COMMONS CHOIR | Robert Kocik prosody performance

THE COMMONS CHOIR, a core and variable cast of roughly 30 singers, actors, dancers, poets, musicians, composers and people, is the performative aspect of the Prosodic Body, an integrative field of research and experiential practice. The Choir was co-founded in 2008 by its co-directors Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik.

The Commons Choir functions like a micro-society, whose presentations are multimodal, multilingual, multiracial and multigenerational and are, as such, celebrations of our very working process. This process is porous: anyone's concerns or inflections may go into the making of the script, score or libretto. We call this commoning. The Choir is an invitation into a common circle. The topics are eutopic and rooted in reality. The performances are investigative musicals that give uncanny prominence to prosodic features, a literal lionization of prosody. Phonemes, meters, pauses, gestures are fully meaningful in themselves. (Our working title for this fluent fusion of movement and voice is choreoprosodia.) Included in the range of matters the Choir has treated: usury laws, the Age of Discovery, the history of justified greed, nutmeg, neurohormones, gratitude, the assumption of the separability and privatization of self, blessing, Chinese energetics, stress, schadenfreude/freudenschade and epigenetics.

mayday heyday parfait — A Commons Choir performance that premiered at BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn, NY on November 9, 2017— a history of the peopling of Brooklyn, starting with the ‘Age of Discovery’ that set into motion a global interchange of peoples, plants and communicable diseases under the most exploitive terms imaginable. This work was guided by a reparative process named "undiscovery."

E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E — performed at New York LIve Arts, March 2013, created by choreographer Daria Faïn and poet Robert Kocik, in collaboration with composer Katherine Young, vocalist Samita Sinha and the Commons Choir. An epic, town hall musical that calls upon a panoply of reparative tones, tunes and intentions to plead the case for an all-inclusive economy, proposing, with Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr., money as everyone’s. The idiom for this work was named "reEnglish."