“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all”
- Andre Breton

The Australia 2020 Summit [1] sets out to be a showpiece for ‘open democracy’. This is the hope of its helmsman, Kevin Rudd. But as a planned event, it faces the dilemma of how to spark the spontaneity so vital to innovation and change. His plan may also falter at another point. The Summit seeks a new vision. Yet far from teaching us to be more resourceful, it will depend on the views of experts and celebrities. As a way out of this impasse, we shall draw on a parable of our times.

Politics – so often just a loop of images and sound bites. Leaders and opinion polls do no more than mimic each other. The alternative – and our means of redemption – is to look at creating our own reality. Pop culture is a Gnostic highway that is rich with such a theme.

To follow this path we need to look past the Summit’s grand display of one thousand flowers in bloom. Instead, we go back to the local - and the streets we know. The parable we choose is that of the Choir of Hard Knocks [2].

The Choir of Hard Knocks gives shelter to its members. Where society may fail in providing physical shelter, the Choir offers emotional support to its disadvantaged and homeless members. As anyone who has seen a performance will attest, on stage, they create a glow of recognition that is missing once they fall back to the cold hard streets. Above all, by the example of this unlikely group, we see that those who for whatever reason find it hard to fit into society’s expectations are nonetheless still capable of realizing their dreams.

I caught the show earlier this year at a full house at Canberra’s Royal Theatre. The impression was to bring the walls tumbling down before their collective voices. In the end, their voices won us over such that you could hear our sing-along from every row.

The Choir changes our view about music. What strikes me as unique about them is the revival of a kind of folk lore. It is a street culture, banished by the media’s linking of talent with fame and celebrity with cultural worth. The Choir reminds us that ordinary people can create that magic spell in music as in other fields of the arts. The lesson here is more jolting because these people are not just ‘ordinary’– they include the homeless and lost. While we have been preoccupied by pop icons, we ignore the essential origins and simple joy of music that exists within us and around us. While we flock to the blockbusters, we miss how deep creative talent flows beneath the towering neon where the noise and hum of consumerism never stops.

As Bob Dylan tells us in Desolation Row:

Ezra Pound and TS Elliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers.

What Dylan is saying here is that while much art has become empty discourse between elites, the genuine article is practiced every day before our eyes. The arts are thus part of our living culture - and the streets are alive with the sound of music.

In this spirit, the Choir is the true embodiment of popular surrealism [3]. Like the calypso singers and fishermen in the Dylan song, the Choir reminds us that simple joy and the ability to strike a chord in each other is alive and well. High art and commercialism (and Summit participants) may battle it out in the ‘captain’s tower’, but in the end the stage belongs to the people.

A common error is to miscast surrealism as a rock video style of zaniness. Its true origins go back to the twenties and thirties and figures such as Andre Breton and Robert Desnos. Let us now define what we mean by ‘popular surrealism’. It is a way of seeing how that which is most ordinary can also be extra-ordinary. It is seeing the marvellous in the everyday. Surrealism is part of the day to day experience. A further aspect of surrealism achieved by the Choir of Hard Knocks is the audience’s sense of surprise and shock from the juxtaposition of two distinct realities. On one side is our preconceived idea about high culture. The surprise that awaits us is to see street culture subvert a formerly staid medium such as the choir.

To our ears, the Choir offers something special. It demonstrates that talent, fine voices and music’s power of emotion are not the exclusive license of pop icons. Above all, we find a message for us all: that the spirit is never diminished no matter what hard knocks life deals out.

In this respect, the Choir is part of an uprising of street talent we find happening all over the world. The Choir of Hard Knocks is a relatively new sensation in Melbourne. However, the Sydney Street Choir has a similar story to tell over its seven years. Looking overseas, there are stories that connect to the same experience - such as the Montreal Homeless Men’s Choir.

Swapping the Choirmaster’s baton for a football, we find that the Homeless World Cup [4] aims to achieve similar goals in the sporting field. Australia has entered teams in the last two Homeless World Cups. It in turn is an offshoot of the street soccer movement where you don’t need an expensive grass pitch to play on. Sport is a fresh avenue for winning respect, and like the street choir, it can build self-esteem.

For the Choir members, many have never been applauded in their lives; and the rapturous applause at the end of a show is of course the reward for every performer – from the greatest to the most humble. For the street choir, the applause is the recognition society has never provided, and tragically, in the present social reality – perhaps never can.

Chances are some of the 2020 invitees will have heard the Choir of Hard Knocks. To make the best of the Summit, its participants would do well to put into practice some of the Choir’s street level messages. Not only within the arts, but also by application to life. A ‘vision’ needs to be a popular one; but we can do without the same old spectacle of experts and celebrities that displaces that which it claims to represent.