Sounding Off: Performance, dyssynchrony and participatory media

Abstract

Based on the author's experiences as a choreographer, performer, and viewer of the live art piece Grayface (2010), this article presents the performance as choreography for the vocal apparatus. Grayface is an eight-hour endurance piece in which eleven speakers attempted to dub silent video clips of performers saying ‘You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet’, a line made infamous by minstrel star Al Jolson and his many impersonators. Warren-Crow argues that Grayface expressed the desire for and the impossibility of perfect synchronization between sound and image. The piece was constructed to emphasize the considerable effort of the live performers, drawing attention to each speaker's distinctive vocal expression as well our difficult, dyssynchronous relationships with media history that endures.

Notes

¹ Grayface was part of the group exhibition ‘Non-Cochlear Sound’, curated by artist and scholar of sound art Seth Kim-Cohen. We exhibited the piece as a live performance during the show's opening night and the day after; for the remainder of the exhibition, the work was shown as video documentation. Invoking an expanded notion of choreography, my collaborator and I consider the work to be a piece of choreography for the vocal apparatus (including the lips, tongue, lungs and vocal chords).

² I perform in all of my live works involving endurance elements and share the rigours (and joys) of performing with the volunteers. In addition to my collaborator and me, performers in Grayface included Matt Hackett, Lauren Hafner Addison, Dayna Moses, Cassandra Motta, Alison Powell (pictured on page 125), Holly Parker, Amanda Riesman, Adam White and Alex Zamalin (pictured on page 125).

³ The Jazz Singer is the first feature film with synchronized dialogue. However, there were a number of earlier short subjects with synchronized dialogue, including A Plantation Act.

⁴ ‘You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet’ has music by Michael Alexander and lyrics by Tony Withers. Bassey has another connection to Jolson; when she was a teenager, she performed in Memories of Jolson, a musical based on Jolson's life.

⁵ Seth Warren-Crow and I did not ask people of colour to perform in the piece; we wanted to implicate ourselves, as white Americans, in dynamics of racial oppression.

⁶ For Roland Barthes, the ‘grain’ is the corporeality and materiality of human expression. It is ‘the body in the singing voice, in the writing hand, in the performing limb’ (1991: 276).

⁷ I am stretching Cavarero's theory by moving away from the audible qualities of the voice. However, I do think that the visual aspects of vocality are not adequately addressed in For More Than One Voice: Toward a philosophy of vocal expression. While I support her reclamation of sound as a destabilizing force that challenges both ocularcentrism and logocentrism, I also recognize the entwinement of hearing and vision in the perception of speech. This is demonstrated by the McGurk effect, a perceptual illusion that results when an image of a phoneme being spoken is dubbed with the sound of a different phoneme. Instead of hearing the phoneme that was voiced on the audio track, the listener ‘hears’ a different syllable, often an intermediate form between what were produced sonically and visually. Psychologist Harry McGurk and his assistant John MacDonald published their findings in ‘Hearing lips and seeing voices’ (1976), a pioneering article on the multimodality of speech perception.