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Abstract
What can touch, as operational metaphor and physical method, offer to voice work for an intersectional performer in an intercultural context? This analysis considers 3 voice practices I have researched within the frame of experimental deviser training with diverse student groups, grounded in my work at the Norwegian Theatre Academy (NTA). The exercises work with different touch interfaces; (1) Vocal Wrestling (touching each other), inspired by contact improvisation and Grotowski diaspora trainings, (2) Follow the bubbles (self-touch) derived from anatomical voice methods, and (3) The Voices in My Voices (touching our communities/cosmologies) inspired by decolonial and New Materialist (NM) thought. The work proposes touch as generative in the process of world making via voice. Strategies include: decentring the teacher, empowering student world building, polyvocality, brave spaces, vocal risk and queer use via hybrid experience. It puts forth principle-based and practical starting points for models of touch in training which ‘meet’ today’s climate of care and carefulness proactively and with lightness. Theoretically, this work is grounded in McAllister-Viel, Thomaidis, Oram, Eidsheim, Object Oriented Feminism, aurality studies, critical whiteness and decolonial theory.
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Notes
1 Voice training does not happen in a bubble separated from the world. Cahill and Hamel argue for “the body as ineluctably embedded within social and political dynamics, and a recognition of the profound influence of structural inequality on both vocality in general and vocal training in particular.” (2019). No students are outside these questions: even when a student group is quite homogeneous, these dynamics are at play because they will be making art in a world embedded in these structures. I ask, how can we acknowledge and engage with the complexity of these factors in how we create voice methods and philosophies.
2 Although discussed here within the context of NTA, they have been developed over several years and also been applied in a British Drama School, Italian workshop, Singapore conservatory (via zoom) and two ‘classical’ acting programs in Norway. In making exercises, I acknowledge that to have long sessions over time in a dedicated studio, is a privilege not all have access to. I aim to create ‘rough and ready’ approaches teachable in 1.5 hrs which do not require prior skills, but likewise offer challenge to each practitioner based on their negotiation of engagement.
3 “Within voice studies, McAllister-Viel, Thomaidis and myself, among others, have argued that the voice is not only physical, but necessarily cultural, social and political: it cannot be approached by a voice training as ‘neutral’ and the metaphor of the voice as machine is outdated.” (Behrens Citation2020, p.398)
4 Royona Mitra references a similar problematic in the co-authored paper with Patel: “Kathak is Always Already Queer: Jaivant Patel Dance and I Am Your Skin” (2021). (Mitra and Patel Citation2022).
5 A human-centred point of view.
6 In Norway, this can be particularly complex for the student of color who is Norwegian by birth, but has the lived experience of being othered and treated as non-Norwegian due to false assumptions of cultural background. The “where are you from?” “I am from Norway.” “No, where are you really from” dynamic.
7 NTA is dedicated to anti-discriminatory practices. We prepare students to be in the field by changing it, rather than conforming to norms. NTA is an interesting case study, because of this dedication to a critical and expanded perspective. On the NTA website, you can see a glimpse of the kinds of work students make and meet: https://www.hiof.no/nta/english/.
8 DiAngelo (Citation2018, p. 71) writes, after the Civil Rights Movement, being a racist was cooked down to the idea of “simple, isolated, and extreme acts of prejudice”, and then the logic followed ‘if you are a good/nice person, you cannot be racist.’ This faulty logic she calls the ‘good/bad’ binary and explores how it hides racism, often unconsciously enacted by those who identify as white allies.
9 That there are some techniques named ‘extended vocal techniques’ in an avant guard tradition which are central and familiar in other cultures, is an extension of this problematic which Eidsheim names.
10 I do not in any way claim that these exercises ‘fill the most needed gap’ in contemporary voice training. To the contrary, voice methods based in non-white and non-colonial lineages and particularly those rooted in indigenous knowledge systems are needed more than this method. In the spirit of ‘doing the work that I can do’ from my positionality, I aim here to be a guinea pig for other white practitioners wondering how they might question or restructure their work. The significant outcome of this work will be as much if I ‘get it wrong’ as if I get it right.
11 Cahill and Hamel (Citation2019) have a similar notion which they call intervocality.
12 Arao and Clemens reflect: “As we explored…thorny questions, it became increasingly clear to us that our approach to initiating social justice dialogues should not be to convince participants that we can remove risk from the equation, for this is simply impossible. Rather, we propose revising our language, shifting away from the concept of safety and emphasizing the importance of bravery instead, to help students better understand – and rise to – the challenges of genuine dialogue or diversity and social justice issues. (ibid p. 136)
13 Sara Ahmed (2020) coined the term ‘queer use’. Sakar (Citation2020) writes: “Ahmed argues that this is precisely why we need to ‘keep the question of use alive’ because it allows us to examine, challenge and subvert normative definitions and uses of use and usefulness. The book’s main insight is that questioning use can be the starting point of a queer feminist project of ‘living differently’, imagining possibilities that lie outside the confines of what is allowed.”
