You are also most welcome to visit the following Research Expositions:
(WCP Rome2024, International Association for Japanese Philosophy, August 5-6)
• Black-Market Truths: Performative Wisdom in Passion, Grief and Madness (WCP Rome 2024, Invited Session dedicated to Performance Philosophy, 7 August)
On-going PP & Artistic Research Projects:
• No Self Can Tell (Research Project, 2019-ongoing)
• Lessons in the Shadows of Death (Research Project, 2023-ongoing)
Performance Paper Presentation
WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY
"Philosophy Across Boundaries"
Sapienza University, Rome, AUGUST 1-8, 2024
Stage for sub-group: Experimental Philosophy (August 3)
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.
à Dio
MIND
Leaving. Never really belonging to a normal life. To a life with a home and a kitchen table. A common way of living. Always leaving friends behind. Always feeling guilty For not being close as before And keeping contact with the passed. Sorrow of living away from family. A feeling so sad that it hurts in me. Painful. A painful longing. Longing and missing the land of birth. !e land where I was born Longing and missing. Memories comes to me. Faces and landscapes, I know my pain caused by longing. Her sorrows I will never know. Only mine.
VOICE
À à à Dio Roma 119
MIND
A note a pause A note a pause A note a pause I could just sing the letter A,
VOICE
À à à Dio Patria À à à amici, amiiiiiiiIIIIIIiiiici à Dio ammmmmmmmiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiccciiiiiiiiiii120
MIND
I am leaving you my friends. And I wont Come back. No, never. I wont see you faces any more, And I am drowning in my own sorrow. God, help me be strong. I turn to you. FRIEEEEEEEENDS stay with me. Hold me and be with me. Oh God,
VOICE & BODY
A à à Dio Patria A à àamici, amiiiiiiiIIIIIIiiiici
MIND
On my way, I trust. I learn to trust. In the chromatic movement, I let myself go
VOICE
Vado à partir l’esiglio in pianti amari 121
MIND
I am leaving. I have to raise myself up from the ground And be strong and bold. I will be exiled and I will cryyyyyyyy bitter tears. In all this emotion, I see myself in a bubble, all alone. Like being in a emptiness Not really understanding what happens. It’s quiet and I don’t dare to stir. My tears come in silence. !ey tremble and again, intuitively, I alternate the sound of the tone, Like the motion of a wave. Like a really slow tremolo
disperata
VOICE
Navigo disperata disperata i sordid mari, 122
MIND
Hwe..... !is cannot be stopped. !e waves grow Into a storm. And on top of it I sail fast and lost. I have never been a sailor, But I have been in high waves. Out of control inside the strong force of a mighty sea. I cry loud But there is no chance the sea will hear my despair. Even the loudest sound will be ignored. !e fury of a stronger force has become mad And my being is again forgotten.
CHORUS of OTHER
“Excellent and divine maiden, Whose voice and great appearance Will make you loved everywhere, I say a thousand times farewell! I believe that on Neptune’s waters, You will face no danger, For if the winds and mutinous waves wanted to tease you there, your songs, your charms, your face, would soon calm the storm”123
cor mio baciar mura
MIND
If my voice can enchant the sea, I will try to calm the waves. I will ask the winds to bring my name with love and kisses back to the stonewalls of my home.
VOICE
L’aria che d’hora in hora riceverà i miei (ati, Li porterà per nome del cor mio À veder à baciar le patrie mura,124
MIND
Air. Winds and breath. I can hear them. In fact it is breath from inside me. It comes from inside and it travels out – Towards my home. Even my whispers are loud now. Stronger than the storm inside me. !e sea has no chance any longer. My tears are gone. !e sea is calm My voice brings my heart Towards anyone with ears. !e moment this happens I sense the spine. !ere is a freedom leading right through me. Every vertebra is +oating on air and Flexibility allows me to grow out of my body itself. !e words transforms to thoughts.
io solinga pianti passi
VOICE
Et io Starò solinga 125
MIND
Me Io Self Again I battle with who I am. But here in this place it doesn’t matter who I am. Myself. Self and alone. Staying with the strong awareness of my spine, 125. And I will remain alone. Creates a secure landscape for the voice to be in one place. Not loud, not week, just there. I will stay there On my own. Aware of my rooted feet and my whole growing being.
