Songs of Communal Becoming (A Fluxus Choir Installation)

Songs of Communal Becoming

A Fluxus Choir Installation 

Click here to watch on YouTube

MUSINGS AND INSPIRATIONS

The ritual is not casual but the pedestrian contains the magnificent.

I’ve been thinking about the sacred. Sacred spaces and how to reclaim them into embodied experiences. I think we have codified many experiences into a set of dances and rituals and steps whose meaning we have long lost touch with. We go through the motions of ritual but have lost their sacred essence. 

I wonder how differently we would treat embodiment and sound experiences if we weren’t searching for the niche, the oddity, the newest shade/tone/timbre, rather instead being in so much awe for that which is abundant. Our environment. The hum of our physical body. How that might expand into many tones, transforming our awareness of the body into a multi octave instrument. Tuning into our source energy vibration. 

In kundalini yoga, of which I am a practitioner, it is taught that sound is the center of creation, the birthplace of all things. We are taught through yogic sciences about the 8 chakras of the body (and the 84 chakras of the mind) as different energy points in the physical body that all vibrate at different speeds and therefore hold different frequencies or pitches. While this is a very complex science that people use in different measures, the idea is that you can expand or shrink specific energy centers with mediation. 

Sometimes they are thought to be out of balance with each other, causing disharmony of the full body so you will work to shrink or open whichever centers aren’t regulated with the full body for alignment, essentially tuning your system.

The idea of regulating your own frequency with breath and body (mantra) is soothing especially during these times when so much seems out of our control. When the only regulation we have is our minds, our breath, and for at least some of us, our body. How can that body be listened to, meditated on, questioned as a form of revealed and unraveling composition? What is our body's own masterful composition, it’s own narrative in the space time continuum? As music becomes a background hum and we are fed disassociation through fleeting conquests, I wonder what kind of deep euphoria could come from returning to the body as source composer, as living composition, perfect in form and function and poetry. 

ABOUT THIS WORK

I was trained as a classical singer and worked as a gigging opera singer and choral singer/soloist for about five years out of undergrad before changing my focus to composition. 

Something that I always felt a bit sad and curious about during this era was the singing world’s obsession with “a good voice” and “a beautiful sound” often relating to a pure soprano in a classical flourish. When I was teaching vocal lessons to community choirs and leading community choirs myself, I was often in the trenches of guiding untrained singers through feelings of unworthiness and desperate longings to express themselves through singing, met by impenetrable walls of insecurity, fear and mind/body dissociation.

One of the tools I created to break through this mental and spiritual block was to come up with a series of games from which physical movement was the impetus of sound. I would engage singers with the experience of movement as a focal point from which sound would emerge. With the focus on embodiment and physical gesture as a sound inspiration, the fear of the perfect sound would slowly melt and become irrelevant and true embodied singing would begin to emerge, gesture and expression taking the lead and “a beautiful sound” releasing its grip on the singers. 

I had a voice teacher once tell me to not think of the piano or vocal range of notes as high to low but as sounds that naturally occur in nature with different contexts. Low notes are soft hums, deep sighs. High notes are Alarm! Warning! I.e. All these pitches exist in our bodies in different contexts so we don't have to grasp for them in great tension, they can be commanded by softening into context. I have since found great freedom in exploring and guiding other singers in exploring the sounds of our animal body. 

For this work, I gave the singers 7 different vocal games that I had devised out of a series of prompts and rules and adjusted the rules as the textures began to unravel and grow. I also gave the singers journal prompts during the rehearsal process in which I asked the singers to write about something on their mind and heart recently and use that written experience as a guide to build the arc for their improvised solos. The film you are viewing is cut down from about 4 hours of sonic footage/experiments.

NOTES ON OWNERSHIP/COLLECTIVE SYNTHESIS

Something that comes up a lot in collaborative devised work is the issue of credit and who is to be credited as the composer. While I am a curator and guide of this process and nurtured the specific environment and processes with which to create these experiences, this work would not be what it is without the input, skill, ability and devised work of the collaborators involved. I modeled a workflow as a curator, guide and visionary of this work. This was a group effort with a clear guide, something I seek to accomplish in my own definition of composer as a service position in which I curate an opportunity for community building through music and performance. 

A guiding principle for me in the creative process is an idea a kirtan teacher once shared with me, “The center is not the best place to occupy because the center is the one place love doesn’t flow.”

NEXT STEPS

The next stop for this work is to be the nucleus of an installation for a fluctuating community choir. I hope to have the instruction for movement and sound posted on the wall of the Hurley Gallery Space in The Lewis Center and host a 3 hour installation in which people can wander in and out and join the texture of the 3 singer nucleus choir, when and how they choose. A moving, fluctuating, ephemeral work for a community of voices and bodies. 

I would like to guide a community of singers away from the idea that singing is about “how beautiful of a sound can you make”, and toward “How deeply can you inhabit yourself?” and collective synthesis, art as process, community as process.

If you would like to be involved with the development of this project please talk to me after the concert or DM me on instagram @hopelittwin

Love, Hope

ps. Songs are Prayers, Mantras for Self Hypnosis