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Books by Virginie Magnat

Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Volume 13, Issue 2 (2022) : « Performance Training and Well-Being », 2022

Aims and Scope Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT) is a rigorously peer-reviewed journ... more Aims and Scope Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT) is a rigorously peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for practitioners, academics, creative artists and pedagogues to articulate research into performance training in all its diversity.

Routledge Voice Studies Series , 2019

The Performative Power of Vocality offers a fresh perspective on voice as a subject of critical i... more The Performative Power of Vocality offers a fresh perspective on voice as a subject of critical inquiry by employing an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach.

Conventional treatment of voice in theatre and performance studies too often regards it as a subcategory of actor training, associated with the established methods that have shaped voice pedagogy within Western theatre schools, conservatories, and universities. This monograph significantly deviates from these dominant models through its investigation of the non-discursive, material, and affective efficacy of vocality, with a focus on orally transmitted vocal traditions. Drawing from her performance training, research collaborations, and commitment to cultural diversity, Magnat proposes a dialogical approach to vocality. Inclusive of established, current, and emerging research perspectives, this approach sheds light on the role of vocality as a vital source of embodied knowledge, creativity, and well-being grounded in process, practice, and place, as well as a form of social and political agency.

An excellent resource for qualitative researchers, artist-scholars, and activists committed to decolonization, cultural revitalization, and social justice, The Performative Power of Vocality opens up new avenues of understanding across Indigenous and Western philosophy, performance studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, sound and voice studies, anthropology, sociology, phenomenology, cognitive science, physics, ecology, and biomedicine.

publication description Popular Music and The Postcolonial (Routledge), 2018

Recipient of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research 2014 Ann Saddlemyer Book Award Honorab... more Recipient of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research 2014 Ann Saddlemyer Book Award Honorable Mention.

TDR Review by Tanya Dean: "As both a scholar and a performer herself, Magnat’s research relies upon an interdisciplinary methodology, combining fieldwork, artistic collaboration with her subjects, and the articulation of her embodied research
through writing. The result is an insightful account of the
work of such artists as Rena Mirecka, Ewa Benesz, Katharina Seyferth, and Ang Gey Pin. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in the work of Grotowski, Polish theatre, women theatre practitioners, as well as those engaged in practice‐as‐research."

As the first investigation of women's foremost contributions
to Grotowski's theatrical and post‐theatrical research, this
book is grounded in four years of multi‐sited fieldwork
conducted in Poland, Italy, France, and Denmark. Situated
at the intersection of performance studies, experimental
ethnography, and Indigenous research methodologies, this
exploration of the artistic journeys and current creative
practices of key women from different cultures and
generations is complemented by a Documentary Film Series
created in close collaboration with these artists and
featured on the Routledge Performance Archive
(www.routledgeperformancearchive.com).

Papers by Virginie Magnat

Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2016

Theatre, Dance and Performance Training

Theatre Research in Canada

Cet article met au premier plan les principes éthiques autochtones de respect, de réciprocité, de... more Cet article met au premier plan les principes éthiques autochtones de respect, de réciprocité, de relation et de responsabilité qui lient les agents humains aux agents autres-qu’humains ou plus-qu’humains – conception non anthropocentrique de l’agentivité dont on peut dire qu’elle propose une approche écocritique véritablement radicale, à défaut d’être nouvelle, des questions cruciales soulevées par les recherches fondées sur les nouveaux matérialismes et le posthumanisme. Virginie Magnat défend l’idée que la distinction entre cette compréhension de l’agentivité et celle de Karen Barad dans son influente théorie du réalisme agentiel est la non-séparabilité de la matière et de l’esprit postulée par les chercheuses et chercheurs autochtones Vine Deloria Jr, Gregory Cajete, Manulani Aluli Meyer et Shawn Wilson, entre autres. Elle soutient que le fait de faire honneur à la philosophie autochtone, qui valorise les méthodes de savoir incarnées transmises oralement, contribue à décentrer, ...

Performing (in) Place: Moving on/with the Land, 2022

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Études anglaises, 2016

This essay examines the potentialities and limitations of the Anglo-American performance paradigm... more This essay examines the potentialities and limitations of the Anglo-American performance paradigm. It discusses the epistemological and methodological implications of the “performance turn” in the social sciences. It considers the Indigenous critique of dominant Western knowledge stems that support a form of cultural imperialism privileging binary thinking and mind-body dualism. The exploration of the strands of scholarship emphasizing the political dimension echoes Diana Taylor’s dual concepts of archive and repertoire, material traces and non-written performance, exposing the social and cultural biases behind the archive’s supposed neutrality.

Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance, 2013

Anthropologica, 2018

Cette ethnographie performative de la résurgence culturelle occitane par la pratique du chant et ... more Cette ethnographie performative de la résurgence culturelle occitane par la pratique du chant et de la musique traditionnels se situe à la croisée de l’anthropologie, l’ethnomusicologie, la sociologie, et le champ interdisciplinaire des performance studies. Nourri par le travail de terrain que l’auteur mène en Occitanie en tant qu’artiste-chercheur, cet article propose une démarche critique et réflexive alliant l’imaginaire à l’historicité et le légendaire au performatif pour interroger le devenir d’une tradition musicale interculturelle que l’auteur associe à ses racines méditerranéennes. Afin de produire ce que D. Soyini Madison (2012) nomme performance of possibilities [la performance des possibles], l’auteur donne à voir/lire/imaginer une Occitanie revitalisée par la diversité, l’inclusion et la solidarité afin d’offrir une alternative aux constructions nationalistes de l’identité culturelle ancrées dans l’héritage colonialiste de la France ainsi qu’à l’inquiétante recrudescence...

Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Volume 13, Issue 2 (2022) : « Performance Training and Well-Being », 2022

Routledge Voice Studies Series , 2019

publication description Popular Music and The Postcolonial (Routledge), 2018

Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2016

Theatre, Dance and Performance Training

Theatre Research in Canada

Performing (in) Place: Moving on/with the Land, 2022

Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des

Études anglaises, 2016

Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance, 2013

Anthropologica, 2018

Anthropologica, the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), invites you to submit a... more Anthropologica, the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), invites you to submit articles for peer review. We welcome articles in both French and English that engage with any field of sociocultural anthropology, covering a broad range of topics relevant to the dynamics of contemporary life. We welcome articles that are grounded in innovative methodologies, such as visual anthropology, community engaged research, and critical studies of materiality. Submissions should be based on original ethnographic fieldwork in any part of the world.

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2017

This interdisciplinary exploration of voice seeks to open a space for the nondiscursive performat... more This interdisciplinary exploration of voice seeks to open a space for the nondiscursive performative power of vocality in qualitative research. In the first part, I focus on anthropology and ethnographic practice to identify the ways in which “voice” gets muted when transformed by scriptocentrism (see Dwight Conquergood) into a conceptual abstraction or a metaphor. Given anthropology’s colonial legacy and the implication of ethnographers in what Anthony Kwame Harrison defines as the project of literatizing non-literate societies, I argue that the potentially scriptocentric dimension of ethnographic practice must be taken seriously in light of the travels of ethnography across disciplines and its increasingly widespread usage within qualitative inquiry. In the second part, I foreground philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s critique of the devocalization of logos in Western philosophy and its analysis by interdisciplinary voice studies scholar Konstantinos Thomaidis, who investigates the sys...

Popular Music and Society, 2016

The resurgence of Occitan popular music traditions in France is coterminous with the emergence of... more The resurgence of Occitan popular music traditions in France is coterminous with the emergence of postcolonial regionalism during the 1970s Larzac protests, following the wave of decolonization in the 1960s and anticipating the anti-globalization movement in subsequent decades. Situated within this continuum of postcolonial and transnational cultural activism, Occitan music practitioners are uniquely positioned to embody a radically inclusive conception of Occitan identity by embracing the intercultural dimension of their Mediterranean musical heritage. Reconciling regional specificity and cultural hybridity can thus offer creative ways of resisting nationalist constructions of identity and neoliberal representations of global culture. This article examines the political implications of the traditional music revival movement within the "imagined community" (Anderson) of Occitania, a vast and bio-culturally diverse area extending from Bordeaux and Toulouse in southwestern France to the Piedmont valleys of Italy, and from Marseille and the Provencal Alps in southeastern France to the Aran Valley in Catalonia on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. Ethnomusicologists Luc Charles-Dominique and Yves Defrance identify France as the only European country whose high culture and popular culture remain in a critical situation of total and irremediable rupture (6). They specify that the historical split that took place between the ethnomusicology of France and the ethnomusicology of faraway cultures within the French university system is unique in the world of academic research (7), and suggest that such a dichotomous conception of ethnomusicology's purview reveals a serious and recurring problem in French society manifest in its fraught relationship with its own popular culture, including regional forms of traditional music (15). Hence, the French folk revival campaign of the 1970s and 1980s was carried out not by ethnomusicologists benefiting from university funding but by young musicians who employed the grassroots ethnographic practice of collectage to come into direct contact with, and to learn from, elders living in rural communities whose musical traditions appeared threatened by the dominance of modern urban consumerist culture foreshadowing the advent of globalization (16). Occitan music revitalization was significantly influenced by the American folk revival through the work of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, whose open letter titled "Ne vous laissez pas coca-coloniser" (Resist Coca-Colonization) appeared in 1972 in the French popular music magazine Rock & Folk. In

