About Us

The Voice Project is a choral theatre company, working with un-auditioned singers and experienced professionals. It was established in 2008 by Directors Jonathan Baker and Sian Croose. Based in Norfolk, we work locally, nationally and internationally with a brilliant team of associate artists.

We compose and direct new choral productions of site specific and responsive work in both the landscape and built environment. We have also created and delivered film and digital projects.

Our Open Voices workshops, open to all, focus on different apsects of singing and music, and Scenius is our Continuing Professional Development programme.

We offer opportunities for people taking part to be involved in the creative process of making a new performance piece, learn about their singing voices and develop their performing confidence.

We aim to create an inclusive community in which anyone can participate and enjoy using and developing their singing voice. There are no auditions and no need to read music.

Jonathan Baker

Jonathan is a singer, teacher, and composer who has written extensively for TV, radio, and theatre. He was a founder member of Innererklang Music Theatre with director Sean Doran and performed lead roles in UK tours of works by Peter Maxwell Davies, Hans Werner Henze, Luciano Berio and Trevor Wishart.

He played the voice of the artist Egon Schiele in a collaboration with the composer Orlando Gough and the choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh for the ‘Staging Schiele’ UK tour
He has collaborated with artists and composers including Arve Henriksen, Jan Bang, Barbara Thompson, Jon Hassell, Andy Sheppard, Nik Bärtsch, Gwilym Simcock, Steve Beresford, Helen Chadwick, Orlando Gough, BJ Cole and Van Dyke Parks.

Jon is a founder member of The Neutrinos with whom he has recorded several albums, touring throughout Europe and North America, and KlangHaus, an award-winning live-art company blending moving image, live music, light, sound-design and staging.

Jon offers singing lessons and vocal tuition in-person and online. Each lesson is bespoke and tailored to the needs of the individual.

Sian Croose

Sian is a singer, conductor and performance maker with over 30 years experience creating and directing music projects. After an apprenticeship in bands and alternative theatre, she trained on the Community Music programme founded by John Stevens.

Since 1997, she has conducted new choral works by many composers, including Barbara Thompson, Karen Wimhurst, Andy Sheppard, Jon Hassell, and Gwilym Simcock. She has sung with the Helen Chadwick Group and Human Music and performs in the Voice Project Quintet.

Other projects include The Dawn Chorus, with American singer and composer Brendan Taaffe, writing and performing new songs inspired by the Shape Note tradition, and Harmonium, a wordless systems-based a cappella project for 12 women‘s voices.

Sian runs Norwich-based choir Big Sky, regularly commissioning new music from award-winning songwriter Chris Wood and performing with storyteller Hugh Lupton and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Lever. She also runs workshops for choirs and vocal groups throughout the UK and Ireland and training and coaching for vocal leaders and singers.

The Voice Project is a registered charity. We do not receive regular funding and rely on fees, ticket sales and donations to run our community projects. Sometimes we are successful in applying for grant funding for our work, but most of our activities have to be self-funded. If you would like to support us you can give a one off or regular donation on our Give As You Live page.

Associate Artists

Soloist, session singer, vocal coach, composer, musical director: Jeremy has worked in all these roles during his eclectic musical career. He is a regular musical director at Shakespeare's Globe, Vocal Coach for feature films and a longtime soloist with Orlando Gough's vocal Big Band, The Shout. In 2023 created The Whispering Dome for the Brighton Early Music Festival. This large-scale piece about bird and human migration, for instrumentalists, singers and choirs won the ‘Extra-European project’ of the year at the REMA awards in. 2024.

Jeremy Avis

Lisa Cassidy

Lisa is a professional singer who performs across the UK and Europe giving performances of song, oratorio and opera to thousands. A Britten Pears Young Artist and graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Lisa has appeared Judith Howarth, Malcolm Martineau and actress Eleanor Bron. She has choreographed, designed and self-directed numerous performances of La voix humaine by Francis Poulenc and Ian Hÿtch’s Lady Macbeth is Dead, which was composed for her. Her online SING KAIZEN course uses the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement, alongside Chakras, tai chi and pure vocal technique to open the voice and waken the imagination.