14 Over the arc of 3 years, my role as teacher is fluid: sometimes I totally decenter my role and sometimes I take on the hat of ‘master teacher’. Starting from these types of exercises suggest that the role of ‘master’ is not predetermined but is a role we take on. When/if I take on a role of master teacher, it is by mutual consent. It should be noted that my practice is in relation to the work of the singing teachers, whom the students have parallel, and they have their own relationship to student/teacher power dynamics.
15 While I find this notion of queer use operational in my own thinking, I do not advertise this work as ‘queering voice’ to students, as that has already its own matrixed lineage.
16 Many practitioners have searched for adequate and elegant terminology when discussing the integration of body, voice. Some key references, among others, body/voice (McAllister-Viel), body-voice (Roy Hart), body-mind (Zarrilli), bodyworld (Camilleri), Body Voice Somatic practice and Smadar Emor names her work Bodyvoice the international program. I first used the term ‘bodyvoice’ in 2016. Camilleri developed bodyworld in 2020, referencing not necessarily an integration (which can have connotations of sameness), but rather a complex entanglement of a bodymind with material worlds. This resistance to notions of integration, with a focus on relationality is highly relevant to my use of the term.
17 This work, as well as the other historical examples I explore here, have long traditions of written and embodied practice. I acknowledge the impossibility of considering these practices as singular or closed, as they are carried on by communities as living legacies. As part of said legacies, my interpretation is a product of my own experience from a particular historical positionality. In describing the works, I acknowledge the partiality of my gaze, and my questioning of them stems from the inspiration they offer: they are all works which have changed my life. I aim not to give a definitive interpretation, but rather to contribute to the continuous renewal and reconsideration of embodied pedagogies over time which are a product of many ephemeral entanglements, of sweat and conversations.
18 The interpretation of how this work ‘works’ is completely based on my own experience of it in the early 2000s; it will differ from how it is being taught or written about by others.
19 Magnat’s (Citation2014) book: “Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women” reconsiders the legacy of Grotowski via the strong female influences in his work who are often overseen and is a good source for understanding some of the power dynamics at play. Berkeley-Schultz and I wrote an analysis of ‘traditional’ song training work and its application within a university context. (Behrens and Berkeley-Schultz Citation2017)
20 This is one of many pre-exercises, each which offers the performer another awareness focus when entering the core exercise.
21 Bryon’s (Citation2014, p. 145) exercise ‘Meeting in the Middle’ works with a similar sense of working with energy and ‘meeting’ the other in space and can be a useful reference for this work.
22 This is a clear option if a student is resistant to working with a person’s touch, or needs very much to self-steer the tempo-rhythm of the work.
23 For some, this may be reminiscent of Linklater’s (Citation1976, p. 84) ‘Resonating Ladder’ exercises in terms of the intention: “you will be directing your voice to move up and down the resonating ladder until every part of it is available, familiar and safe.”
24 The internet is flooded with videos and website descriptions of the science behind this exercise: it appears to be very accessible – in contrast to the sometimes mystic and artistic exercises of Grotowski and contact improvisation.
25 For example, while many in OOO try to ‘give life’ to things, (which can reinscribe anthropocentrism) Behar, asks why can we not investigate what is ‘dead’ in us? She explores this in her artistic work of hybrid human/machines.
26 Titles of these exercises include Sonic Positionalities: An Ear to the World, Representations of Sonic Identities and Contexts Shared.
27 This can be a particularly interesting exercise to do at the beginning of an education, right after students are accepted to a program. Suggestion: reading the quote at the beginning of this section as inspiration before doing the exercise.
28 The Eidsheim citation about what we can and cannot hear quoted earlier in the article can be an interesting provocation to start off this exercise.
29 Mapaya warns of the dangers of intuitively trained musicians forced into Western models of music which prioritize score over aurality. He identifies this as what Christopher Small calls a process of “demusicalization” (in Davis and Lynch 2022 p. 155) Exercises like this attempt to hinder such process from happening via a greater understanding of musical diversity.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Electa Behrens
Electa Behrens (PhD) is program-responsible for the BA Acting at Norwegian Theatre Academy. Research areas include: intersectional performance and voice trainings, student agency in teaching, sonic dramaturgies, vocal identity, New Materialism and the dramaturgy of darkness. Behrens has published several articles and book chapters on these topics in journals such as Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Performance Research and Critical Stages. She has been teaching for over 10 years at a university level in the UK and Norway, and has taught workshops internationally. She has long experience also as a performer, having worked with companies/artists throughout Europe/USA including Odin Teatret, Richard Schechner, Marina Abramovic and the CPR, as well as making her own work.