Hen and Stag

The Shout, the internationally acclaimed choir, are searching for 200 singers – 100 women and 100 men – to take part in one of the major productions of next year’s main Brighton Festival.  Led by Orlando Gough who specialises in extraordinary ambitious left-field choral events this is an opportunity to create something wonderful and slightly mad.

Fresh from success at the Proms and the re-opening festivities at the South Bank Centre, the unique choir The Shout, in collaboration with UK’s friskiest dance company Protein, brings a new outdoor choral extravaganza to festival.  It is a chance to dress up outrageously, maraud around the streets of Brighton, behave badly (but legally) and sing some gorgeous love songs.  All the music will be new compositions, with some strange rearrangements of classic songs. 

"The SHOUT continues to develop an ensemble sound and attitude like no other. It is entertaining, funny, and deadly serious. It is full of enormous egos and talents, yet they work effortlessly together to create intricate and contemporary textures, effects and subtle backgrounds with no apparent effort or tension."    The Guardian

Singing experience is desirable but not essential. If you’re in a choir, they’d love you to take part. If you’re not in a choir, they’d love you to take part. 

Please use the link to the left to register your interest in taking part, and explore The Shout's main website with songs and videos.

 

Happy  Together

Human beings were once composite creatures that were both male and female. Each being had one head with two faces, four hands and four feet, and both male and female genitals. Being unified and whole, our ancestors wielded tremendous force. In fact, so magnificent were these androgynous beings that they dared attack the gods. The gods, of course, would not tolerate this insolence. ‘Men shall continue to exist,’ Zeus decreed, ‘but they will be cut in two, then they will be diminished in strength so we need not fear them.’ The two halves were then sent in opposite directions to spend the rest of their lives searching frantically for the other half-creature, the reunion.

Plato’s Way

 

Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.

Haruki Murakami

The space that exists between men and women is very noticeable. There are gay men, there are lesbians. And what are the heterosexual people up to? They’re on hen nights and stag nights, marauding round the city like lost souls, with antennae sticking out of their heads.

In Happy Together, two groups of people, one male and one female, set out from different points in the city. They move through the streets independently, singing love songs. Sometimes the groups come close to each other, but they do not meet. As they move, the groups grow, picking up more and more people. Along the route, situations develop – games, dares, arguments, incidents, accidents, surprises, encounters.

The groups consist of singers, professional and amateur, and performers/actors, professional and amateur.

The walkabout is a mixture of dignity and anarchy, of formal procession and ASBO idiocy. We intend to research the origins of hen and stag nights looking for interesting rituals. We are intending to do more than simply recreate a modern hen/stag night. Our intentions are more serious – to expose the inherent separateness of men and women.

The singing, a mixture of solo and choral, will range from Geri Halliwell’s sublimely daft It’s Raining Men to an Indian ghazal sung by the Sri Lankan singer Manickam Yogeswaran of The Shout, taking in popular songs, folk songs, classical songs, newly composed songs. High art and low art intermingle. There will be no band, only a ghetto blaster providing an occasional backing track. Solo singers may use megaphones.

The audience moves with the singers and performers, perhaps amongst them, perhaps slightly separate. Each member of the audience is issued with an itinerary, giving him/her the option of following either group. Perhaps there is a formal ticketed audience which follows the groups closely, in some kind of privileged way. There will of course be an informal audience of interested bystanders and cheapskates. It is quite possible that naughty people may try to disrupt the piece, but that is not necessarily a problem.

Eventually the two groups come, simultaneously, to a club. The dance floor is divided down the middle by a curtain, as in orthodox Jewish weddings. The audience watches from a gallery. The groups enter through different doors and occupy the two halves of the floor, still separate. They sing to each other, call and response. The curtain is drawn back. Silence. The groups mingle. The men and the women dance together. They regroup on either side and the curtain is drawn again. They leave the club separately, singing.