Anthropologica, Jul 1, 2011

Embodied ResearchEmbodiment, lived experience and intersubjectivity are key to experimental appro... more Embodied ResearchEmbodiment, lived experience and intersubjectivity are key to experimental approaches articulated at the intersection of performance and ethnography. Yet the slippery nature of the territories which this research proposes to investigate has often contributed to undermining its academic credibility Since embodied experience eludes and possibly exceeds cognitive control, accounting for its destabilizing function within the research process potentially endangers dominant conceptions of knowledge upon which the legitimacy of academic discourses so crucially depends.Within the discipline of anthropology, alternative ethnographic models that account for the lived experience of researchers and research participants have arguably been most compellingly articulated by indigenous and feminist ethnographers. Lassiter notes that American Indian scholars were among the first to produce a radical critique of ethnographic fieldwork and to "call for models that more assertively attend to community concerns, models that would finally put to rest the lingering reverberations of anthropology's colonial past" (2005:6). Lassiter further remarks that feminist scholars, writing "as women whose knowledge is situated vis-a-vis their male counterparts" are already positioned as Other (2005:59). Indigenous and feminist anthropologists therefore raise related epistemological and methodological questions about ethnographic authority and the politics of representation because they share similar concerns about the ways in which conventional methodologies enable researchers positioned within the academy to authoritatively speak for the Other (Lassiter 2005:56, 59). Positioning oneself from within the community they are studying and accounting for their own embodied participation in the culture of that community has led indigenous and feminist researchers to develop alternative research methodologies which foreground embodiment, lived experience and intersubjectivity, and which privilege collaboration and reciprocity.While feminist ethnographers are committed to creating "more humane and dialogic accounts that would more fully and more collaboratively represent the diversity of women's experience" (Lassiter 2005:56), for indigenous ethnographers, consultation with community members is meant to ensure that the research they are conducting is mutually beneficial. In both cases, lived experience and accountability are linked and the researcher bears a moral responsibility to the community. When reflecting on his ethnography of Kiowa songs, Lassiter acknowledges that what mattered most to the Kiowa community was the power his interpretation would have in "defining [this community] to the outside - and to future generations of Kiowas for that matter." The questions that emerged from the research process were therefore about "who has control and who has the last word" (2005:11). Indeed, what is ultimately relevant to the Kiowa people is the power of the songs, for it is the embodied experience of singing these songs which sustains the cultural continuity of the Kiowa community."Meetings with Remarkable Women/Tu es la fille de quelqu'un," the SSHRC-funded research project1 1 am currently conducting with women artists whose experiential approaches to performance vitally depend on embodiment, similarly hinges upon questions of accountability, relevance, and reciprocity. Indeed, for these women from different cultures and generations, who often work with ancient traditional songs, it is the power of performance, transmitted through their teaching and performing, which gives meaning to their creative work as members of a transnational community of artists who share a direct connection to Jerzy Grotowski's groundbreaking performance research.The significance of the cross-cultural research conducted by the Polish director was recognized through his appointment, in 1997, to the Chair of Theatre Anthropology of the College de France in Paris. …

