BY BOWOW-BOY

NOTE:  THIS POST ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON BOWOW-BOY'S BLOG.

Thanks to the miracle of facebook and youtube, I was recently able to gain contact with a local performance maker that very much inspires me here in Melbourne. His name is Peter Gleeson and he has been leading gatherings in 'Spontaneous Choirs' for years.  In fact, my first experience with one was probably in 1999 or 2000 with my older brother at a Confest, though I suspect Peter had been working at this for much longer still...

What is Spontaneous Choir? In brief: a Spontaneous Choir is a co-ordinated meeting of people in a public place, festival or anywhere a crowd may be seen to gather. Gleeson leads an initial group in a gathering that could be compared to the more recent phenomena of 'flash mobs' (though with some important differences that i will discuss later), but this 'seed' of participants quickly encourages others in the crowd to join in the games. The group, or Choir, is then led by Gleeson in performing enjoyable and humorous little group performance experiments with sound such as 'sonic-baths' or 'processions'. People of all ages are encouraged to participate, you will often find elderly, children and even pets in a performance.

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The bowowhaus site is evolving into a place for conducting discussions and to establish blogs within a network of like-minded performer/artists.

The first stage of this new direction has been the introduction of Benjamin Ardley into the site.

Welcome Ben!

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