ABSTRACT
This paper is structured as seven scenes, each one flashing up and developing through auto-poetic and intra-active vocality. The work is closely based on a singer’s philosophizing encounter with voice, sound, with a score, by living in the process of understanding, experiencing, and making performative knowledge shareable. The aim is to allow voice, concepts, and written words to intra-act diffractively, in order to create meaning and knowledge from fields beyond reason and systematic rationality.
It is also a tribute to the 17th century singer Anna Renzi Romana - one of the first public opera singers active in Venice around 1640. She was described as a ‘symbol of Nothing’, a living performative paradox who was born and re-born through words, gestures, and vocalisations (Calcagno 2004, Belgrano 2011). Renzi's voice is well documented in letters, poems, and other writings of profound praise: and yet in accord with her paradoxical life and work we know nothing of her in directly sonic terms. Her presence-in-absence on stage became a vessel for an ‘alchemical performance’ in which her voice found endless possibilities for connecting with her audience; a presence-in-absence we hope may continue to echo no matter time and space.