This is Not a Manifesto

Abstract

This short essay is written by a voice teacher, questioning her positionality, ethics and exercises. In writing it, I tried to take a risk, to fail generously and to take responsibility.

The provocation: It is not my place as a white woman to write the manifestos we need today. Imagining utopia demands that we question our position in imagining it—whose utopia and what is silenced in such a notion. Specifically in the Norwegian context where I teach, the right to dream utopias is being reclaimed by black, indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC). If we speak of resistance, my first action, as a pedagogue of the actors of the unimaginable future, must be to work in a way that is constantly unmaking utopia as a singular dream. To work with the idea of contested spaces. In order to do this, I need to find ways to get out of the way.

Notes

1 Konstantinos Thomaidis, in his Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, as well as Tara McAllister-Viel, among others, have been instrumental in opening debates of intersectionality and complexity within the field of voice work that has often downplayed the role of culture, society and politics in how our voices work or are heard/not heard. In this way, I understand voice training as a field that is highly debated and in a period of dynamic change.

2 See the graduation catalogue (Norwegian Theatre Academy 2019b) with images and information about our programme and students.

3 We only have one BA class at a time.

4 Our school is known for disturbing normative Euro/ American notions of ‘what theatre is’ and through our curriculum, research, hiring and writing we aim to take a stand against discrimination and appropriation. Examples are Ely (2019) and Behrens (2019).

5 I wrote about a specific experience of this in a co-authored conference paper (Behrens and Eeg-Tverbakk 2019).

6 Fitzmaurice voice work, which has a practice of tremoring or destructuring, is a provocative embodied starting point for this research.

7 Voice work is in a particular historical moment: the master teachers who have shaped much of modern practice are getting old. Kristin Linklater, master teacher and visionary writer of Freeing the Natural Voice (1976), died during the spring of 2020. As these masters leave us the question arises of how to continue these traditions – as religions with methods fixed in stone, as hybrid versions or adaptations – or perhaps the field needs other ‘masters’ entirely.

8 I wrote this text in the summer. On returning to the studio, I began the autumn term this year with an exercise titled ‘Home as Archive’. The task was for students to create the ‘home of their artistic practice’ in small physical/ performative manifestations together in a room alongside their other classmates. They were invited to bring in the room elements of their past, present and future, which were relevant for them – to acknowledge their ghosts, bring their notebooks and embody their dreams. Walking through the physical ‘in-betweens’ between the houses, we manifested an image of ensemble that included both a high degree of articulating and owning one’s artistic identity, while at the same time inviting hospitality of one another and ally-ship: a trust built on togetherness in difference.

9 By this I mean to acknowledge both the layers of the individual as material that New Materialism points to, as well as the space of voice being something much bigger than the individual, which is present in many indigenous cultures.

10 The clearest example of this was when the shared questions of why do we make art (in a COVID-19 reality)? and what voice actually do we need now? became the starting point for the video project I curated – Killing Songs, Writing Time – in which students made small original compositions tutored by their singing teachers.