Exhibiting The Voice

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’.

Post-Opera exhibition booklet , 2019

The human voice has been central to our psychological and social understanding of the self. The voice is also at the heart of our definition of citizenship, as having the right to vote means having a voice in society. Hence, the voice is intimately entwined with what counts as being ‘human’. Yet not all bodies are equally seen as ‘human’ and allowed to have a voice. This begs the question: what kind of voices are recognised as such within our societal power dynamics and what are the possibilities for voices to be heard? Technological developments also shift the ways in which we look at bodies, voices and identities today. As we become increasingly accustomed to an intrusive intimacy with technology, and are surrounded by artificial voices, new questions emerge: In what ways do such disembodied creatures affect our understanding of what constitutes a voice? And how do such voices gain presence? Insights from opera There is hardly any other artistic genre where the voice is more essential than in opera. Yet the operatic singing body was long overlooked, not considered important enough to be taken seriously in the process of meaning making. Contemporary postdramatic opera engages in a reinvention of the body-voice relationship, using technology to alter voices or to break the seamless connection between singing body and voice, thus stretching the borders of the body and the voice and of the opera genre itself. Post-Opera takes a similar approach, with a lively combination of new commissions to both visual artists and composers, installations and live performances, vocalists stretching the possibilities of the human voice and singing machines.

Twentieth-Century Music, 2021

This article analyses composer Pamela Z’s work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black studies and sound/music studies. Z’s large-scale multimedia work Voci (2003), which the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’, consists of a series of eighteen scenes that combine vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an alternate controller interface that converts bodily gestures into expressive control signals. Z’s work has been considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumanist discourses. But rather than affirm her practice as fully consonant with technological visions of the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the very liberal humanism upon which the posthuman is built. For a key tenet of liberal humanism, as Alexander G. Weheliye observes, was the racial and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. We have never been completely human, he suggests, let alone posthuman. Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In a Voci scene entitled ‘Voice Studies', for instance, Z engages the problem of ‘linguistic profiling’ as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguistics researcher John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocalizations, Z explains, ‘Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice’, subsequently playing back recordings of housing applicants containing vocal signifiers of racial difference. The article then contrasts this kind of ‘aural dimension of race’ found in Jennifer Lynn Stoever's notion of the ‘sonic color line’ with Pierre Schaeffer's attempt to separate sound from the social as well as from bodies and identities in his practice of acousmatic reduction. With this in mind, I show how Z construes the voice as an acous(ma)tic technology of embodiment while reframing opera’s humanist legacy through Voci’s allegorical narration of the ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’. Moving with and against a posthuman imaginary, Z suggests that although we have never quite been human or posthuman, we may nevertheless narrate new versions of each.

Oxford Art Journal 43, no. 2, 2020

In recent years, the rallying cry to 'decolonise art history' has become a mainstay of critical debates in the academy, public institutions, and on social media; calling attention to the need to acknowledge unspoken biases rooted in the legacies of imperialism, interrogate the discipline's exclusionary mechanisms of power, and to give voice to previously marginalised or even silenced subjectivities-to finally hear 'the subaltern speak' and for such speech to transform our existing apparatuses of knowledge production and dissemination. 1 Although these issues have been articulated by scholars, artists, and curators (usually hailing from the 'Global South') for decades, the strident vocalisation and amplification of these concerns at this present moment is telling. The ongoing saga of the UK Brexit referendum, the Trump administration, fears of mass migration and cross-border movements, and most recently, the Covid-19 global pandemic, has fomented a chorus of xenophobic, nationalistic, and jingoistic invectives that have dominated public discourses across the world. Yet, the coterminous proliferation of grassroots movements like #MeToo, #IamNotaVirus, #BlackLivesMatter and #ICantBreathe have emphasized the urgent need to call out systemic forms of discrimination and social injustice, and to speak out against the myriad, pervasive, and suffocating forms of racial, sexual, gendered, and environmental violence that have gone unseen and unheard for much too long. In this clamour of often violently opposing perspectives, art historical or otherwise, it is striking how questions of identity, representation, and power accrete in the metaphor of voice. Given the ocular-centricity of the field, it is not surprising that considerations of visibility and opacity-the disciplinary operations of the gaze and its refusal-have dominated efforts towards decentring and decolonizing the scope of art historical inquiry thus far. However, there remains much to be said about the critical potential of 'sound's invisible formlessness' to disrupt the 'surface of the visible world.' 2 While visuality, as numerous critics have noted, is generally directed, focused and linear, sound is immersive and multi-directional. 3 We might be able look away or askance from the gaze, return it, or even turn a 'blind eye' to its operations of power, but sound is altogether more diffuse and intersubjective-passing through seemingly impenetrable boundaries and barriers; reverberating across space and time. Yet, of all the sounds in the world, it is only the voice that remains so intimately bound to questions of agency, subjectivity, and authority. Voice as Form parses the interpretative registers through which we can better theorise the agentic and material dimensions of voice in artistic practice. The artists whose work is discussed and presented in this special issue speak from contexts of exclusionary identitarian structures, the intimate experiences of migration and diaspora, and challenge the pervasive logic of coloniality that still shapes our contemporary postcolonial and postnational moment. But to confine our understandings of these works to forms of communication alone only reinforces the reduction of voice to metaphor, a potentially disempowering

