Shaping a creative choir by learning to listen?

The MidWest Girls’ Choir, composed of girls aged 14–21, have developed their social and bodily experienced knowledge during their years as part of a girls’ choir so that they implicitly form the physical and social singing body. Choir singing is a process supported by the teaching and by the choir's practice of rehearsals and performances. This paper describes and analyses the meaning of engaging learning processes and repetitive practices for becoming skilled and potentially creative choir singers. The anthropological analysis of the choir singers’ individual and collectively embodied learning processes of singing, listening, and creating choreography is based on empirical examples. I argue that the creativity of the girls’ choir comprises a series of skills, bodily immersion and experimental practice by the individual members and the social group, formed by training in listening and sensing according to their age and choir experience.