EMERGENCY CHORUS
(Ben Kulvichit & Clara Potter-Sweet)
Emergency Chorus is the artistic collaboration between myself and Ben Kulvichit. We’ve been working together since 2016.
We make contemporary pieces across performance and other mediums which investigate the anxieties and optimisms of the present. Our work collides disparate source materials to create collages of choreography, music, text and images.
Our most recent work is Ways of Knowing (2023), a choreographic collage of methods for predicting the future. It’s our third work for theatres, and will be touring across 2025.
We have made and toured two full-length shows - CELEBRATION (2016), which episodically explored youth and optimism in a year of bizarre disaster; and Landscape (1989) (2018), a choreographic meditation on mushrooms, apocalypse, climate crisis, and life in the wilderness - as well as works in short and durational formats (You Have Reached Emergency Chorus and Mr Jet).
We’re currently developing our fourth theatre show, Something in Your Voice, an ensemble show exploring data privacy & algorithmic decision-making through romance, intimacy & doubles.
Our working name as a duo gestures towards the potential energy that lies within crisis - a holding in balance of disaster and the opportunity for change. Rebecca Solnit says in Hope in the Dark:
‘Inside the word "emergency" is "emerge"; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.”
‘I think [EC] might be super cool genius theatre dudes from the future sent to save us.’
- Nigel Barrett, theatre maker
‘Ben Kulvichit and Clara Potter-Sweet create beguiling and enchanting work that has an anarchic curiosity’
- The Guardian
'Work that rumbles around in your head long after it’s over'
- Lyn Gardner
PHOTOS
Ang Kia Yee, Chelsey Cliff, Richard Davenport, Giulia Delprato, Ross Hunter, Matt Wendzina & Jemima Yong