VOICE
Alternando le mosse ai pianti, ai passi 126
MIND
Here I start to move from one side to the other. In search of something. Something I cannot see since my eyes are so full of tears. Again, a mist. !e feet move anywhere, But I don’t know where.
VOICE
Insegnando pietade ai freddi sassi 127
MIND
In this state I can teach you to be vulnerable. Look at me. I am here even if I am weak. You, cold stones, look at me. It hurts, but I don’t die of it. I will live and I will feel alive. 126. shi 4ing my moves between tears and walking. 127. Teaching the cold stone to have mercy. 94 Act I Act I 95 sacrilego duolo
VOICE
Remigate, remigate, remigate Oggi mai perverse genti Allontanarmi, allontanarmi 128
MIND
Move, move, MOVE, Don’t just stay there. ACT now. Get me out of here. Take me away from this cold and unfriendly place!!! Yes, away. I want to leave. Here is no love at all. Just cold stones, ignoring any feeling. Wanting to kill… To disrupt life. To disrupt any feelings. To hurt. It hurts me right into my sacred soul.
VOICE
Dà dà dà gl’amati lidi 129
MIND
Yes, I said, far away from the shore Out at open sea. Sobbing, I am sobbing out these words. D d d da !e D comes as a punch. 128. Row, row, row today, you per-dious men. Take me away, take me away. 129. From my beloved shores. Gl – a so. movement at the back of the gum Prepraing for Aaaaammmmaaaaati lidi. I know of so many lovely sea shores. Shores where I played as a child. Shore on the other side of America. !e sound of waves hitting the rocks in the north; Or shaping the stones on a shore in the Mediterranean Sea. !e familiar sounds of boats and playing children, People calling for someone.
VOICE
Ahi, ahi, ahi sacrilego duolo, Tù tù tù m’interdici il pianto Quando lascio la Patria 130
MIND
You steal, my holy soul. I am so full of wounds. !e pain, the pain, the PAAIIIIN, It doesn’t want to go away. And you won’t let me cry. Can you not see my feelings? Can you not feel yourself? Or perhaps your feelings are too strong to face. Are you listening to me at all?
VOICE
Interdici il pianto quando lascio la Patria Ne stilar una lacrima poss’io Mentre dico ai parenti e à Roma131 130. Ah, ah, ah sacrilegious pain when I leave my home you forbid me to weep. 131. you forbid the tears when I leave my home, not even a tear may fall when I say to my family and to Rome. 96 Act I Act I 97
MIND
No, you don’t. So what is the point to try to convince you? I see you have decided. So I will cry for myself. Quando lascio la patria I need to say it slowly to understand. It seems like a foreign language. What, how, no, yes, no But yes, it is so. I will leave. And while I take farewell from my parents and family And from Rome Not one tear will fall. And I will say, farewell. A Dieu, With Gods will I go.
VOICE
Ne stilar una una lacrima poss’io Mentre dico ai parenti e à Roma À Dio.132
Words pour out of my mind, heart and soul,
Transform into sound
And I know nothing else…
Closing her eyes. Recalling her initial purpose. Smiling. She intended to explain. Explain without killing. It was the most challenging act.
Humans display deep and enduring needs for explanations and patterns. Every culture we know of turns scattered stars into constellations. Randomness transforms into diagrams of animals, gods, heroes, all with their mythologies. Some of these patterns are called 'history'.
It is difficult to speak of heretics: the most obvious reason is that almost all accounts come from the people who first mangled the heretics' bodies, then their ideas and practices. A less obvious but more pervasive difficulty is that we inherit the languages and values and an entire grammar of thought which has been conditioned by victorious orthodoxies. Whenever we speak coherently, we advance an unspoken majoritarian project. Unique, refined or rare experiences have to be made average if they are to enter the economy of general concepts and ordinary communication.
Even so, some possibilities for vocalising heresies remain open. We must think and speak in a contorted manner and risk developing deformities: but will speak of voices, whispers, and echoes in the side-lines of history which despite the best efforts of orthodoxy did not fade entirely into oblivion. We will attempt to place these spirits of deformation in conversation with some of the representatives of contemporary philosophy. In going back into a mainly hidden and partly lost history of vocal art we hope to demonstrate that while words and concepts are useful stars to steer by, the darkness between the stars is a larger and philosophically richer zone.
