Exposition

Material Words for Voicing Dancers (Appendix VII) (2021)

Robert Vesty

About this exposition

This is the seventh appendix to my doctoral thesis: Material Words for Voicing Dancers. The thesis stems from practice-led research that has investigated the role of voicing (both linguistic and non-linguistic sound) in improvisatory dance-based performance practices. My research is rooted in the pedagogies of three independent practitioners — Ruth Zaporah (US), Julyen Hamilton (UK/ES) and Billie Hanne (BE) — which took place intermittently between 2012 and 2017 in Spain, Belgium and the UK. Reference is made to pedagogical processes and Instant Composition performance practice, as well as the my own artistic performance experiments and outcomes, to draw out the figure of a voicing dancer. The analysis considers: 1) how a dancer might ‘access’ feeling for voicing, taking a somatically-oriented approach that also utilises my experience as a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method; 2) how voicing can be ‘arranged’ in a compositional environment with objects; 3) how voicing is amplified for performance in an enlivened acoustic space drawing on theatre aurality. Working through these stages (‘accessing’, ‘arranging’ and ‘amplifying’) aims to discern and differentiate the way voicing and dancing can be considered a potentially unified but situated act, as well as offer an analytical model for researching such practices. I argue that to describe such practice in terms of ‘embodied voice’ is limited and I use Tim Ingold’s relational ontology, and particularly his notion of ‘ensoundedness’, as a foundation for expanding the terms of engagement. I suggest that ‘voicing-and-listening’ can more fully account for how voicing(s) are produced by dancers in a studio and performance environment. Reference is made to my own artistic performance experiments and outcomes that have attempted to extend the research. The performance documents that stem from this are housed in this digital appendix.
typeresearch exposition
keywordsvoice, dance, improvisation
date15/04/2019
published30/03/2021
last modified30/03/2021
statuspublished
share statuspublic
affiliationRoyal Holloway University London
copyrightRobert Vesty
licenseAll rights reserved
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/606646/606647
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/rc.606646
published inResearch Catalogue


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