Vocal Extensions: Disembodied Voices in Contemporary Music Theatre and Performance (original) (raw)

THE ANATOMY OF VOICE: TWO VIEWS ON THE EXHIBITION POST-OPERA(“Tent” Gallery and “V2_Lab for the Unstable Media”, Rotterdam, April 19 – June 30 and May 3–26 2019)

New Sound , 2020

In this paper we discuss the exhibition Post-Opera, a complex and provocative curatorial project by Kris Dittel and Jelena Novak, in which the changeable relations between the voice and the (human) body are investigated from the creative and theoretical perspectives, relying on juxtaposing and reflection between visual arts, technology and opera. Firstly, in the paper we examine the curatorial procedure, in its shift from the mediatory function between the work and the audience towards the practice, which intervenes in both of these domains and results in an exhibition as an autonomous art object. In the second part we interpret the politics and the effectiveness of the singing and the speaking voice in contemporary art and culture, while in the third part we write about the resemantization of the relation between the singing body and the sung voice within ‘installing the operatic’.

(Keynote) Radical Vocality in Performance: On Voices that Lay Bare their Bodies

"In this keynote lecture, I argue that the radical vocality that has marked the post-modern stage and performance art gives rise to a re-‘enchantment’ of the disembodied voice. This is particularly induced by the principle of the acousmatic, which is most inherently part of our aural cultures and technologies. Taking various examples of radical voices in contemporary performance and music theatre, I attempt to debunk the myths surrounding the disembodied voice. I wish to place it under scrutiny to uncover the processes of how we perceive bodies in voices. My concerns are twofold. The first part of my talk focuses on the theory of the disembodied voice. I discuss how an excess of auditory intensities, which is constituted by what I term ‘vocal distress’, invokes the desire to reinstate immediacy with or locate identity into the voice by attributing a metaphorical body, a ‘voice-body’ (Steven Connor 2000). I argue that this desire propels a necessity to position one’s self in relation to the vocal excess. The second part looks more closely on the ramifications of such a voice-body on our modes of auditory perception as virtual positions in relation to what we see in the vocal performance. This inquiry about our listening modalities includes a critique on the understanding of oral and literate modes of listening (Derrick de Kerckhove 1997) as mutually exclusive. I substantiate these theoretical considerations by means of two small case studies: The Wooster Group’s La Didone and Franziska Bauman’s Electric Renaissance, respectively."

Radical Vocality, Auditory Distress and Disembodied Voice in Performance: The Resolution of the Voice-Body in The Wooster Group’s La Didone

Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, 2012

In this chapter, I discuss how theories of the disembodied voice call for a cultural understanding of our listening attitudes in music and musical theatre, which goes beyond genre restrictions. I contend that the enhanced interest in vocality on the postmodern stage, which lies at the basis of the newly emerging forms of music theatre since the 1950s (with an increase in the 1980s), has given rise to a general re-‘enchantment’ of the disembodied voice, which re-enacts, challenges, substitutes communicative properties of orality, as much as it pushes and expands the discursive realm of aurality. Therefore, I wish to focus on the principle of acousmatization, which is most inherently part of our aural cultures and technologies, to the extent that this concept is useful to explain the effects of disembodied voices on the listener. Taking various examples of acousmatized voices in contemporary music and musical theatre, I will attempt to uncover the processes of how we perceive bodies in voices, particularly by means of our modes of listening.

The Challenge of Theorizing the Voice in Performance

Voice is the unique sound of the human self, made audible. The sound of the voice is contingent upon the complex structure of each individual human body for the nature and quality of the sound emanating from it, as well as being subject to the state of health of the individual, both mental and physical, which contributes to the constantly, if subtly varying physicality of the individual. It is indeed a truism that the voice is unique, inasmuch as no two humans are identical, and therefore no two voices are identical. I propose a phenomenological discussion of the performing voice, in order to reveal the voice in its material and substantial thingliness as the sound of the unique individual who is the actor, containing within its fluctuations and its nuances the character who emerges from the actor’s engagement with the text. There are at least three inter-connected challenges disrupting perception of the uniqueness of the voice and defying attempts at its representation. The first challenge arises out of the constraints of a culture that has traditionally valued the written word as the means of interpretation and analysis of performance. This privileging of the written word both informs, and is informed by the second challenge, which is the commonly held notion of the voice as a mere carrier of text, whereby the voice itself is assumed to be “synonymous with speech” (Titze xviii). Such a misconception regarding the difference between voice and speech is bound up with the third challenge, which is the nature of perception itself and how it is generally discussed.