Anna Renzi was initially born in Rome around1620: the first of her many births, occasioned again and ever again through her vocal performances. In these she is crossing the borders between male and female, mundane, infernal and celestial, living, dead. Between philosophy and performance:
''It all comes through seed.
Tiny seeds.
Slowing becoming fruits of imagined contemplations.
I would never know in advance.
They happen.
Connecting through the movements
of the stars in the sky.
All elements contribute to the sound of angels.
Operating at the extremes of ‘strano’, Anna Renzi was not herself. Her name and the reputation give her the appearance of 'one of the first opera stars'. It seems more appropriate to think not of a star but the infinite nothingness between the stars, a field of inchoate forces or primum materium which, being so close to nothing, could become anything.
They call me my many names.
Siren.
Thalia.
Melpomene.
The Fourth Grace.
Lover.
Venus.
Soldier.
Helena.
A fool.
A monster.
A man.
A woman.
The monstrous Signora Anna Renzi Romana'.'
In early Opera ''Madness freed characters from the decorum of normal behaviour, allowing them to do whatever they pleased [...] by speaking irrationally, disconnectedly, and inappropriately, by voicing delusions—as well as by behaving unreasonably, dressing peculiarly, moving abnormally [...] Such characters had to break the accepted rules of their own language, music; they had to sing abnormally, erratically.' (Rosand, p. 346).
Opera was mad: and people wanted to see it and hear it and enter into the un-sane zone. Composer Claudio Monteverdi envisioned the central character of La Finta Pazza Licori as self-multiplying, like alchemical gold, transforming and transformative: paradoxically one and many, a unity and a plurality, every- and no- body. In figuring the singer as a metamorphic substance and a vector of more-than-human forces the exponents of early opera were engaged in politics in the widest sense: a politics of the body which challenged social and theological orthodoxies throughout Europe.
It makes me both worried and safe.
You ask from where.
From the sun I will tell.
From the monstrous spirits
Encountered in every corner of life
Karan Barad writes of 'a performance of spacetime (re)configurings' as offering 'a way of thinking with and through dis/continuity--a dis/orienting experience of the dis/jointedness of time and space, entanglements of here and there, now and then, that is, a ghostly sense of dis/continuity' (Barad, 2010: 240). What does it mean? Sometimes it is a useful tactic to defer any strong demands concerning 'what a thinker means' and instead try to discover what the thought does when it is performed. And if it can’t be performed, what kind of a thought is it?
In the 1600s the new hybrid art-form called OPERA was a high-stakes gamble against religious authority. By good fortune, the public loved it and the commercial classes saw the opportunities and invested in purpose-built opera-houses. But early opera sailed VERY close to damnation.
Music was feared by the Church and the roots of that fear ran deep. People could all-too-easily lose themselves in song. For as anyone who ever tapped their foot to a rhythm knows, music is materially contagious. Its nature is to spread across boundaries and connect seemingly unconnected bodies, infecting and delighting them with strange feelings not their own.
This fear of ''other voices speaking through the body'' is acute in Christianity. A large percentage of Jesus' miracles were exorcisms (Mark 5:1, Mat. 8:28, Luke 8:26). It was impossible to deny that demons spoke through people without denying scripture.
The sacred differs from the religious. The sacred is a restoration of intimacy which dissolves the orthodox safety-barriers. As Bataille noted, the sacred is opposed to the religion of the Logos because 'intimacy can not be expressed discursively' (ToR, p.50). A transported singer may become a monster with one soul in several bodies, or with multiple 'selves' in one body. And this is likely to spread to the audience. This is a more or less precise description of the contemporary practice of many vocal artists such as Tom Waits and Diamanda Galas. And back in 1630s, it was the stated mode of procedure for Anna Renzi.
If I try to fool you?
Why would I ever do such an evil?
I am telling the truth.
And my voice is the voice of a messenger.
Delivering holy water.
Living water.
Tears.
Laughter.
''Certainly opera could on occasion draw the audience into a kind of mystic participation, not resembling the Mass, perhaps, so much as the sacred drama enacted at the Eleusinian Mysteries. After an immersal of three or four hours in an altered state of consciousness, some might find themselves indelibly marked by the experience, while none would easily forget it.'' ( J. Godwin, find ref).
