F*Choir’s BIG Five Fund

F*Choir's BIG Five Fund 

Help us save F*Choir! As we celebrate our 5th birthday, we’re looking to raise £5000 to safeguard the future of the choir. After 2 years of having gigs cancelled, singing on Zoom and outdoors in the rain and cold, losing and looking for rehearsal spaces and writing endless funding applications, we know all too well that being a choir during a pandemic really sucks!

Despite the challenges, F*Choir has been a vital lifeline for all of our members and wider LGBTQ+ community. We have supported each other through huge personal and financial challenges and offered an accessible and safe space for queer artistic expression, solace and celebration through singing.

The BIG Five Fund will give F*Choir a much-needed financial foundation on which to rebuild in 2022. It will enable us to hire a larger, safer rehearsal space, welcome new members, develop new resources for learning songs and plan for the future. More gigs! Music videos! Workshops! Recordings!

Our Story So Far

F*Choir has become a place to gather in body and voice to vibrate, move and learn together. Using non-gendered voice parts and unconventional scores, we sing percussive and experimental choral arrangements about gender, sexuality, love, freedom and rage.

Our aim is to hold space for all voices to be heard without assuming anyone’s gender, origin or sexuality – to develop the choir as a feminist practice and use communal singing as a form of magic.

Since our exhilarating week at Borealis in March 2020, we have had gigs and residencies cancelled and lost crucial income needed to sustain our practice. Our members have faced unemployment, housing issues, illness, isolation and financial worries. Despite this, we’ve constantly reimagined the choir in order to stay safe and connected, combating loneliness and offering joy through creativity and community.

2 years later we’re still here, though our resources are drained and our pockets empty. AND it’s our 5th birthday, so…

How Can You Help?

To make sure that we (and our grand-queers) still have F*Choir in the future, we’re looking to raise £5000 to reconnect, re-establish and rebuild based on everything we’ve learnt during these tough two years. We really need your help.

With your donations we will be able to:

• Hold regular rehearsals throughout 2022
• Welcome 20 new members, creating a 50 person-strong choir
• Hire a larger, safer rehearsal space, for physically-distanced singing
• Make printed songbooks from our unique graphic scores
• Use better technology to include singers who are self-isolating or unwell at home
• Maintain 5 free bursary places for those who need them
• Pay our artistic director and administrator for their time and leadership
• Work toward new creative outcomes. Gigs! Music videos! Workshops! Recordings!

Thanks & Rewards

Should you be in a position to donate, your support would mean the world to the F*Choir community!

We’d love to acknowledge your contribution on our website, invite you to see us perform, join us at an open session or workshop and share our songs with you.

A donation of £5 will keep us in tea & biscuits for one rehearsal

A donation of £15 will pay for a newly printed songbook

A donation of £50 will support a bursary place for one term

A donation of £500 will hire a rehearsal space for one term

Our Dreams for the Future

Although it’s been a tough time, we’re determined to be positive for the future and look for ways to grow as a choir and thrive as a community. Along with gigs, workshops and music videos, we have BIG ambitions…

• We would love to make our first proper recording – we have lots of original songs and arrangements to share and are so excited to record them. Fitting a 50-person choir in a recording studio is no easy task, so any extra funds we raise will help with hiring a large studio, sound engineer and making the record.
• For the past 12 months we have been working on creating an F*Choir archive. So many incredible feminist projects have been forgotten without having the resources to tell their own story. We are collecting videos, photos, scores, art works and choir member testimonies to build an archive and share the legacy of F*Choir long into the future. Any extra funds we raise will help to host the archive on an accessible platform and work with an archivist.

Who is F*Choir?

F*Choir is a queer-led majority LGBTQ+, intergenerational, feminist choir founded in January 2017 by freelance musicians, creatives, writers and artists. F* Choir is led by performance artist and drummer Jenny Moore.

F*Choir has performed across the UK and Europe, including sold out gigs at Earth Hackney, Raven Row and the Wellcome Collection. We worked with Young Women’s Music Project and OVADA in Oxford and ran a group residency in Catalonia, Spain. In 2020 we performed at Borealis, a festival of experimental music in Bergen, Norway and led a euphoric week of gigs, workshops and interventions across the city. Our work has been featured on BBC3 Late Junction, The Guardian, New Statesmen and Stylist magazine.