The Choir WAYS - With All Your Senses

Some love gospel music, others soul while others again prefer pop. In WAYS, we just want to sing and make music that touches your soul, that is full of rhythm and heart and speaks to all your senses. It’s essential for us that the songs we perform deal with important topics, such as courage, hope, freedom, friendship, love, and trust.

Since its birth in 2014, WAYS has been rehearsing and reinventing itself, continuously grooving and growing. We started out as a tiny group of sing-crazy ”loons” with or without note-reading skills. We’ve grown since then and we now count around 30 folks who have fun building a beautiful choral sound, like songs to be able to start a fire in the audience and for that reason just can’t stop grooming our repertoire – we genuinely love rehearsing together.

We also love to perform and generally give one all-night concert a year as sole choir and one with another choir, a concept we call “WAYS meets…” We also give smaller performances from time to time or maybe even participate in a choir competition.

Our highlights of the past years have been performing as guest choir at a concert of the German soulsinger Stefan Gwildis in 2016 and participating in the international choir competition „Sing Berlin“ in 2018 at which we won the 1st prize in the category “Modern Jazz/Pop/Gospel”.

All this would not even be imaginable without our very artistic director Gunars Kalnins or at least it would sound completely different. (Thank you, Gunars!) Over and over again, he succeeds in making us surprise ourselves. Gunars never tires of working with us on our sound, (almost) never despairs of our slight obtuseness when it comes to choreography, he is our hero at the piano, composes wonderful arrangements, and relentlessly teaches us how to really get „our message“ across.

Gunars speaks English with us, thus the rehearsal language is a sort of Denglisch – in other words German and English, often in combination – a famous saying of Gunars’: „Every day is Zwerchfell-day“ (“Every day is diaphragm day”).

The WAYSies come from all over Berlin and the surrounding area. Our rehearsal room is in the neighbourhood center “Berliner Bär” in Berlin-Tempelhof. Here we meet every Monday at 7:00 – 10:00 p.m.

On 8th February 2022 WAYS was featured on national radio Deutschlandfunk Kultur. The portrait was part of the series “Choir of the Week”. The podcast can be found on the homepage of the radio station:

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/chor-der-woche-ways-choir-dlf-kultur-2ef0f715-100.html