And there is no doubt that Monteverdi and his associates utilized alchemical ideas to develop modes of vocal expression which were shockingly agitating to the listeners of his day. Written accounts by the earliest listeners to Anna Renzi's performances of Monteverdi's works testify that they had been profoundly changed.
Only fools try to make anything reasonable about me.
It can’t be done.
Because No Body knows that will come.
Not even my self.
It would be only slightly monstrous to retro-fit Terence McKenna's ideas of techno-shamanism or Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism into the realm of Venetian opera. The generative roles of the feminine and the machine were certainly present, front and centre stage:
''For musical and mythological reasons, women play as important a part as men in these dramas, wielding an influence that they seldom enjoyed in society. Sexual ambivalence is rife in the multiple travesties, disguises, and in the regular casting of men (the Castrati) in female roles, and women in male ones. And above all, there was the spectacular element, which made the designer of scenery and machines often the highest-paid contributor to the enterprise. It was his illusionary skill that, like the conjuration of a magus, summoned the archetypal beings and their worlds into sensible existence'' (Gowin).
The highly cultured works of early opera are continuous with allegedly 'primitive' practices, as are the twenty-first century projects aiming at thoroughly materialistic artificial intelligence.
We are addicted to summoning alien powers and non- and more-than-human beings into existence.
The singing voice is supremely rich zone of potentials and connections. In various contexts it has been considered as a technology for the creation and/or conjuration of non- and more-than-human life. As Ficino writes, the material of harmony: ''is air, hot or warm, breathing and somehow living […] so that [song] can be said to be a kind of aerial and rational animal'' (Ficino, De Vita, chapter 21). Matter has agency, is agency, not the passive clay or chaotic water of biblical mythology awaiting instruction from above. As Barad has it:
''Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity. Nor does it merely entail resignification or other specific kinds of moves within a social geometry of antihumanism. Agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has.'' (Barad, 2003).
The voice in song differs also from the Logos of philosophy and theology in its fluidity, imminence, plurality, and irreducible sensuality. It is ironic that the often wordless, affect-rich ornaments and ululations of the operatic voice became known to musicologists as ''pure voice''. Pure voice is anything but pure. It teems with hybrid forces, bastard energies, glitches, seeds and viruses. Given the right conditions these grow and mutate without the intervention of the singer's consciousness: pure voice offers portals to worlds outside the human ego as it diffracts into Nothingness (Laasonen Belgrano, 2020). Pure voice delivers on the promise of restoring the intimacy of the sacred. The bursting lament overspills and calls forth tears, sighs provoke passion, words cross the border of meaning into laughter.
The emergence of 'the operatic voice' in Renaissance Italy involved a complex set of cybernetic loops between somatic practices, philosophy, theology (both Catholic and heretical), politics, mass psychology, and the supposedly 'internal' realms of sensations and passions. And it is clear that the machinery and the monstrosity of this emergence was not under central control. It was diffracting, mutating, performing in ways un-forseeable to its creators - not all of whom were human, anyhow.
The madness, grief and passions Renzi embodied involve deep paradox. One wonders if she pursued anti-method as a method. Her voice leads her through the questions: she experiences answers which are not always explained, she shares the experiences anyway. One might think of trance mediums, shamanic seers, the priestess of Delphi, the Loa of Voudoun. If these pronouncements lead to new insights it is never in a straightforward manner. The sense they bring moves as if through a maze, or as light through a window onto tangentially related realities. And yet they do guide us, through passions which are powerful but never inhuman – through the passions, the griefs. The lament, together with the act of insanity in the first operas of the 17th century was lifted to the skies by their audiences. In their indirect contact with the grieving and insane singer on the opera stage, the unthinkable and the unrealistic became clear, intrusive, and real.
Renzi met the emotions which characterized her perceptions of death - cold, emptiness, blazing fire, ocean of tears, irony, transgression. She jumped like lightning between realities, physical, mental, vocal. She was expected to surprise her audience, even scare it, down to the innermost roots of the heart. She made her audience feel at home in the experience of being utterly lost. Beyond control, beyond reason, breaking all rules and borders Anna Renzi came to stand as a symbol of impossibility, of a doubled reality, of paradox. We search for her voice, which is not hers, and it tells us everything is possible. And impossible.
END