Canadian Theatre Review, 2012

That's the old saying, 'a'a ka hula, e waiho i ka hale. I dare you to dance or stay home.-Keola L... more That's the old saying, 'a'a ka hula, e waiho i ka hale. I dare you to dance or stay home.-Keola Lake quoted by Manulani Aluli Meyer in "Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian Epistemology" In Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance, D. Soyini Madison remarks that "these days, one can hardly address any subject in the arts, humanities, and social sciences without encountering the concept of performance," and specifies that such a concept has become critical to the investigation of "the meanings and effects of human behavior, consciousness, and culture" (149). Referring to Victor Turner's notion of "homo performans," Madison envisions human beings as a "performing species" and posits performance as "necessary to our survival" (150). If that's the case, how, then, can performance ethnography become a way of engaging in research that contributes not only to our survival, as members of the performing species, but to the survival of all living species and of the natural world which we co-inhabit? Performance as Experiential, Reflexive, and Intersubjective Turner, who pioneered performance ethnography, traces the etymology of the word performance back to the Old French parfournir, and argues that "performance does not necessarily have the structuralist implication of manifesting form, but rather the processual sense of 'bringing to completion' or 'accomplishing.' To perform is thus to complete a more or less involved process rather than to do a single deed or act" (Turner 101). Accordingly, performance hinges critically upon embodiment, or the involvement of the whole beingbody, mind, and heart-in the process of bringing meaningful actions to completion. This

Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, 2017

Konstantinos Thomaidis (KT): Why conduct scholarly and artistic research on traditional singing i... more Konstantinos Thomaidis (KT): Why conduct scholarly and artistic research on traditional singing in the global age? Given the dominance of new communication technologies and the unprecedented commodification of world cultures, investigating vocal practices rooted in oral cultures and traditional ways of knowing may seem futile and irrelevant. Yet, traditional singing is a powerful mode of human creativity, and traditional songs comprise a significant part of what UNESCO has designated as 'our' shared intangible cultural heritage. Current debates on cultural diversity demonstrate that rethinking regional, national, transnational and global notions of cultural identity is becoming increasingly urgent if we are to acknowledge and value the world's biocultural diversity beyond borders that separate and delineate nation states, whose sovereignty continues to hinge upon legitimizing constructions of national identity. If, as Caroline Bithell reminds us in Transported by Song, 'the act of singing with others is clearly about far more than simply producing sound' (2007: xxx-xxxi), how does engaging in singing practices relate to emergent, unstable and conflicting versions of belonging in times of precarity?

"As both a scholar and a performer herself, Magnat’s research relies upon an interdisciplinary me... more "As both a scholar and a performer herself, Magnat’s research relies upon an interdisciplinary methodology, combining fieldwork, artistic collaboration with her subjects, and the articulation of her embodied research through writing. The result is an insightful account of the work of such artists as Rena Mirecka, Ewa Benesz, Katharina Seyferth, and Ang Gey Pin. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in the work of Grotowski, Polish theatre, women theatre practitioners, as well as those engaged in practice-as-research." - Review by Tanya Dean, TDR

"[Magnat’s] methodology is an exquisite ethnographic balance of researcher and participant ... I ... more "[Magnat’s] methodology is an exquisite ethnographic balance of researcher and participant ... I found she did a splendid job of placing [this study] within the context of Polish history. …Her overall argument follows a post-theatrical path in Communist Poland instead of capitalizing on Grotowski’s international reputation…The volume is a comprehensive collection of the practising female Grotowski practitioners...This is a valuable body of work... the first to give full attention to the female angle of Grotowski’s legacy." - Review by Lara Szypszak, Canadian Theatre Review

"Influenced by the fields of indigenous and feminist research methodologies and her personal cont... more "Influenced by the fields of indigenous and feminist research methodologies and her personal contact with Cree director, performer and writer Floyd Favel, Magnat lays out an approach that stresses the necessity of abandoning the position of a distanced, objective observer of cultural material... In bringing to light the work of these practitioners, Magnat also has the opportunity to further analyse the development of Grotowski’s Paratheatrical experiments – a period of his work that is often given only cursory or dismissive treatment in accounts that address the officially sanctioned direction of his work and successors….The book provides much interesting ethnographic detail and well-constructed arguments … Magnat is asking provocative and important questions, and offering access to a rich and fascinating realm of performance practice." - Review by Brian Schultis, Studies in Theatre and Performance

Recipient of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research 2014 Ann Saddlemyer Book Award Honora... more Recipient of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research 2014 Ann Saddlemyer Book Award Honorable Mention

"This book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in the work of Grotowski, Polish theatre, women theatre practitioners, as well as those engaged in practice-as-research." - Review by Tanya Dean, TDR

"This is a valuable body of work... the first to give full attention to the female angle of Grotowski’s legacy." - Review by Lara Szypszak, Canadian Theatre Review

"Magnat is asking provocative and important questions, and offering access to a rich and fascinating realm of performance practice." - Review by Brian Schultis, Studies in Theatre and Performance

Watch the Companion Documentary Film Series on the Routledge Performance Archive (http://www.routledgeperformancearchive.com)