Pure Taste Indicator - Artist Page

The primary subject matter and artistic medium of The Commons Choir is the political economy. The Commons Choir equates the economy with the commons (the shared resource allowing people stay alive) while the basis of politics is the communal process of determining what is best for living together. The Commons Choir is an inquiry into paradox and intractable differences. In particular, TCC focuses on the correlations between the primacy of individualism and concentrated wealth, personal privacy and resource/infrastructure privatization, self-ownership and non-cooperation, prosperity and austerity, and differentiation and commonality. Formed in 2008, TCC is a multilingual and variable collective of roughly 30 singers, actors, dancers, poets, musicians, composers and people. Our diverse identities are an integral part of our content. To address critical areas of concern and conflict, TCC creates librettos, performances, forums, symposia, exhibitions, workshops and curricula to activate an “implicate theater” in which everyone is potentially complicit, often involving the audience to revise the narratives, and working with local performers, activists and organizations. Our songs, assemblings, exhibitions, teachings, exhortations, and self-organizings stress that our survival now depends on equitable interchange and an understanding that capital, as the collective, congealed work of all of humanity, is the commons. Our work has been referred to as investigative musicals or antidotal reparative epics, especially in that we always involve history and the tracing of causes. TCC is the performative aspect of the Prosodic Body (a field of research founded by TCC directors Daria Fain and Robert Kocik) that explores language as sound, embodiment, utmost expression and the unsaid. Tone, rhythm, intention, implication, gesture, hesitation, interaction, evocation and even cosmogenesis are all acts of prosody.