"This show is one big continuous experiment" | Seamus Carey's Community Service
28 Oct 2026
A Note from Seamus Carey
The show is one big continuous experiment.
Every single performance is different. I'm endlessly changing it, depending on how the audience reacts. It feels like a car that's forever in the garage, needing something fixed. It's been a slow, fascinating, frustrating, highly informative experience for me.
Running an alternative male voice choir for six years (Men Are Singing 2018-2024), I realised now, was the perfect petri dish for illustrating how community can form so quickly. Every Monday night we established a common culture - banter, sense of humour, new traditions, work ethic, world outlook and even a shared tactile-ness. I remember overhearing two lads in the gents at our local pub saying to each other: "oh no, those weird men who keep hugging each other are back".
Had we started a cult without even knowing? Had I become the cult leader?
I left the project, as I always do, with questions emerging for the next one. I wanted to explore how quickly one could form a community. Could it be done in an hour? Probably not, but the proposition sounded funny. What the hell even is community? How do we describe, define and measure it? Can community be toxic as well as wholesome? And when it is good, what's the best thing it can achieve?
For me the answer was simple: Collective Joy. This is what I wanted my audience to feel by the end of the show.
Barbara Ehrenreich's book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy was an invaluable insight into how humans have been doing the same old stuff for millennia, to make themselves and everyone around them feel better. I began to ponder how I could utilise these ancient tools and archetypal symbols (singing, dancing, rites of passage, trust games, clowning, group circles, rebellion, carnival, ancestor honouring, physical contact) but with bland, corporate "away-day" aesthetic?
As, let's face it, for lots of people, these themes (human connection, togetherness, being in the moment) can quickly sound hippy-dippy and trite. So pairing that world with its complete opposite, felt like a good way to sneakily lure people in. And potentially be quite funny.
So I tried out a prototype Collective Joy Workshop at festivals. This kind of worked, but needed to be more theatrical. Eventually, I donned a shirt and tie, explored being a grumpy, reluctant leader and thus Geoff was born. this experience also coincided with by journey into the world of Clowning - of which I have much to learn, but it feels like I'm on the right path...
With the help of the audience, my team and particularly Jamie Wood, we've now made a show that can play (pretty much) in any space inside or out, translates into any language and elicits (I hope) a serious sense of community and collective joy. Whilst also being silly.
