Following a five-day residency with Britten Pears Arts earlier this year, the Sansara Choir report back on their experience and how it helped them come together as a group to develop their creativity and connection:

“In April this year, we spent five wonderful days in Snape Maltings on a Creative Health Residency, supported by Britten Pears Arts. As a collective, we are in the process of developing our vision and ambitions for the future, with a particular focus on creative health and wellbeing. In 2020, SANSARA developed ‘Rite to Grieve’, a project responding to the widespread crisis of grief and bereavement as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. In collaboration with Ellie Harrison and ‘The Grief Series’, we devised a musical event format for the collective expression of grief, providing a safe space for conversation, remembrance and celebration of the lives lost during that time.

During our residency, one of our main aims was to develop our Rite to Grieve event, bringing it out of the context of the pandemic and creating a workshop that allowed participants the space to reflect. We wanted to guide participants to use breath work and their voices as tools to develop awareness, and ground themselves both physically and mentally, with the hope that this learning might be transferrable into their day-to-day lives.

Not only were we looking to develop and explore ideas around this workshop format, but we also wanted to use the time to think more broadly about wellbeing in the ensemble and how we can take that forward across all areas of our work. We also used the time together to explore and trial ideas for a new commission with composers Alex Ho and Rockey Sun Keting.

Over the course of the week, we had time together as a group to work on these objectives, but were also guided by sessions run by Mary Ann Gayford, Music Therapist, and Hazel Harrison, Clinical Psychologist. We also participated in a sharing session with the St Elizabeth’s Hospice Compassionate Communities team.

Our week at Snape Maltings was invaluable. As busy freelancers, it can often be difficult to get everyone together in the same room, and so to have five days of uninterrupted time to explore and develop our ideas together away from the bustle of our everyday lives was incredible.

As a result of this time, we succeeded in developing our workshop, and have since run two events – one at St Elizabeth’s Hospice and one at Snape Maltings. We are really looking forward to developing our relationship with the Hospice and Compassionate Communities team, and hope to run further events in the future for members of the community and the extraordinary staff who give their time there.

Not only was the residency an incredible opportunity for us to develop the creative health strand of our work, but it was a wonderful time to connect as a group. Over the course of the week we had a beautiful walk along the water to the Iken Church, sampled the local pubs, and spent evenings on the beach with our fish and chips.”