Maintaining the connections that sustain community

In 2004, a group of women singers from Canberra, Australia produced a major work called 'Websong' and presented it to an international audience in Bulgaria. This paper presents results from an ethnographic study of their production processes, including use of the Web to communicate and create. Websong uses dance, ritual and singing to enact a cycle of cataclysm, lament and renewal. As with all their work, Chorus chose to manage their work without an appointed director so that each member effectively took a governance role. This necessitates a high degree of reflexivity on the part of the group as a whole, requiring them to manage and sustain the necessary threads of connection, on various levels; creatively, organizationally, philosophically, socially. Their work is discussed through considering Chorus as a Community of Practice and using Gregory Bateson’s understanding of reflexivity as a prime characteristic of self sustaining systems,both natural and cultural. From this perspective we see that the threads of connection so valued by members of chorus are characteristic of all sustainable living systems. The close analysis of Chorus working together reveals processes that can be applied to support sustainability for communities and possibly to enrich the discourses about connection between human and environmental sustainability.