DynamiQ Voices is the first queer choir of the city of Utrecht (Netherlands) where young members represent the colourful LGBTQIA+ community. We’re open to all young people from the LGBTQIA+ community, with a mixture of low and high voices.
In contrast to the vast majority of choirs, we do not have gendered voice groups, instead only focusing on voice range. We mainly focus on pop music, although we make small ‘excursions’ into other genres from time to time.
In an incredibly short time, our choir has managed to grow and develop into an amazing community for young musical queer people in Utrecht. We started in early 2022, as lockdown was lifting, and a year later we’ve grown to over 30 members, given two concerts, one of which at the historic Paradiso in Amsterdam, and of course had lots and lots of fun, making beautiful music during the rehearsals, having drinks (mainly tea) in a local queer bar or park afterwards and dancing the night away at some iconic queer parties.
One of the highlights of our rehearsals are, believe it or not, the vocal warm-ups. You never know what to expect from our conductor. We’ve had it all: a complete musical diary of our conductor’s vacation to Bonaire, a swinging Christmas anthem and even an ode to everyone’s favourite vegetable, broccoli. The latter exercise has even become our unofficial choir ‘anthem’, and we performed it to a standing ovation at our first concert. After our first season, we rewarded our board and choir director with broccoli plushies, and so it happened that broccoli is now our unofficial mascot.
We have a lot of fun as a choir, but sometimes, we have a bit too much fun, and our conductor really wants us to be quiet for a bit so that he can give us instructions. As his voice was wearing out during our first season, we gifted him a NERF gun (Fortnite branded, of course) so that he can not only use his voice, but also more drastic means to keep us in check. Safe to say, there are some specific members who have had their fair share of bullets fired at them.. Though luckily our conductor still loves us very much, so he only ever aims at our feet 😉
However, it’s not like we’re not productive as a choir! Our repertoire has grown steadily, including a Dutch-language song by the singer Froukje. We’ve had the amazing opportunity to sing this song for the bassist in Froukje’s band, which was incredibly exciting, particularly for the basses, who sang the actual notes she originally wrote. Besides our usual repertoire, we’ve also had the amazing opportunity to record backing vocals for a song by local queer singer LUCAS. It’s not released yet, so we’re keeping it tightly under wraps for now, but safe to say it sounds amazing.
