The Voicing Project’s Sleep Choir offers participants and viewers the opportunity to explore the unconscious through sound.
Led by artists Noa and Tomislav in De Beauvoir Town, the sleep choir is part of a series of experimental projects.
Together, they form a series on the folk origins of the seven sins.
Tomislav said: “We’re kind of thinking about them in a more balanced way, because I think they all represent things that are very human and complex, both gross and exciting.”
The sleep choir represents sloth, but is broadly about the unconscious and movement.
Noa’s interest in creating a choir stemmed from having previously done care work, prompting them to think a lot about communication and the limits of language. They wanted to create a space that was anti-traditional and anti-institutional.
One feature of the choir is that it does not use a traditional score; you don’t have to be able to read music to participate.
Noa said: “The real learning curve for me was how to communicate a melody to a group of people because I would explain a melody in a way that made sense for me, and they would explain how they envisioned it.”
For Tomislav, it was an expansion upon pieces he created for his degree, focused on asking queer people to perform intimacy for ten minutes in institutional spaces such as churches and old schools.
The choir was thus originally a way of creating scores for these films.
He said: “A lot of what we want to do is create art that exists and thrives outside of professional arts spaces”
Rosie, who’s been a part of the choir for the past year, explained the creative process behind the sleeping choir.
“It’s collective music making with polyphonic voices, but mediated to create that environment,” she said.
“Noa basically creates pieces by putting structures and methods in place, and then it’s up to our participation ideas to create the final product.”
And eventually, these workshops built up to create a body of work.
Parts are improvised, like drone sections, where people come in at different rhythms, and then gradually the group is rounded out with Noa’s direction.
Featured image credit: Charlotte Lang
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