Join us for an evening of collective singing with artist and musician Bint Mbareh!
This choir for non-musicians is a vocal activation for collective but improvised sounds made mostly by the people who are in the space at the time of activation. Bint Mbareh invites the audience participants with echoes in mind, with the attempt to be enveloped in sound rather than searching for it in sounds that are directed AT us.
The choir requires only courage and the willingness to listen, it investigates the sonic potential of language beyond meaning-making, but also the difference between an individual and a collective soundmaking process, it encourages listeners to find an internal listening and a group listening.
In doing so WHILE sounding not while passively listening, it implies through practise, that listening and sounding (OR listening and changing the object being listened to) are part of one circular process, thickening the quantum possibilities that one person or a group of people can feel some agency over.
Exercises include moaning, grunting, percussing using our bodies, whispering as loudly as possible, responding to outside events, inventing non-existent words, disrespecting the original intentions of a poem, and exploring the possibilities for telepathy.
Bint Mbareh is a sound reseasher with a focus on water in Palestine. Her interest in the physical parallel between the water wave and the soubd wave leads her into questions of border dissolutions (between bodies, between states, between tenses), and into the possibilty of being enveloped by a water body. She challenges settler colonial epistemology by taking seriously Palestinian ways of knowing, from rain-summoning music to shrine pilgrimage as an instigator to politcal revolution.