Voices beyond corporeality: Towards the prosthetic body in opera

Studies in Musical Theatre

My theoretical interest in the relationship between body and voice in recent opera was stimulated when I attended a performance of Michel van der Aa’s opera One (2003). In it, soprano Barbara Hannigan, looking identical to her life-size two dimensional video image, ‘competes’ with her ‘second self’ – the projected image and pre-recorded voice. A ventriloquism-like discord between what is seen and heard is significantly different from what is usually experienced in western mainstream operatic repertoire. Voice appears beyond the body that produces it due to technological means that act as a kind of prosthesis to the expressiveness and instrumentality of the singing body. In order to show how the body–voice relationship becomes opera’s major productive force I use the concept of prosthesis by Sandy Stone, the concept of vocal uniqueness by Adriana Cavarero, and the concept of intruder by Jean Luc Nancy to illuminate the relationship between singing body and voice in One.

Exhibiting The Voice

PARSE journal n. 13 (2), 2021

The title of this article carries an inherent contradiction. How could something so elusive, and most of all, invisible, as the voice, be exhibited? Despite the availability of recording technologies for over a century, the voice still conveys the impossibility of being caught in place and time. It was this contradiction that the exhibition Post-Opera (TENT, V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Operadagen Rotterdam, 2019) worked with, in order to show the affect of the singing voice, the bodies they emit it, and challenge the socio-cultural frame that influence the perception of who can have a voice and what is considered a voice. In the Western world, the notion of "having a voice" is commonly associated with the right to have a vote, to have a voice in society, often expressed in individualised and humanistic terms. Critics of humanism, and in particular critical posthumanists, have already pointed out the non-neutrality and inherent privileges the term carries, with its underlying connection to white, patriarchal, anthropocentric and colonial meanings. Instead of this rather Eurocentric conception of the voice, Post-Opera demonstrated a disconnect between this view and brought forth a proposition where singing machines, mechanisms, beasts, animals and other "others" joined in a collective form of vocal expression. They sung beyond opera and at the same time beyond human. This way Post-Opera proposed a different ontological understanding of voices and their potentialities, as well as the variety of ways voices are let to be heard.This text reflects on the ways in which the exhibition and surrounding programme materialised on the intersections of visual art and postdramatic opera, while confronting voice studies and theories of critical posthumanism in order to posit the voice beyond its humanist license.

Staging Voice

2021

This study reflects on what it would mean to take opera's decisive attribute-voice-as the foundation of its staged performance. The book thinks of staging through the medium of voice. It is a nuanced exploration, which brings together scholarly and directorial interpretations, and engages in detail with less frequently performed works of major and influential 20th-century artists-Erik Satie, Bertolt Brecht, and Kurt Weill-as well as exposes readers to an innovative experimental work of Evelyn Ficarra and Valerie Whittington. The study is intertwined throughout with the author's staging of the works accessible online. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in voice studies, opera, music theatre, musicology, directing, performance studies, practice-based research, theatre, visual art, stage design, and cultural studies.

The electroacoustic and its double : duality and dramaturgy in live performance

2011

Live electroacoustic performance juxtaposes and superimposes two main elements: the real, present and physical, against the simulated and disembodied. In this sense, it is a liminal form which negotiates two different worlds on stage. In this dissertation I will address some central aspects of performance that have been reshaped and problematised by the use of the electroacoustic medium in a live context. I will investigate in particular three main dualities: the performer's body / electroacoustic sound; physical space / electroacoustic space; and performance / audience. I will also discuss a generalised duality common to all three: presence / absence. Rather than regarding these dualities as indicators of discontinuity, I will suggest that they can help develop a continuum of connections and relationships between performance elements. These connections can be designed as part of the composition process. By investigating these dualities, this research addresses the main elements...

MUVE (Museum of Ventriloquial Objects) : reconfiguring voice agency in the liminality of the verbal and the vocal

2011

This project aims at reconfiguring power and agency in voice representation using the metaphor of ventriloquism. The analysis departs from ‘ventriloquial objects’, mostly moving image, housed in a fictional museum, MUVE. The museum’s architecture is metaphoric and reflects a critical approach couched in liminality. A ‘pseudo-fictional’ voice precedes and complements the ‘theoretical’ voice in the main body of work. After the Fiction, an introductory chapter defines the specific role that the trope of ventriloquism is going to fulfill in context. If the voice is already defined by liminality, between inside and outside the body, equally, a liminal trajectory can be found in the functional distinction between the verbal (emphasis on a semantic message) and the vocal (emphasis on sonorous properties) in the utterance. This liminal trajectory is harnessed along three specific moments corresponding to the three main chapters. They also represent the themes that define the museum rooms jo...