The Shout performs a mixture of concerts, music theatre and site-specific pieces; our first performance was an outdoor oratorio The Shouting Fence (South Bank, July 1998) involving a large group of amateurs and children, the second a concert at the jazz club The Spitz, London (January 1999), the third a music-theatre piece Mouth at the Drill Hall, London (May 1999). Most of the singers are not actors; but the choir is interested in pursuing the theatrical implications of singing.

The choir aims to be a group whose personalities are revealed by the music and who are given freedom to sing solos and to improvise, and yet a group capable of homogeneous effort; it aims to explore the possibilities of sixteen individuals and of a single voice with sixteen components. It aims at achieving a high degree of choral sophistication while preserving a raw natural energy. It is interested in pursuing a kind of collective choral improvisation as well as using the individual improvising talents of the singers.

The music is written by Orlando Gough, Richard Chew and members of the choir. We aim to write with the particular talents and voices of the singers in mind, while also asking them to explore unknown territory. For some this unknown territory is improvising, for some it's singing complex harmony, for some it's memorising massive amounts of new music. We perform without scores and without a conductor.

The choir has worked with amateur musicians and children on six large-scale pieces: The Shouting Fence, Corona,Because I Sing, Sea Tongue, The Singing River, Fallen Fruit. We run workshops, for amateur singers, for children, for business people.

The choir performs in a wide range of situations - outdoors, in jazz clubs, in concert halls, in theatres, in art galleries, on rivers..... The Drill Hall and Battersea Arts Centre have been extremely supportive. The Vienna Festival has made a long-term commitment to commission new work from us. We have a continuing relationship with the National Portrait Gallery.

In short, the choir likes to do things that choirs normally don't do, and tries to push at the boundaries of what a choir might be.

The Shout is essentially a performing group rather than a recording group, but we have made two CDs On Arrival and Deep Blue.