The Theatrical Choral Singing Citizens: a place of encounter between music and health

Abstract

This article presents the experience of the Theatrical Choral Singing Citizens, created in 1992 as an extension of the activities developed at the Convivence and Cooperative Centers of the Health Secretary of São Paulo, and supported by the NGO "SOS Mental Health, Ecology and Culture". The Choral is a heterogeneous group formed by interest on artistic construction, which gather people suffering from mental illness, people in vulnerability, and others from general population, having been established as a workplace Galeria Olido, in São Paulo. From 2006, the Choral has worked in a partnership with the Laboratory of Studies and Research in Art, Body and Occupational Therapy. This practice recovers the sense of art as a human attribute capable of transforming attitudes, knowledge spaces, and existential spaces in orther to alter one's quality of life. The Coral's tool is the promotion of encounters in which the singers could harmonize dissonances and tune differences, supporting an experience on the interface between choral singing, art and health on contemporaneity. Musical practice in groups who present this profile installs itself, therefore, not only as possible, but instigative in fomenting new possibilities for choral music, new establishment of relations and territories.