Event Review From Beat Boxing To Underwater Opera

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Getting Involved I have been involved in many unusual projects and events over the years, as my philosophy on life is to try anything and everything while I can – life’s too short not to grab every opportunity presented. So a chance to support an underwater opera, through modest participation in an amateur choir, taking inspiration from rap-music beat-boxing sound effects and holding singular operatic notes, and tooting on a recorder rather than song, sounded like a dream come true, and too good an opportunity to miss. Leaflets for the Queer Up North festival were all around Manchester’s performance spaces, and there were mentions of it on Facebook & Myspace. Though not gay I do qualify as Queer, and not jut downright weird. I mean my enforced period of celibacy in my cult years and just openly admitting to even having been in an extremist cult has some echoes of emerging from the closet. Strictly speaking, 'Queer' has a wider definition range than 'Gay', a distinction I have tended to overlook myself in a lazy tendency to use 'gay' and 'queer' interchangeably. Though not 'gay', I do safely, proudly and comfortably regard myself as queer, in my near asexual existence, and in still being haunted by a past history of enforced celibacy, Queer in a general broad sense of being ' "strange," "unusual," or "out of alignment." certainly applies to me, and I have accepted that there is any such thing as 'normal' behaviour. This is a theme I'll be exploring further in other online essays and research in the very near future. Queer Up North encourage everyone towards diversity in their thinking. Events like Those Who Will Emerge prove to be a perfect way of achieving that. Not everyone at, associated with, or supportive of Queer Up North's projects will necessarily match my broad definitions here. Juliana Snapper is a fully trained American soprano opera singer who has taken to performing away from the traditional stage – she sometimes sings upside down, and on this occasion Sunday 17th May 2009, she would be singing under-water. She has undertaken some study of the effects of water on music and voice, and uses special technical equipment to amplify and carry her voice, enabling her to sing while swimming, and controlling her breathing under-water. She has performed individual songs and experimental pieces in swimming pools, but You Who Will Emerge From The Flood is a specially written fifty-minute opera. It is set in the future where the waters have reclaimed the land and most life on it. Juliana plays Blorkra, a solitary late survivor, evolved into a human fish hybrid, lamenting on lost humanity and the folly of global warming that may have contributed to the rising waters, etc. This might easily have been a solo-production, but Juliana wanted to interact with the last vestiges of cruelty left from humanity, - the creatures who would taunt her from the marshy shores of her watery realm and that is where the choir came into the production. There were shades of H G Well’s The Time Machine here, with the choir of Morlock creatures surrounding and voyeuristically watching Blorkra, a creature comparable to the last of the Eloi. Our role as choir and musicians involved sound effects and long held slow resonant notes made with our voices rather than songs, which is fortunate because my singing is truly appalling. The promise in the request for choir members that no experience were needed and that it wasn’t an audition was all the incentive I needed to sign up. I had no idea quite what would happen next. Jason Singh’s Beat Boxing Workshops Four weeks before the one night only performance, choir members were invited to voluntarily take part in three free Wednesday evening warm up workshops with beat-boxing expert and performer, Jason Singh. These informal workshops took place at the Queer Up North HQ at the Green Fish studios, on Oldham Street, Manchester. I was one of only two participants at the first workshop (our numbers would grow in subsequent weeks). Jason was playing around with his high-tech sound equipment when I arrived, giving a spontaneous, impromptu demonstration of his skills. This was daunting, as I wondered if he was going to seriously try to make me achieve anything like what he could do – his vocal range was extra-ordinary. What we did was actually much easier, but nevertheless, highly effective and taught us a new appreciation for sound, noise, and what we can do with our own mouths. As warm up exercises, we sat up straight in our chairs, and went into a meditation mode, which was far less tense than my cult experiences of such activity, but a little unsettling at first, due to personal past experiences. though I got used to it as we went on. Jason had us listen to our own breathing, and follow it through our mouths, noses, lungs, etc. We then had to listen to the sounds from the room, taking in every creak of the floorboards, and what each other were doing, etc. Our listening field was then allowed to extend out to take in the noises from the building, and the busy streets of Manchester’s Northern Quarter. We reversed the process to bring the noise back into ourselves and now it was our turn to make some noise. Jason did some more beat boxing, and had us pay attention to his hand and microphone movements. This wasn’t dance, but a means of focussing the sounds made. When a beat-boxer makes a whooshing noise, the hand moves away from the body, and the sound runs parallel to that in duration, speed and intensity. If the hand moves down, the sound is low and deep – if the hand is raised higher, the noise is higher in pitch too. As well as outgoing noises, beat-boxers can make noises while breathing in – accompanied by the hands being drawn back in time with it. The most dramatic touch we learned was the way a sharp sudden stop, especially on breathing in, can create some very startling effects. We played with this a lot over the next few hours. An important prop was Jason’s terrific repeat loop drum machine. This was a foot activated devise that recorded any sound we beat-boxed out, and then kept that playing on a loop as we added a new layer of beat-boxed sound or any noise we wanted, - the loops carried both noises together, and we could add as many new sounds, beats, etc. as we wished. This enables beat-boxers to become a one man or woman orchestra, in effect setting their own accompanying sound-track – layering complex patterns of noise on top of one another. I got to layer my sounds on my own sounds and to interact my sound effects with those of the other workshop participant, Martin, and Jason as well. We played back the finished recordings, creating a very industrial mechanical effect in the first. Our second stab sounded like a haunted forest to me, and to a peaceful church retreat to Martin. Abstract art will always mean different things to different observers. At the second and third workshops, Martin & I were joined by a dozen more volunteers, and we quickly learned new techniques, such as creating the sounds of specific instruments, such as symbols, (making a ‘Tse’ noise with the mouth, and snare drum effects, (Tche noises) kick-drums, (B sounds with pursed lips), and rain effects, made by a group of people clicking fingers against their teeth. It was clear that at the show itself, our growing choir would not be using the looping machine, but relying on each other to provide supporting sound effects to anything we did. Our final week’s lesson took us through similar exercises to before, and on to making elemental sound effects together, wind, water, rain, fire, etc – I was in the wind and air group when we split into elemental units for the last few exercises. Sadly, Jason Singh wasn’t able to join us at the show itself, due to other work commitments. Our next gathering was for a rehearsal with Juliana Snapper herself. Youtube - Jason Singh in action - without a single instrument Arthur Chappell