A voice is never neutral. It carries where it comes from, what it has been through and whether it has been given space to be heard at all. And it rarely stays contained within a single body. It can extend, travel and gather, held between people as much as produced by one. A shared field rather than an individual expression.
The work of NYX begins precisely here. As a collective (poly)vocal ensemble working across experimental music, performance and sound art, they have developed a practice that moves away from the idea of voice as something singular. Instead, they compose through attention and encounter, allowing sound to take shape through multiple bodies in relation to one another and to the environments they inhabit.
At the heart of their work is an understanding of voice as material. It is shaped by the bodies that produce it, by the histories they carry and by the conditions that allow them to be heard. As Music Director Sian O’Gorman reflects, a creative project “rarely begins at a single point.” It emerges through a coming together of people, place and intention. Before meaning settles, there is already a movement between interior and exterior, something crossing a threshold and becoming audible.
Their new live commission First Breath, made for the opening of V&A East Museum, unfolds from that premise into something more specific: if voice is the most primary technology through which we express and make meaning, what happens when many voices encounter a museum sitting with the oldest question of all — not what we make, nor how, but why?
The Why We Make galleries, which occupy a central place in the new museum, frame making as a transhistorical and polyvocal condition, where multiple voices, histories and forms of knowledge are held in relation rather than resolved into a single narrative. NYX’s practice offers a way of encountering these ideas through experience, where making unfolds between people, in real time, and through the act of listening as much as sounding.
Creative Producer Philippa Neels describes an artistic process that begins with a curatorial frame and expands collectively, becoming increasingly attentive to surroundings. “Who owns a live experience?” she asks. “When the architecture, the public and our communities are half of what a performance really is.”
The shape of First Breath will not be determined in advance. It depends on acoustics, on attention, on who is present and how they listen. Collective voice becomes here a way of embracing difference rather than dissolving it. Multiple voices remain distinct while entering into relation, held through systems of attention that allow listening to become structural.
V&A East’s staircases are central to how the commission thinks about the museum. Each step carries a relation to what has just happened and what is about to unfold, producing a continuous sense of transition. Embodiment Director Imogen Knight works closely with this quality, tracing cycles of ascent and descent, of lying down and rising, of falling and pausing in suspension.
Every culture has a way of beginning. For Sian and Philippa, who grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand, a building is opened through a pōwhiri, a welcoming ceremony that activates a relationship between people and place, the past and the present. As Philippa explains, in Tikanga Māori, that act is guided by a karanga, a female calling voice that acts as a bridge between physical and spiritual worlds.
While NYX are not seeking to replicate this ceremony, they are informed by these forms of orientation, where voice is used to meet a space, to listen to how it absorbs or reflects sound, and to trace its contours through resonance. “It’s a bit like arriving in a dark cave with a torch,” Philippa says, “using light to understand where you are.”
Through these gestures, First Breath gathers multiple understandings of what it means to begin. A first breath can signal arrival, but it can also hold anticipation or uncertainty. It sits just before articulation, at the point where something internal is about to enter a shared space.
This is what visitors will find when entering the Why We Make galleries: an active encounter with the conditions of making and with their own position within them. Who has been given space to make? Whose voices have been recorded, preserved, amplified? Whose have gone unheard?
First Breath holds these questions through what Sian calls a gradient of participation. Some people will remain in observation. Others will move toward sounding. Both are understood as forms of presence. There is no correct way to take part, only different distances from which to listen, or to add a voice to what is already there.
First Breath takes place on 25 April at V&A East Museum, with NYX and collaborators activating the building through voice and movement across the day, holding space for these questions to be felt rather than answered. Workshops exploring voice, embodiment and collective practice will run throughout, culminating in a Drone Circle, a shared field of sound that visitors are invited to enter through listening, through presence, or through contributing their own voice. NYX will be joined by afromerm, Katya Barton, Rhianna Compton, Ushara Dilrukshan, Bones Tan Jones, Rachel Oyawale, AK Patterson, Plumm, Monique Sallé and Trans Chorus.
This is an invitation to take part in a shared process of arrival. To listen, to sound, and to encounter making as something that happens between us.
A new beginning, held in common.
First Breath with NYX – V&A East Special event at V&A East Museum · V&A
