Taking our inspiration from Australian company Brink Productions’ stunning work Memorial presented at the Barbican in September 2018, ViSiBLE VOiCES is working towards a large scale performance piece to be performed by professional actors and singers alongside choruses of older non-professionals.

The development period will begin in 2019 with the gathering of stories from a diverse section of older people drawn from community choirs and other organisations. Selected elements of this verbatim material will be woven into a text to be set to music at the second development stage in 2020. Themes and a structure for the work will be allowed to evolve in response to the material gathered.

The final work, to be produced in 2021, will be imbued with the life experiences, reflections, hopes, fears and dreams of a very broad cross-section of people aged between 55 and 95, with a view to communicating the diversity, challenges and richness of later life.

The work, which is currently conceived as a type of oratorio, is to be performed by a small team of professional artists supported by a large ‘chorus’ of between fifty and a hundred older volunteers, many of whom may have contributed to the text in the first stage of story gathering.