The Dialing Tone Chorus

22 May 20:

Lockdown and social distancing means the cancellation of all my performance gigs and participatory art projects - pretty much everything for the foreseeable. I know I’m lucky to have a roof over my head and food in the cupbaord, and most fortunately I’ve not caught anything.

And I am lucky again to have some wonderful collaborators who want to continue making work, and have asked me to help. I’m working with Suzy Harvey, Moving Memory & People United, as well as Gitika Partington - singer, composer, arranger, choir leader extraordinaire. She decided to put together a virtual choir, and asked me to make a video for them. What started out as a reason to keep members of her various choirs happy and fulfilled soon blew up into something more. Gitika is not one to simply coast along.

Fellow Tubthumpers Chorus member Jo Healy was brought in to coordinate the members and Matt Glasbey was brought on to engineer the voice tracks together. Forty singers bashed out the parts with Gitika on Zoom, went away and filmed themselves and sent me their files.

To prepare, I watched as many different multi-person performances online as I could, and so many of them were so well done. The majority were quite simple - lining up people elegantly in split screen sections, fading in and out between featured singers. I wanted ours to be a little bit different tho, and fit the personality of the choirs and their leader. I asked Gitika to film herself conducting, maybe humming notes to tune everyone as if they were directly in front of her and then winking to the viewer. She took that idea and ran with it like Usain Bolt with an Olympic baton - filming a fabulously funny conductor video in one take, in front of a greenscreen.

Another inspiration she had was commissioning a backing track. Just the week before we were to start she met Eric James, a local musician who’d never made a dance track before, so she asked him to do one, showed him a draft of the video, and he got to work. Back came a brilliant quirky logic produced track that lifted the video and inspired me back. It also inspired the name of the choir: The Dialing Tone Chorus. There will be two more videos, and then a break.