Tenor

Colaratura Soprano

Sharon is an internationally renowned vocalist, teacher and composer. She was awarded an OBE in the 2022 Queen's Platinum Jubilee Honours list for Services to Music and to the community in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Sharon currently works for Sing Up as Partnership Manager, and runs choirs across the North East. She also works regularly for the British Council, delivering their World Voice and delivers sessions regularly for Music in Hospitals. She has been Vocal Programme Leader at Sage Gateshead and performs as part of Mouthful, a four piece vocal ensemble who push the boundaries of vocal possibility and successfully devise and compose new vocal material.

Sharon Durant

Helen Chadwick

Helen has composed songs for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, English Touring Opera, the BBC, the Royal Court, the British Museum, Protein Dance, and for theatre-on-film and film projects. Commissions include Dalston Songs (Royal Opera House), Truth (South Bank Centre), Where Two Worlds Touch (Salisbury Festival) and A Body Of Song (Greenwich Festival). Helen’s performances and concerts move between beauty, humour and profundity and her songs are influenced by her meetings with singers in many parts of the world as well as by classical music, folk song and multiple polyphonic song forms. She has recorded numerous albums and sung with Meredith Monk. Awards: The President's Award from WaterAid for creating Sing For Water, and an Honorary Fellowship from Dartington College of Arts.

Alto

Composer

Orlando Gough is a composer (and sometimes lyricist, librettist, music director, MC, recording engineer, cookery writer), who writes operas, choral music, music-theatre, music for dance and theatre, and creates large-scale site-specific work. His work includes I Look For The Think a short opera about love and stroke: Staging Schiele, a dance piece with the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, about the artist Egon Schiele, featuring the voice of Jon Baker, Solar, music for a lighting installation by the artist Bruce Munro, featuring the voices of Sianed Jones, Sian Croose, Jeremy Avis and Jon Baker, Albion, a look at British music - William Byrd, Napalm Death, Elgar, Ronald Binge, Sugarbabes…... in collaboration with the viol consort Fretwork and the composer/dj Gabriel Prokofiev.

Orlando Gough

Adrian Lever

An accomplished multi-instrumentalist with a Masters degree in Sonic Arts, Adrian has developed a sound practice based on field recording and instrumental response. Confluence Project (2015) was a multi-media piano improvisation performance piece inspired by water flow-forms and his East Anglian coastal home, performed at venues in London and Norfolk. The piece is one of several developed with sound artist Bill Vine. His major work Watermarkbrought together the rivers of Stara Planina in south-east Serbia with body recordings, and included a dual-prepared-microtonal piano set-up responding to both. He played for 8 years with LAura Cannell as the award-winning folk and early music experimentalists Horses Brawl.

Composer

Musician

Esther Morgan’s poetry collections are published by Bloodaxe Books. Her first collection, Beyond Calling Distance (2001) won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. This was followed by The Silence Living in Houses, Grace, shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize and, most recently, The Wound Register which traces the impact of the First World War through several generations of one family. Born in 1970, she grew up in rural Worcestershire. She began writing poetry whilst volunteering at the Wordsworth Trust,Grasmere, Cumbria, before arriving in Norwich to do an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Since then she’s been involved in the poetry world as an editor and teacher, including helping to set up The Poetry Archive.

Esther Morgan

Sianed Jones

Sianed was a close collaborator of ours for many years and was central to many of our projects and performances.

She was a composer/performer with an upbringing steeped in the choral and poetic traditions of Wales. Language and song were the driving force of her work; improvisation and collaboration, with other artists and art forms at the core of her creative practice.

We miss her greatly.

Poet

August 1959 - February 2022