Choir as Method. Musarc Folk Meet on a Midsummer Day Until Dusk V. St Paul’s Bow Common, 22 June 2024, 6.30–Sunset

Join Musarc on one of the longest days of the year and watch the choir sing until dusk in one of the city’s most beautiful spaces. Food prepared by singers and drinks available all evening + shop with books, music and artworks by members of the ensemble. Doors and bar open 6.30pm. Programme starts 7.30pm and ends just after sunset. Advance Tickets starting from £10 available online from musarc.org. Children and young people under fifteen go free.

The choir’s practice is its performance, deep under this evening which is but an archipelago. Choir as Method asks how the chorus embodies knowledge. It presents new commissions and work in progress that materialise the choir’s ongoing creative practice and research, being a body of bodies in relation to each other, and the weight and affordances of its environment, culture and traditions.

Rachel Warr is teaching the ensemble puppetry as part of an ongoing, year-long project with composer Benjamin Oliver. Improvisor and pianist Pat Thomas has been teaching the choir how to conduct itself. In her second commission for the choir, Heleen van Haegeborgh has been making an inventory of the languages the choir speaks and the instruments it plays. Jennifer Walshe has been in a room with the choir to conjure and test ideas, working into different directions from a shared conception of embodied practice. Finally, after nine years, artist and composer Lin Chiwei has created a new tape score for the ensemble in which a double choir reads from the braided and wound textures of a knotted string, sounding the body of its own granular, cricket-like intelligence.

Choir as Method takes place in one of the country’s most beautiful modernist churches. The setting is informal and convivial. Breaks between performances offer time to talk and eat. There is no fixed stage, and the performance arrangements will change as the evening progresses. The audience is invited to move around, stand or sit on the floor. Blankets will be provided in addition to benches. There will be no artificial lighting in the space. The audience will be given candles to illuminate the auditorium as darkness falls. The concert is expected to finish just after sunset, which on the day is around 9.30pm.