Breathing Choir: a voiceless articulation

A collaborative workshop/assembly/performance exploring breath as a voiceless fricative, moving beyond phonetics and speech to reassemble breath as a collective gesture for Acoustic Justice, Acoustic Care programme for The Listening Biennial in Berlin, 2026.

Inneke Taal - ‘Breathing Choir - a voiceless articulation’

Through a collective reflection on the poetics of breath, the ‘Breathing Choir’ was a group-devised performance that allowed breath, as a combination of natural breathing and voiceless fricatives, to form the sonic and visual landscape of bodies in shared space. 

Beginning with developing a score related to breath and body, participants were invited to workshop this into a notional choir as a collective act of breath. Breath and voiceless fricatives became a way to transcend linguistic boundaries and explore embodied states that often remain unvoiced. Anyone with experience breathing was welcome.