[By Mike Foley]
Three exceptional choirs provided music for the opening devotional of the Polynesian Cultural Center’s 60th-anniversary celebration on October 8, 2023, in the BYU–Hawaii Cannon Activities Center.
All were exceptional, but the most unusual one was a small virtual choir comprised of 24 alumni from around the world who sang and recorded their parts into smartphones. Two talented alumni combined the results into a touching, six-minute video, Voyage of Faith, a beautiful medley of songs that was displayed on the BYUH CAC’s large screen.
Couldn’t hold back tears: Many in the devotional audience could not hold back tears as they listened to Adele “Della” Wirihana Wi Repa’s original composition, Voyage of Faith along with two other beloved songs, Behold Laie and The Gathering Place. The latter is one of the Center’s night show theme songs (with Lamar Benavides singing the solo).
All were masterfully edited by Milton Kaka and intermingled with old Polynesian Cultural Center pictures, many showing old-timers still with us as well as alumni who have passed away.
Wi Repa is a BYUH/PCC alumna originally from Wairarapa “at the bottom” of the North Island of New Zealand, but she, her husband, Aaron Wi Repa — who was invited to sing with the Tabernacle Choir in the October 2023 General Conference, representing New Zealand — and their eight children currently live in Hamilton, New Zealand.
Della, as many call her, first came to Laie in 1985 and started working as a student in the night show. She also soon got drafted into the Promo Team. After interrupting her studies to serve on a mission in New Zealand, she returned to Laie. Della graduated from BYUH in 1992 and has since lived in New Zealand.
Kaka, who is originally from New Zealand, came to Laie with his parents and siblings and has been a Cultural Center musician for over 30 years (as well as being on the Promo Team). For those who didn’t previously know, however, he is also a terrifically talented video editor. In fact, he and his wife, Janeen Gago Kaka, recently produced a feature-length, award-winning movie, Tala, based on one of her family stories in Samoa.
Della and Milt began collaborating on producing virtual choir videos for the groundbreaking of the Auckland New Zealand Temple in June 2020. Voyage of Faith is their sixth virtual choir video.
Starting in 2022: When Center Vice President of Cultural Presentations Tagalotaoa Delsa Atoa Moe started to plan the Center’s 60th-anniversary celebration, she said, “We were still in the throes of social distancing and other COVID-19 pandemic concerns, so I thought it might be nice to have a virtual choir.”
Because she had seen the Auckland Temple groundbreaking production, she approached Della and Milt to see if they would be willing to do something similar for the Center’s upcoming
anniversary. They generously agreed.
Drafting and rehearsing the virtual choir members: Kaka explained they used a PCC database to send out invitations to people they thought might be interested in joining the choir, from which they received 24 responses. “From there, it was still a long process,” he said.
For example, Della created a Facebook™ group that included sheet music and tutorial videos. She explained, “I created a video of myself conducting, and we have the music playing on the video, plus the words and sheet music for them to follow.”
She indicated the training videos included prompts, such as “look right, look left, smile, put on the headphones, push play, and keep smiling at the end for a few extra seconds” to provide video editing “handles.”
Recording each choir member’s voice: When Della felt the choir was ready, they plugged headphones into their laptops (or computers), pressed record on their phones, and sang their parts as they followed the music on the videos.”
She added because she’s a “fussy” conductor, the process included several video “takes,” and she used the GarageBand™ app to do the recording
Kaka, who eventually ended up receiving all those recordings, noted since some of the virtual choir members sang more than one part, they repeated the process for each part they sang.
“For some, it seemed like an easy process, which it is,” he continued. “All the choir members needed was a laptop [or a computer to watch the tutorial videos] and a smartphone to record their parts, but others found this very technical.”
Compiling the separate voices into a single choir: From there, Kaka said he compiled the individual tracks into a choir, plus he added video effects that primarily used old Polynesian Cultural Center photos and a videotaped hula of Behold Laie in the Hawaiian Village by Cy Bridges, Sunday Mariteragi, Ellen Gay Dela Rosa, and Keith Awai, who had all trained under Aunty Sally Wood Naluai.
“It honestly took hundreds of hours at that point, but only because I’m kind of a perfectionist when it comes to these things,” Kaka said, and Della confirmed that included a number of extra challenges with this production.
Indeed, an old film (and likewise, video) adage goes, it can take about an hour of editing to generate a minute of screen time. Plus, to add to Kaka’s challenges near the beginning of his part, he had to buy a new, professional, and expensive suite of audio editing apps, and toward the end, he had to replace his own computer when his old laptop “died.”
But the results are outstanding: In previewing the near-finished project with Moe, she responded, “I literally was speechless. I was crying from the beginning, and at the end, when he was waiting for a comment, I couldn’t even talk. I was so emotional, it was just beautiful.”
“I couldn’t wait for our alumni to see it,” Moe continued. “It was so perfect. When we gave the link to Nephi [Setoki, the Center’s webmaster and a former Promo Team member], I said, ‘Nephi, after the devotional is over, post this on Monday morning, because I know it’s going to go viral.’
“Well, Nephi had it posted that Sunday night right after the devotional.”
“Oh, my goodness, by Monday morning, it already had a couple of thousand views on it. Milton and Adele exceeded my expectations by far.”
Kaka and Wi Repa respond: Kaka responded with gratitude for the whole experience. “We do it because we know the feelings people experience from these videos. We want them to feel the same spirit we feel every time we create one of these videos. We know it’s from Heavenly Father.”
Della said it was “heartwarming to hear people’s early comments, and I certainly got emotional, too.”
She also shared a related story from her outside job of assessing families with special needs children (two of Della’s own children also have special needs): Before going on the home visit to a Maori lady, she asked Heavenly Father how I could be a ‘missionary’ in my work.”
“When I got to the lady’s home, she was highly stressed and didn’t want to go through the assessment process. But somehow, we got on the topic of music because her boy likes music. That was one thing that settled his meltdowns. He also likes videos and wants to be a videographer. So I said, ‘Oh, I have a friend who’s a videographer, and we’ve just done a virtual choir video. Do you want to have a look?”
“At first, his mother didn’t look interested, but he did, so I turned it on. Then I gave it to his mum to have a look, and she listened to it for, like, I don’t know, three seconds. Then she just burst out in tears.”
“She had no idea what we were singing for,” Della continued. “She just knew that they must have been special people (in the old pictures). She had softened. Then she started to ask questions about God, and I mentioned some things about our church. By the end of it, we had become quite good friends. When I left, we had hugs, and she said that she’s going to let the missionaries in the next time.”
“Because she likes singing, I also invited her to see the Christmas lights at the temple. All of that came about because of the virtual choir.”
Mahalo to the virtual choir members (in alphabetical order by last name):
Bobby Akoi, Tupua Ainu’u, Lamar Benavides, Kyla Greening, Ka’onohi Hew Len, Candace Iafeta, Milt Kaka, Tane Randell Kaka, Ninoy Kusuma, Ani Ligaliga, Tim Ligaliga,
Rianna Kaka Mahe, Ani Matenga, Tiffany Matthews, Ariyan McKay, DeAnn Nicholls, Desire Ryter, McKay Schwenke, Leilani Soifua, Lucia Boyona Solis, Alma Toelupe, Esther Tukukino, Kerry Tukukino, Adele Wi Repa, and Ottley Wright.
