Staring at the Sun. Album Launch + Musarc Folk Meet on a Midsummer Day Until Dusk VI. St Paul’s Bow Common, 21 June 2025, 6.30–Sunset
Workshop Programme
29 Apr — 20 Jun 2025
London Metropolitan University
Oli Kitching conducting Musarc during recordings of Heleen van Haegenborgh’s Affordance album, Ghent, April 2025. Photo: Yiannis Katsaris
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.
Staring at the Sun 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.
Reuben Esterhuizen, Joanna Ward + Harry Houdini
Working with and alongside composers Joanna Ward and Reuben Esterhuizen, Musarc present an installation of pieces coexisting in St. Paul’s, Bow Common, taking inspiration from magician, escape artist, and séance exposer, Harry Houdini. His magic, his life, and his instantiation in popular culture in the form of songs by Kate Bush and Dua Lipa, serve as materials for the choir to digest, understand, and rework into new forms. The images are of the padlock and the key, the containers of water which overflowed as he submerged himself in them, and the figures surrounding him such as his wife, Bess, and former press agent Kit Clarke.
In this installation consisting of multiple choral pieces, video scores, field recordings, solos and duos, and text scores, the above themes orbit and overlap with each other, repeating in different configurations while the audience form individual pathways through the performance. Joanna and Reuben, both regular singers with Musarc, have used the opportunity of working with the choir to explore the possibilities of the ‘Choir as Method’: working with the singers to generate material for certain pieces while honing in on the unique affordances of the ensemble to create a work that makes space for individual autonomies, while coming into existence thanks to the strength of the collective voice.
Harry Houdini in chains. Photo: Getty Images
Affordances Album Release
Musarc is also thrilled to launch a new album in collaboration with SN Variations.
Affordances presents four works written by Belgian composer Heleen van Haegenborgh for UK experimental choral ensemble Musarc between 2019–25. Scored for voices and free melodic instruments, each piece tunes into a different dimension of the vibrant and oracular polyphony of the chorus, its joyful hallucinations, its many languages and the many ways it has with the world as a body of bodies, singular and plural: at times sounding restrained and hauntingly beautiful, at other times triumphant and clear.
Recorded over two days in April 2025 at Luca School of Arts, Ghent, Affordances offers a view into Musarc’s quietly radical, and maybe unrecordable, approach to what a choir can do and the unique space it can creates for artists, musicians and singers to develop new ideas. The evening will also feature live extracts from Haegenborgh's music.
Preorder the album now at Bandcamp.
Photo: Douglas Cape
Musarc recording Heleen va Haegenborgh, Ghent, April 2025. Photos: Yiannis Katsaris and Douglas Cape
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 £12 available online. Children and young people under fifteen go free.
Dinner served by Musarc, June 2024. Photo: Yiannis Katsaris.
St Paul’s Bow Common
St Paul’s Bow is one of London’s most beautiful and welcoming public spaces. Designed in 1960 by Maguire and Murray, the building is considered a Brutalist masterpiece. In 2013, it won the National Churches Trust Diamond Jubilee Award for best Modern Church built in the UK since 1953.
Unlike other churches in London, St Paul’s remains a civic space and a continuation of the city, open all day to the community and passers-by for contemplation or as a refuge. It is is a town square, able to process the assembled detritus of the people and things that pass through it. Benches surround the altar, alongside crayons and nursery chairs, two pianos, a coffee machine, a box of home-made instruments, cushions, cleaning paraphernalia, stacks of chairs and trestles, extension leads, Ikea bags overflowing with stuff for the next jumble sale, balloons from a christening, flowers. From the ceiling issue two bell pulls and salt weeps through two cracks in the concrete, forming small stalagmites on the floor that look like patches of snow.
Its dignity lies in its complete disregard for barriers, security and corporate balance sheets. St Paul’s has offered Musarc time and space to rehearse and perform in return for a donation. The choir would like to thank the church and its guardian, Mother Bernadette Hegarty, for its generosity and welcome.
Venue Information
St Paul’s Bow Common
Burdett Road
London E3 4AR
Google Maps
Nearest Tube/Rail: Mile End (9min) and Limehouse (15min)
Busses: 277, D6, D7, N277
Tickets
Advance £15 (£12 Concessions) tickets are available from TicketTailor.
Admission on the night is £18 (£15 Concessions).
Card payments on the door only.
Children are welcome and go free (under 15) – please contact us in advance as the event is recorded. Donations in support of Musarc’s artists and ensemble programme are welcome.
