Carmina Bowena warming up before our concert on Monday
I sing in a choir here on Bowen Island called Carmina Bowena. We focus our attention on Rennaisence European music, singing sacred music, madrigals and modern inspirations of the same. We also sing folk music and more traditional music from Italy, France, Spain and the British Isles. We are an impressively eclectic group of people, under under the leadership and joy of our director, Nicole Thomas Zyczynsky.
We like to craft an atmosphere with the music we sing. It’s already transcendent music to begin with but when we perform we want to make it less about a concert and more of an immersive experience. We usually perform in small theatres or churches with good acoustics, from a stage, to an audience.
Monday night though was the first of what I hope will be a series of contemplative experiences that we co-created with the congregation of Cates Hill Chapel here on Bowen Island. We sat in a circle in the centre of the room, which has phenomenal reverb, and around us were a couple of circles of chairs. Candles lit the room and the participants were invited to be in silence for an hour as we sang four sets of music interspersed with poems about light and dark. It was not explicitly a religious experience, but for a contemplative person like me, it was a very good way to be in Lent.
The program began with a couple of Gregorian chants and went through songs by Byrd, Palestrina, Duruffle, Rossi, Lauridsen and Gjello. There was no applause between pieces, just a transition from one to the next, as we stood and sang in candlelit darkness. My friend Kathy played a beautiful clarinet solo a set of variations on a theme by Kodlay. I played a slow air one my flute from the Irish tradition called “The Fire in the Hearth” from an album by John Skelton.
The experience was co-created. Asking the audience to hold silence throughout the hour or so, in a resonant room light by candles, created an atmosphere of deep compilation. More importantly it was an atmosphere that was held by all of us, the choir, the readers, the hosts and the “audience.” It doesn’t;t even feel right to call them an audience.
To me this is the high art of participatory container work: when people all have a role in creating something together. To paraphrase Christina Baldwin, it is not one person’s job to create a container, but a group creates a dialogic container together. And when there is some coherence in that group – perhaps some shared experience, or a shared aspiration or even a shared curiosity – the container can be one in which transcendent experiences happen, where beauty emerges, or novelty, or flow. When we get out of our own way, feeling that it is our job solely to host and create, something else becomes possible. These are communal experiences can be full of beauty, like our concert, or of intense emotional joy like I have experienced when my teams have won important matches. They can be collectively healing, as my friend Linda Tran has begun to discover in her sound bath practice. Today we were talking about the way in which a sound bath session – where she plays crystal bowls and offers gentle meditative and awareness guidance – becomes a powerful collective experience when the participants have all done it before and have set aside their anxieties and worries and deeply rest in the experience. Something else is possible.
We live in a world of performance and consumption. Being an audience member in most places assumes a detachment from the experience. The fourth wall is intact. We passively consume what is put in front of us. We forget that we are also participants. It is becoming more and more clear to me that we NEED to find places of the participatory and collective practice of beauty, even in what is traditionally thought of as as an audience-performer context. May we never lose that ability.
