Pure joy: the Australian pub choirmaster who flipped the script on America's Got Talent

The Guardian

6 hours ago

Viewed from the outside, at least, far from united, the states of America appear irreconcilably divided.
Which may explain why Astrid Jorgensen, a 35-year-old choir director from Brisbane who honed her skills at the pub, has just toured the States to sold out shows and seen her US reality TV appearance go viral.
'When I stand on the stage, I would like to prove to you that, in 90 minutes, we can agree on something,' Jorgensen says.
'And I think that that's a really important message anywhere but, for sure, I'm drawing the conclusion [that] in America … it feels like an antidote to whatever's happening in their own communities.'
While it might take an hour and a half in her travelling Pub Choir shows – in which she coaches the audience to sing along to pop and rock classics in harmony – Jorgensen made her point in a matter of minutes when she flipped the script of America's Got Talent in her televised appearance last month.
Instead of seeking their adulation for her own vocal prowess, the former high school music teacher got her audience to stand up and sing themselves. Yes, the cameras follow Jorgensen's dynamic conduction on stage. But, for the two-minute rendition of Toto's Africa, they mainly focus on the faces of the crowd. People of all ages, genders and colours, singing their little hearts out. Bemused, at first, before exuding the kind of pure and silly joy one only experiences belting out an 80s yacht rock anthem with a bunch of mates.
'If you bring some, like, cerebral, I dunno, indie thing, people are going to feel afraid and that they're going to do a bad job,' Jorgensen says of her song selection. 'I just want people to feel like they're winning – because it's just singing. It's not that big a deal. We've been overthinking it. Just give them a win and let them feel good.'
The people must have done. Cajoled by judge Simon Cowell and by an adoring crowd, Jorgensen was voted through to the show's next round. Tens of millions of people have watched, shared and commented on the clip online.
Jorgensen is Zooming in from her bedroom in Brisbane, trying to keep an angry chihuahua called Penny quiet. Penny is never angry with Jorgensen – only with those who seek to steal Jorgensen away from her dog. Penny is frequently angry.
Jorgensen's not long back from a hectic tour of the US. Yesterday, the ABC's Australian Story team was filming hers. Pub Choir will tour Singapore, Tokyo, the UK and Ireland in August. Jorgensen is launching her memoir, Average At Best, in September. She will tour Australia and News Zealand in October and November. Her computer pings with Slack messages from her media team.
Unsure how to mute the notifications, Jorgensen takes a moment to message her handlers and kindly asks them to shush. The quiet brings oxygen back into the conversation.
Jorgensen takes a similar approach to her Pub Choir shows.
'I try to play into, and really appeal to, an analogue experience,' she says. 'I tell people to put their phones away. And that is really hard for a lot of people.'
But choir, she says, is a unique act of communion in which the audience is transformed into artists. It is a sensation she experienced growing up Catholic, something that almost convinced Jorgensen to become a nun – until she realised that the 'beautiful, hopeful, optimistic, spiritual feeling' that its services gave her came not from the word of God, but from the music of the church.
This is an experience Jorgensen wants for her audience, but she wants them to decide for themselves how they feel about it, with their own brain, ears and eyes – not through a screen. Even after the show she asks that they keep phones in pockets.
'And I think that's really freeing for people,' Jorgensen says. 'It's really a lovely invitation for people to just experience, just to feel anything, to feel something at the show with others and to look around, to look eyes up, look at the board, look at each other, hold someone's hand.
'I feel like it's such a nice, rare opportunity to agree with other people just in such a low-key way.'
Jorgensen describes singing together as a 'beautiful fast track to community' – something that, ironically, she alone is not part of at her own shows, standing as she does on stage. So after the final show of her US tour, at a nightclub in Honolulu, Jorgensen invited everyone in the audience to come and say hello.
'People were relaying to me that this felt like the opposite of the way they'd been feeling for … years even. And that it felt important for them to remind that humanity and, like, connecting on a level outside of politics is possible,' she says.
'That's a special thing to be able to facilitate.'