offer workshopping and performing it with any group choir in the world.

Her composition is focused on East European styles with an influence of classical music and folk elements. About 120 compositions including music for theatre shows, large scale choir compositions, settings for Yiddish poems, piano work, and nigunim performed by soloists and choirs all over the world.