‘We want to make it cool to be a choir girl’: an anthropological investigation of creativity in forming a choir identity

Abstract

ABSTRACTMembers of the Danish MidWest Girls’ Choir and their conductor have the aim of creating unique expressive forms. As a consequence, the girls’ work has worked to develop new forms of singing and performance. The choir seeks to find an identity that distinguishes them from traditional church choirs and thereby recreate ‘choir girls’ as something other than ‘well behaved’ and ‘disciplined’, both in their learning processes and in forming their image as a performing choir not related to a church. This paper analyses the role of novelty as process and ‘product’ in an identity-creating process in the social community of singers. Creativity is in this article seen as the collective processes of becoming skilled and of demonstrating distinction from the established discipline of classic choir singing. The choir's identity-forming process is based on creating and being engaged in a different kind of rehearsal, performances and thereby the ‘respectable’ choir image generally.