Thursday 21 September 2023, 7.30pm
Wild Mix is an immersive choral punk musical - a storytelling song cycle performed by a queer choir & crew of kickboxers. They're friends, lovers, colleagues, housemates. They're trying to figure out how to feel alive. Rooted in communal singing, kickboxing and drumming, the work is built from these embodied practices that Jenny and her comrades use in their daily lives. For survival. For joy. To fall in step, to align, to figure out, how can we be alone, together? With vocals and drums, punch-bags and beats, we gather ourselves up to create some kind of embodied, ritual "yes." We ask - is it possible to sing yourself back to life?
At Cafe Oto, Moore will present a work-in-progress sharing of Wild Mix with 5 singers, drummers, a kickboxer and premiere her new instrument: a water-filled boxing bag fitted with a hydraphone as beating heart of the soundscape. In keeping with Moore's joyful, highly energetic, political work, there'll be loads and loads of singing, some storytelling, some bangers, some sad ones.
Written and Directed: Jenny Moore
Assistant Direction: Georgia Frost
Production: Lucia Fortune-Ely and Nancy May Roberts, Metal & Water
Set Design: Kit Falck
Creative development: Tanya Auclair and Tracky Crombie
Jenny Moore is a composer, singer, choir leader and performance artist. Her London-based six-piece choral-punk ensemble Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business is known for their tuned percussion, huge vocals and chanted soulful mantras, a mix of the 90's R&B and post-punk Jenny grew up listening to in the Canadian prairies. Their debut EP, "He Earns Enough," was released on Lost Map Records in 2021, with The Piano Tapes Vol. 1, recorded live in St Barnabas, Dalston following in 2022. Her new experimental choral punk musical, "Wild Mix," is currently in development.
Moore founded the 60-piece experimental F*Choir, composing and arranging for the diverse group of singers using non-gendered voice parts, graphic scores, no auditions to create highly energetic, rhythmic and political music. She's known for pioneering the DIY scene in bands like the dance-punk trio Charismatic Megafauna and Bas Jan, hosts a radio show on Soho Radio called 'Hitting Things,' and recently made her theatre debut as Composer for Robin Hood: The Legend Re-Written at Regents’ Park Open Air Theatre.
Moore was the first artist in residence at Borealis festival for experimental music in Bergen, Norway in 2019-20 and has been commissioned by the National Girls Youth Choir, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Arnolfini Bristol, CCA Glasgow and various DIY artist led spaces in London and abroad. She has performed at The Future is Female, Chapter Arts, Cardiff, Park Nights at the Serpentine Gallery with BBC Late Junction, Supernormal festival, and various DIY artist led spaces in London and abroad.
https://jennymoore.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.instagram.com/jennymooresmysticbusiness/
https://sohoradiolondon.com/profile/hitting-things-with-jenny-moore/
www.fchoir.com
Bianca Stephens is an actor, writer and mover. She regularly works with a physical theatre company called ‘The Pappy Show’ as a performer devising work through movement, song, the written word and breath also running workshops for the company and appearing in shows they produce called ‘Girls’ and ‘What Do You See?’. Theatre credits include working at The Noel Coward Theatre, Hampstead Theatre, RSC and Soho Theatre. Recently the play ‘2:22 a Ghost Story’ which Bianca was a part of has been nominated for several Olivier Awards and has also filmed a TV series called ‘Pistol’ directed by Danny Boyle.
Luisa Gerstein is a composer, producer and workshop facilitator living and working in London. She is the founder of Deep Throat Choir, and one part of four-piece Landshapes, both of which have released three albums on Bella Union Records. Most recently, she founded the small independent label Amorphous Sounds, and scored the music to the Novel produced podcast, The Girlfriends.
Nandi Bhebhe is a British born South African polymath: actor, musician, mover and creator. Her choreographic work has gained notable praise, including Best Choreography in a Music Video nomination at the UK MVA’s 2012. Recent lead roles include: Robin Hood The Legend Re-Written at Regents Park Open Air Theatre; award winning Mimi’s Shebeen with Vocab Dance Company; Wise Children’s “Wuthering Heights,” at The National Theatre and New York; ANU production 'Faultline' and 'Torch'; as well as many productions with Kneehigh Theatre Company.
Nandi works as Bhebhe&Davies a collaborative practice with Welsh artist Phoebe Davies. Their work spans live performance, sound and video, examining collaborative models of working across theatre and visual arts. They recently won the Aesthetica Short Film Festival award for Best Dance Film for their film ‘Viscera.’
Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani is a musician, composer, performer and award-winning director of the Young Women’s Music Project. She is based in Oxford where she was born and raised as a second-generation immigrant, her father having emigrated to the UK from Iran and her mother being Irish. Thoughts on identity run as an undercurrent through her creative process as she connects the different cultures she embodies. Zahra has also toured drumming for acts such as Lafawndah, Young Knives, and a residency with Stealing Sheep. She performed Atigheh on the BBC Introducing stage at Latitude, before taking the EP on tour across the UK and then onto supporting Islet on their album tour.
Sib Trigg is an architect, organiser, drawer, drummer and kickboxer. They’ve recently completed a practice based PhD funded by London Doctoral Design Centre on the experience of being architect and a community organiser, which they’re now turning into a graphic novel. As a queer and trans person, they took up kickboxing to have a place to push back against the structural violence which they encounter in the world, and after joining F*Choir in 2018, realised that both singing and kickboxing share parallels with the collective and collaborative practices which run through all of their projects. They play in the lo-fi, heartsqueeze, choral punk 3-piece band: sksie.
