Art shortfilm created in the middle of corona in may in Kyiv, 2020

The workshops took place within the context of a week-long residential stay at Battersea Arts Centre for the Hooligan company.

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With Various Stages, we had planned three days of work with a young adult community chorus, a 14-strong ‘hooligan chorus’. Unfortunately, we carried out only one of the three intended workshop days for Various Stages, before the crisis intervened, but we agree that a lot was learnt on that sunny day in Clapham.

Jessie is enthused by the group who came to work with us, and is still thinking about them. She is delighted by the response to our open call for participants and intrigued by their motivations for signing up. She feels that this call to participation was itself an important element of the work, as it opened up a space for individual engagement with our subject matter and chosen form, which in turn contributed new perspectives. Some participants had come out of an interest in football hooliganism, or in the themes of tribalism and belonging; others were attracted by an opportunity for collective experimentation in music-theatre.

Pete is moved by the way the Ukrainian actor (and former hooligan) Sam shared his story with the participants and the creative response it inspired in them. Jessie observed that the chorus was able to form an ‘animal’ connection very quickly, creating a lot of noise and a powerful force between them. Pete reflects on how great it was that we created a lot of different sounds together on that first day. Jessie wonders how we would take this brute power and start to introduce disciplines for the creation of sound, collectively and individually, building on our experiments with intoned cluster-chords, chanting, clapping, phasing and tension in the breath.

Olesia remarks on how interesting it was for her to work on the theme of masculinity, particularly from the perspective of domination. In her work Olesia often encounters the expectation that she must be dominant; playing music to a dance floor as an act of power, she feels she is expected to show aggression in the artistic sphere. This parallel with Sam’s story intrigued her. She is happy to be working in a process where the power is collective, a process by which we are not seeking a perfect polished sound, but instead value a spirit of curiosity and interest which does not limit us to the traditional parameters of our individual practices.