"The Gauntlet collapses the choir back into the individual"

-Sxip Shirey
 

The Gauntlet is an immersive choral experience where audience members are guided by dancer, Coco Karol through musical corridors created by a 30-100 person choir, all standing on footstools, in two long rows facing each other. The composer, Sxip Shirey, sings phrases and tones to singers at one end of the line, who then take the musical phrases from Shirey and pass them down the line and across the aisles, singer by singer, until the phrases reach the end of the line. Music passed by singers is accompanied by choreographed gestures, creating ripples of sound and movement. The effect of walking through The Gauntlet’s sonic architectures is an intimate experience for audience members, like walking through a tunnel and being bathed in waves of harmony, poetry, and gesture.

Lyrics for The Gauntlet are culled by Shirey from "Movement Interviews” that Karol conducts with choral members in free workshops before the performance. A “Movement Interview” is a twenty minute gestural and verbal dialogue. It is a methodology Karol developed that uses poetic lines of questioning alongside movement to address the body as an archive of personal knowledge. The “Movement Interviews” for The Gauntlet have been inquiries into each participant’s phenomenological experience of “home” and belonging, and can be tailored to the site/ time/ place of the perfromances

Shirey composes The Gauntlet to fit the site and the community he creates it for with the idea of forgrounding the stories of individuals that represent a given community. Karol and Shirey work with choir members to develop gestures and generate language for The Gauntlet. Together, they consider the architecture, history and culture of a site and come up with the compositional strategies for the performance. 

The Gauntlet:
2016- June 21-The Highline, Make Music New York, Friends of the Highline
2016- December 6 - Fredrickstad, Norway with students of the Norwegian Theater Academy 
2017-June- Central Park, Make Music New York
2018-January- National Sawdust, Ferus Festival 
2018-June- Cleveland Art Museum, Solstice 
2018- September- The Sydney Opera House, Antidote Festival 

Image: The Gauntlet: The Highline 2016