‘against the light of others’: a residency by NO — an experimental research project, spoken-word choir and theatre group — at The Writer’s Room. October 2025
NO choir will be thinking and working through conversations: in talks with friends, family, artists and members of the public, to be recorded in a book over the duration of the month. The work will address the conversation and other locations of the violent conditions of change, punishment and witness in the historicised present, where the multitudinous self meets the multitudinous social world.
The residency will culminate in the performance of a new improvised work that explores the limits - orthodoxies - vagaries - breakages - pressures - of language and speech as forms of discovery and sacrifice.
The first event will be a reading and conversation on 4th October with poets Edwina Attlee, Dom Hale, Imogen Cassells and Mau Baiocco (location TBA).
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Saturday 11th at The Writer's Room: Dan Rhys' sung performance of the tidal movents of the Thames beginning at high-tide (4.30pm):
tidal chorus: a level, alarm, a lament
Dan Rhys convened a new iteration of his durational choral piece ‘A level, alarm, a lament’. Reinterpreting the broadside ballad ‘Lamentations of Old Father Thames’, the piece proposes a collective call to attention for London’s tides. Part counter-mapping, part security ritual, part hydropoetic infrastructure, the piece muddies the barriers that are imposed between the ongoing imperative of the metropolis and the murky contingencies of tidal flows.
Saturday’s event took the form of an open rehearsal. Beginning at high tide, approximately 4.30pm, participants and passersby were invited to lend their voices to a collective tidal chorus. In song and conversation, we considered the tidal flows that suffuse London’s urban fabric and infrastructures, insisting on the right of watery bodies (our watery bodies) to exist out of place and beyond barriers. What does it mean to sit in the intertidal zone, between the urge to stay put and the impossibility of running away?
‘A level, alarm, a lament’ was originally performed in May 2025 for the duration of a low tide – 6 hours, 12 and a half minutes – on site at the tide gauge on Westminster Pier. An abridged version, developed in collaboration with Waste Paper Opera Chorus, was performed for Fieldnotes Live in July 2025.
This Saturday, October 25th from 7:00pm to 8:00pm, NO's residency culminated in a final event, a filmed solo reading of the company's 'air sign' work which was commissioned by TACO! In 2024 and will be published by death of the workers press .
Thank you to everyone whe was there and a general thanks to all poets, artists and friends who have been involved in the duration of the month.