New Zealand Winter Camp 2027
January 18 - February 3, 2027
Rehearsal Venue: Magnificat Retreat Centre, Featherston, Wairarapa District, New Zealand
Leaders: Lala Simpson, Patty Cuyler, Brendan Taaffe
Price: US$2800 / US$2300 youth / + US$250 single room supplement for rehearsal week
We will be accepting singers on a first-come, first-served basis. When registering online, choose “payment plan” at check-out to pay a 25% deposit instead of the full amount. The balance of tuition will be due on December 15.
A welcome from lead director Lala Simpson
A few years ago, I had the privilege of being interviewed by some insightful and talented third year students at Massey University and have my immigrant story shared in a short documentary alongside two other participants. The documentary has won awards and I am so proud to have been part of it all. This documentary talks about my struggles when I first came to New Zealand, it addresses racism and what I and my family had endured because of that but essentially it’s about resilience and the triumph of human kindness and the power of song and what belonging means to me. I talk about my women’s choir Kotaba Voices in this documentary as it is the choir that I formed in 2020 to fill the gap of missing singing with my sisters, my mum, my aunties, my grandmothers, my friends, a sisterhood really but, the Wellington Community Choir is also in the documentary and they sing the song that you hear. My heartfelt thanks for these two choirs who trust me to lead them and indulge me in whatever crazy idea I come up with and whatever challenging song happen to be in the repertoire we work through it together. Because of the freedom to share my songs, I feel right at home.
— Lala Simpson
Join Village Harmony at our second study-performance tour in New Zealand. The 17 day-long program will begin on January 18, 2027 with a rehearsal week in residence at the Magnificat Retreat Centre in Featherston, with a stellar team of VH teachers—Lala Simpson, Patty Cuyler & Brendan Taaffe—teaching a mixed repertoire of Malagasy, Maori, American, South African and other world and composed music.
Tucked away near the shores of Lake Wairarapa, the Magnificat Retreat Centre will offer us a calm sanctuary surrounded by the Rimutaka Hills. We will spend our first week not just rehearsing in this beautiful venue but visiting surrounding attractions—and singing in some truly spectacular places.
Featherston, where the retreat center is located, is the gateway to the wild stretch of cliffs, rocks and water that is Paliser Bay. It’s one of the region’s highlights with an historic lighthouse, native fur seals and the Putangirua Pinnacles, which provided an eerie backdrop in Sir Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King movie.
Once done with our rehearsal week we will enjoy New Zealand’s famous nature and hospitality to the fullest as we we spend 9 days touring around the lower part of the North Island of New Zealand.
From Featherston we will first travel to Rātana Pāto perform alongside their choir and the Wellington Community Choir for Rātana Day, celebrating the birth of the movement's founder, Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana.
Our journey then continues with a series of concerts across Hawke’s Bay, Wairarapa, and Kāpiti and Wellington. Throughout the experience, participants will also engage in cultural exchange by visiting a marae and learning directly from indigenous Māori tradition bearers.
In New Zealand's capital (and Lala’s home city), Wellington, we will visit Te Papa and perform on iconic Cuba Street, one of the best-known—and famously bi-cultural—streets in Wellington.
We will officially finish the program mid-morning on February 3, 2027. But there is SO much more of New Zealand to explore, on both the North and South Islands. Stay on if you can! And then you can also attend one of the Waitangi Day celebrations around the country. Held annually on February 6, Waitangi Day is New Zealand's national day commemorating the 1840 signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the country's founding document. It is a public holiday focused on reflecting on the partnership between Māori and the Crown, marked by ceremonies at the Treaty Grounds, cultural performances, and community events.
Meet our Leaders
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Lala Simpson
Lala Simpson is a vocalist, composer, and community song leader from Antananarivo Madagascar. Lala fell in love with her country’ s traditional music and dance from a very young age and started performing in with a local traditional folk Vakodrazana group at the age of 7. She is a very skilled teacher with a great sense of humour, passionate about the music and traditions of her homeland and has been given the honour of being one of Madagascar’s honorary cultural ambassador in NZ by the Malagasy ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Lala lives in Wellington, NZ with her three young adult children and her husband. She leads two community choirs, performs French music with her band, collaborates with other artists and community groups to organize ethnic community concerts, performs music from Madagascar, and travels around NZ leading community singing workshops.
In January of 2025 Lala led our first New Zealand program. She has also organized and led two awesome VH study-performance camps in her native Madagascar, in July 2023 and July 2025.
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Patty Cuyler
Patty Cuyler, born in California, was educated at Princeton University and is a long-time resident of Vermont. Village Harmony’s co-director starting in 1995 (and, since 2021, the head director) , Patty is an energetic, dynamic workshop leader, choral leader and performer. She is internationally-renowned for her expertise in teaching Corsican, Georgian and South African music.
Over the years Patty has spear-headed the expansion of the organization’s reach into the four corners of the globe.
It was also primarily Patty’s vision and labor that shaped VH’s successful response to the pandemic years, launching online programs that spanned the continents and allowing Village Harmony to maneuver a financially rocky period with aplomb.
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Brendan Taaffe
Brendan Taaffe is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist who lives outside of Brattleboro, Vermont. His most recent work, The Bucolics Project, is a long-time collaboration with Kentucky poet Maurice Manning. The project is a collection of songs based on the poems in Manning’s 2007 collection, Bucolics, a conversation between a field hand and a divine being known only as Boss. Each song references an archival field recording from the Appalachian Sound Archives at Berea College, where Brendan was awarded a research fellowship in 2017. In 2025, Brendan received a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council to support this project.
Brendan has been working with Village Harmony as a song leader since 2004. Best known for his original compositions, he is also deeply versed in traditional American harmony and has spent extensive time studying song traditions in Zimbabwe and southern France. The bulk of Brendan’s choral compositions can be heard on four albums with The Bright Wings Chorus, recorded between 2011 and 2018. Brendan is also a visual artist and a writer.
When not making music, Brendan lives on a small homestead in southern Vermont with his dog, Blue.
Rehearsal venue
The Magnificat Community is based at Cross Creek, 10km from Featherston in the Southern Wairarapa. The two residences, Bethlehem and Nazareth, are on sites adjacent to each on Cross Creek Road. They are surrounded by farmland owned by the community.
Tucked away in the heart of the stunning Wairarapa, the Magnificat Retreat Centre offers a calm sanctuary surrounded by the Rimutaka Hills and Lake Wairarapa.
“Actually learning music from throughout the world shows you so many drop-dead-gorgeous singing traditions, exposes you to music that moves you down to the very marrow... and it makes you exercise so many different ways of singing that you start to figure out the ways that work best, not just the ways that you’ve always done it. It’s sort of like feeding the addiction you never knew you had-- for the chocolate that nobody else has discovered yet.”