NEXT Workshop / Bint Mbareh: re-choir-ed presence?

Name: NEXT Workshop / Bint Mbareh: re-choir-ed presence?
Start: 2025-11-28T16:00:00+01:00
Location: Štúdio 12

Schedule

Fri, 28 Nov, 2025 at 04:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Štúdio 12 | Bratislava, BL

NEXT 2025: The NEXT 2025 Festival will bring five days of contemporary and experimental music, performances and discussions to Bratislava. The program will also include a workshop section focused on sound, technology and new approaches to creation.
╱ One of the two workshops of the NEXT 2025 festival is 𝘐re-choir-ed presence? ╱
𝓇𝑒-𝒸𝒽𝑜𝒾𝓇-𝑒𝒹 𝓅𝓇𝑒𝓈𝑒𝓃𝒸𝑒? is an improvised choir for non-musicians. Everyone who attends is invited to use their voice in different ways, which may be entirely new to them. The vocal practices that Bint Mbareh leads are neither verbal nor musical but rely entirely on who is in the room and what their voices sound like together. No musical or technical background is needed, but a desire to scream with absurdity, comedic intent and bewilderment is a necessary condition for attending. Exercises include collective readings that ultimately flip language such that it is meaningless, shared hums, where, in order for us to maintain the hum as a group, we need to desynchronise our breaths so that we can breathe comfortably, but the hum still carries through strongly. We may also all individually make strange sounds, then ask the group to echo our sounds, then correct the group's delivery of the sound that we invented, thereby teaching others about listening and using their sound-making facilities throat (nose, mouth, ears and face), differently from ways they have tried in the past. We may nominate a group member to be our despot, giving us dynamic instructions or instructing us on how to make our loud hums. The exercises bring music back to the collective, away from the solo genius, back to the body, away from the cerebral, back to anonymity, and away from data extractivism, back to opacity, and away from being intelligible to the systems that harm us.
𝐵𝒾𝓃𝓉 𝑀𝒷𝒶𝓇𝑒𝒽 is a sound researcher with a focus on water in Palestine. Her interest in the physical parallel between the water wave and the sound wave leads her into questions of border dissolutions (between bodies, between states, between tenses), and into the possibility of being enveloped by the voice, by sounding communally, similarly to being enveloped by a water body. She challenges Settler colonial epistemology by taking seriously Palestinian ways of knowing, from rain-summoning music to shrine pilgrimage as an instigator to political revolution.
https://bintmbareh.today/
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👉 PARTICIPATION IS FREE, BUT CAPACITY IS LIMITED. REGISTER HERE:
https://forms.gle/rzPpuRXZihsKLjBw8