"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."

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.

The Sound of Žižek, 2022

Opera may not be Žižek’s central intellectual interest, but it is never far from his theoretical purview. He is especially engaged by the music dramas of Richard Wagner, and when he writes or speaks about opera he invariably uses Wagner as his main theoretical focus. However, it is in more recent operas that I see several instances of real synergy with the thought of Žižek. In this text I examine some cases of recent (post)operas from the perspectives of concepts and strategies developed by Slavoj Žižek. Those are: The Fall of the House of Usher of 1987 (composer: Philip Glass, Libretto by Arthur Yorinks based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe. stage director: Serge van Veggel), Dog’s Heart of 2008-09 (composer: Alexander Raskatov, libretto: Cesare Mazzonis, stage director: Simon Mc Burney), Aliados [Allies] of 2010-2013 (composer: Sebastian Rivas, libretto: Esteban Buch, stage director: Antoine Gindt) and Thea-tre of the World of 2013-2015 (composer: Louis Andriessen, libretto: Helmut Krausser, stage director: Pierre Audi). I discuss those operas with reference to Žižek’s cinematic project The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2006). Looking back to Mark Fisher’s discussion of capitalist realism through the lens of the singing voice, it may become obvious that singing as a state of extreme fragility is more pertinent than ever before in the continuing uncertainty found in all spheres of human existence today. When Madeline’s voice is heard singing in The Fall of the House of Usher, it is divorced from the body, threatening us by virtue of its unpredictable larger-than-life dimension. It is a metaphor of uncertainty. When the dog Sharik sings with several voices in Dog’s Heart, it is clear that the author manipulates this extreme fragility, playing with identity, but at the same time demonstrating the extreme power of singing. The singing that takes over the character of Margaret Thatcher in Aliados demonstrates that power. And finally the Witches in Theatre of the World, their grotesque voices threatening us with the famous Ode, are erased by the eternal power of an ecstatic singing (Sor Juana) that engulfs our whole planet, relativizing the struggles and troubles of the human condition.

2021

Master of Voice" is a temporary program of Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) that united artists of different backgrounds who shared voice-based practices. Often considered as a medium in art history, the (non)human voice has been identified as a discipline in its own right. The book Master of Voice (Smits, 2020) presents the artworks and reflections arisen during a two-yearlong period of research based on collective learning and experimentation. The human voice is mainly approached through gender and technology, gushing from a multiplicity of bodies, freed from Western social norms. Editor Lisette Smits shares a vivid reflection about the role of contemporary artists and the range of their voices in our post-industrial society. The book emphasizes the agency of the voice and accordingly, its potential as a political and social tool.

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.

This presentation is an attempt to bring together what I feel is both a disperse and an enticing string of matters and open questions concerning the experience of the human voice. It is a subject that has fascinated me for a long time now, enough to dedicate myself to it in the context of my ongoing PhD research. It is a subject whose theoretic wanderings have always somehow felt lacking and reductive, when compared to the mystery of the actual vocal experience, renewed in a meaningful situation, in everyday life and experience.