Congregation is an outdoor, immersive, sound art theatre project that builds on the success of Ray Lee’s outdoor work such as Chorus and Ring Out.

In Congregation the audience (of up to 80 sphere carriers) are invited in small groups to discrete locations in a city where they are given a silver sphere. They are instructed that the sphere will guide them to a location by emitting sounds, one sound for the correct direction and another for the wrong direction. Simultaneously other audience members are being met at different locations and also being given similar spheres. All of the locations are on the circumference of an area the centre of which is the location to which all of the participants are being led. As the audience members walk off holding their sonic spheres, they will turn a corner to find more people also carrying spheres until the sphere carrying participants have become a ‘congregation’ moving inexorably towards a central location.

For the public, the sight of one person after another carrying a distinctive silver sonic sphere will create the sense of being in a performance that is taking place all around them. As the spheres congregate the sounds begin to change and the mass of spheres will create a humming electronic web of sound that will attract and engage thousands of passers-by in a strange processional science fiction ceremony. The mass of ‘singing’ spheres will be used generate an electronic musical composition at the final location with the participants being the orchestral players holding the choir of sonic spheres.

“Let a sonic sphere take you on a journey to a secret location, guiding you by sound alone. Seemingly possessed of its own mind it guides you through familiar and unfamiliar terrain. Can you keep the sphere ‘happy’ by going in the right direction? In return the sphere will lead you on a sonic voyage to the mysterious final destination where you will encounter a meeting of the spheres, a chiming, pulsing web of electronic sound.”