Hayden Chisholm: To Bee Ritual at Neu St. Alban Church, Cologne

Photos by Lucie Schulze

By Matty Bannond

As sunlight weakened on the first day of autumn, visitors to this carefully curated event slipped their hands into a red-tartan sack full of plastic rings and dipped wooden wands into a pot of locally sourced honey. Symbolic gifts and gestures were the central focus of the evening. Each ceremonial act invited deeper contemplation of how shared experiences bind societies together.

That reflective impulse was stirred by collective experiences and multi-layered stimuli. Many of those factors are fixed for each episode of the interdisciplinary Ritual series in north-west Germany, but each event culminates in a one-off concert. On September 1, saxophonist Hayden Chisholm and sound designer Robert Nacken transformed the interior of the Neu St. Alban church into an imagined beehive. Visual artist Natalia Manta added video projections.

First, however, guests got packed off for a twenty-minute plod around Cologne’s municipal gardens. Talking was verboten. Instead, walkers were encouraged to listen deeply and perceive how their footfall intersected with noises from screeching parakeets, grumbling freight trains or crackling leaf litter. They then scribbled notes onto postcards and hung them on a display outside the church.

Inside, Chisholm cradled his saxophone on a low stage in front of a set design where orange and purple light transformed sheets of foil into cragged ridges resembling a mountain face. The New Zealander had attached a feather from his homeland to his horn. He sat beside an accordion-like instrument called a shruti box. Traditional Māori wind instruments including kōauaus and pūtōrinos rested on his lap and hung around his neck.

A dozen or so figures shuffled into a circle at the back of the church and started singing. The Ritual choir welcomes all volunteers, regardless of experience or music-reading ability. They kicked off the concert with a short, spectral composition by local musician Dariya Maminova. Chisholm added whistly calls while simultaneously coaxing a low-note drone from the shruti box with his right hand.

For most of the concert, Chisholm cycled through his hardware to send sheets of sound swirling across the incense-scented interior of the church. Twice he chanted a Latin-language excerpt from Virgil's Georgics that referenced beekeeping. Nacken’s manipulated recordings of bee activity fizzed and bubbled, while Manta’s visuals swam from geometric patterns to clumps of crawling bee bodies.

 

Chisholm descended from the stage towards the end of the evening and paced around the pentagon-shaped space playing buzzy, waggle-dance lines on his saxophone. His route took him past ceramic objects designed by Manta specifically for the occasion, as well as a small box containing a group of gently humming real-life bees from Hannah Liebig’s nearby apiary.

Those footsteps recalled the earlier sound-walk, closing the distance between performer and audience. The event’s conceptual framework encouraged attendees to view the beehive as a world of sounds and images that represent key facets of collective life: Rigid physical and social structures, mutual dependence, and vulnerability in the face of environmental change. Strikingly, bees’ movements often appear chaotic—but hives are coherent places. Bees lean into their work. They embrace their rituals. They listen to each other. And that listening holds their world together.