Ten years old this month, but still flush with the sheer cheek of what they do, Orlando Gough's ragbag choir have been blowing out the candles with gusto. They took on a whole week of programming at Kings Place, capping it with this winningly indulgent night of personal celebration. The greatest hits tour, you might have called it, were it not impossible for this group to perform anything with a sense of reverence: they're far too in the moment.

Perhaps ragbag choir isn't the best way of describing the Shout, but it does sum up two things they represent: choral singing without the stuffiness. In place of most choirs' obsession with tweezering the blend, their members come from multiple places in the musical map, ranging from pop to soul, music theatre to opera. What they all share is a brilliant sense of musicianship, combining staggering discipline (everything is a cappella, everything is memorised, everything is in tune) with an exhilarating willingness to dart off in unexpected directions.

This showcase gave us the best of their versatility. One moment the group were absorbed in the febrile heat of Mike Henry's percussive Song for a Dark Girl, the next they gathered in a Gaelic threnody, Grioghal Cridhe, with Rebecca Askew the pure-voiced soloist. Theatre infuses but never smothers their vocalism: in Galeas, a Greek-Ladino lament for the enslaved, the group spread out disconsolately, breathing out the strains of a slave's labour before two singers gave full cry to the melody. But, just when you think it's all gone a bit worthy, the Shout gamely bring on a duet sung with the text entirely back to front: loopy, but oddly compelling.

It's touches such as this that remind you that the Shout isn't just about sound: when they sing, they do it with an immediacy that almost lets you touch a song as well hear it. Here's to ten more years.

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25th July, 2007
Critical Mass
Annette Morreau

Critical Mass, devised by Emma Bernard and Orlando Gough, deserves a long life. As the final offering of Almeida Opera 2007 (a mixed bag of contemporary music and opera), Critical Mass is hugely compelling. Devised by Streetwise Opera and featuring members of The Shout, this is a work for the community by the community.

Streetwise Opera was set up five years ago in response to an MP's remark on the homeless – the people you step over when you come out of the opera. Streetwise comprises people – all sizes, ages and ethnicities – who have experienced homelessness. Critical Mass (the title is wilfully ambiguous) is the result of workshops held in four London centres for the homeless.

Much of the material was provided by the participants. The action concerns an imagined conference of global delegates discussing global issues, satirising the vacuous, clichéd, gobbledy-gook management-speak favoured by many of today's politicians. The cast of 40, besuited, with briefcases, sit in rows, jumping up and down to deliver meaningless declarations, all wildly applauded. Orwell's Animal Farm comes to mind.

From time to time a song breaks out – Hebrew, Estonian, Gaelic, gospel – quickly overwhelming, engaging, subverting the delegates; music, not words, leads to cohesion. Tea arrives on a trolley, an elderly black lady pouring; four "suffragettes" with "Votes for Women" sashes pass by.

There are no "characters", only individuals in a crowd of massed singers, skilfully directed in their movement by Bernard. There is no orchestra or conductor; all songs and choruses are unaccompanied. Melanie Pappenheim leads the last song in German: "Everything is transitory. Life lasts only for a moment."

Numerous attempts have been made to present "new" opera – but is this opera? Well, not in the sense of grand singers, choruses, orchestra and staging, but in a much more real sense – the political sense of Mozart, Beethoven and Verdi – it is. Gough and Bernard have confronted contemporary life, wittily but poignantly. Critical Mass – relevant, intelligent, touching, powerful – should be widely seen. A tremendous achievement.

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28 Sep 2007
Fingerprint: play subsumed by grandeur
Ivan Hewitt

Fingerprint, the latest piece of small-scale music-theatre to be unveiled in the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio, is all about "the tension between individual identity and group identity", according to the blurb. We're also warned that it takes place in a classroom, and includes scenes of registration, prayers and a citizenship class.

This sounds like a recipe for something desperately earnest. No doubt it could be if it were done as straight spoken drama. But this was a show conceived and performed by The Shout, an extraordinary bunch of singers who have reinvented the notion of what a choir can do.

Being drawn from so many different singing traditions – Indian, musical, pop, classical – the group is itself an object lesson in how cultural difference can yield something joyously anarchic at one moment, and superbly disciplined the next. And because the choir deals in song rather than dry speech, a weighty topic such as the tendency of groups to drown out the intruder can be clothed in pure play.

The playful spirit is revealed in the very first scene of this "a cappella choral theatre", as one singer emerges under a spotlight. We see him inventing music all by himself, discovering how one note "leads" to another. Set against that image of primal freedom were images of social conformism, often disrupted, only to be re-asserted.

In words, this would take time; in music, it can happen with magical swiftness. We saw an amusing parody of the worst kind of singing lesson, with lots of banal "parroting" of the teacher by the pupil (Melanie Pappenheim and Adey Grummet were the superb double-act here).

We saw a class united in song turning against an intruder, played by the Indian singer Manickam Yogeswaran. He tries to fit in with a tentative rendition of Jerusalem, but when this is taken up by the group it develops an Indian pop flavour – a neat subversion of the idea of "citizenship classes".

The singers are in constant movement, the drama dispersed among different singing groups, which then surge together like eddies in a river reuniting. The variety of musical styles called on is astonishing. We hear African "jungle" polyphony, Inuit "throat-singing", and in the final thrilling crowd scene a polyphony of moving vocal "sound-masses" like something out of Xenakis.

Here, finally, play was subsumed by grandeur, and a sense of hope.