Procession
The Voice Project creates site-responsive choral theatre shows, inspired by landscapes, buildings, ideas and people. Every piece features original music written by our team of composers and writers and involves outstanding professional artists working with a large, open-access choir drawn from the community. We plan to create a new choral piece in partnership with Waveney & Blyth Arts.
This project is inspired by the famous East Anglian work The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald. One of the key images from this text is the submerged church bells of the lost village of Dunwich ringing out from under the waves. For this project our aim is to offer opportunities for everyone taking part to embark on a collective psychogeographical experience of an inspiring location. We will invite participants and audiences on a journey through a landscape, a journey that takes place over centuries as well as distance, that offers the opportunity for us to connect to a place, its narratives and our inner and outer worlds. In each location we will take our inspiration from a slice of the landscape that is created by a triangle of three locations.
This project will run over three years and will involve communities from Suffolk Norfolk and Sussex. VP will run a programme of activities for community participants, with a rehearsal process involving learning newly-created vocal music culminating in the devising of new site-responsive pieces as well as a connected workshop programme in other art forms.
Our process for developing a new work like this would be to start with a week of research and development, with the Voice Project directors and other associate artists of the company spending time gathering information and inspiration, visiting potential locations, experimenting with creative ideas, meeting people who have some kind of link to the ideas in project: in this case, writers, walkers, naturalists, landscape archaeologists and historians. We would schedule this for June/July 2023 and would invite Waveney and Blyth Arts to an informal presentation at the end of the process to share our ideas and plans for the piece.
This would enable us to develop a funding plan for the public project which would take place in Summer 2024. There would be opportunities for related activities to feature in a programme for Waveney and Blyth Arts for 2024 eg creative writing, walking, environmental art-making.
We would need to raise funds to support the initial R&D, which we estimate would cost around £5000. Any contribution from Waveney and Blyth at this stage would be much appreciated and would enable us to apply for match funding to secure the balance.
Both Voice Project directors have a long association with the Waveney and Blyth area, and are really inspired and excited at the prospect of creating a new work here. A significant number of our singers live in the area and the success of our piece Arc of the Sky at Blythburgh last summer, with support from Waveney & Blyth Arts, shows that there is an audience for our work .