THE COMMONS CHOIR

As we celebrate the closing of The World Is Sound, the Rubin asks: What does humanity sound like? The Commons Choir offers an answer with Mayday Heyday Parfait, a performance that sets humanity’s troubles and highest aspirations to song, dance, and poetry, discovering the human capacity for empathy across difference. Led by choreographer Daria Faïn and poet Robert Kocik, the large ensemble weaves an intricate narrative of individual stories through complex musical harmonies and highly personal movement, from the mayday of distress to the heyday of success, creating an irresistible, multilayered parfait of the complexities of the shared human experience.

About the Performers

The Commons Choir, a core and variable cast of roughly 30 singers, actors, composers, and people, is the performative aspect of the Prosodic Body, a new field of research founded by Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik, which explores language as sound, embodiment, and utmost expression. Tone, intention, rhythm, gesture, the tacit, hesitation, interaction, evocation, and even cosmogenesis are all acts of prosody. The Prosodic Body is a practice that manifests in various areas: principally performance, architecture, health, education, and socioeconomic justice.

The Prosodic Body is deeply committed to the cultural cruciality of poets and performers and calls this social aspect of their work “commoning.” One branch of their commoning work is the Commons Choir, started in 2008. The choir draws on the breadth of their prosody research to create performances that carry socially charged issues. Surrounding the choir events are symposiums, talks, and teach-ins covering diverse matters such as economic justice, income distribution, biochemistry as endogenous alchemy, universal entitlement, usury laws, plebiscite, artificial scarcity, gratitude, levity, accumulation, the history of privatization, and choreoprosodia (the full fusion of poetry and movement).