BETWEEN LIMINALITY AND TRANSGRESSION: EXPERIMENTAL VOICE IN AVANT-GARDE PERFORMANCE _________________________________________________________________ A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre and Film Studies in the University of Canterbury by Emma Johnston ______________________ University of Canterbury 2014 ii Abstract This thesis explores the notion of ‘experimental voice’ in avant-garde performance, in the way it transgresses conventional forms of vocal expression as a means of both extending and enhancing the expressive capabilities of the voice, and reframing the social and political contexts in which these voices are heard. I examine these avant-garde voices in relation to three different liminal contexts in which the voice plays a central role: in ritual vocal expressions, such as Greek lament and Māori karanga, where the voice forms a bridge between the living and the dead; in electroacoustic music and film, where the voice is dissociated from its source body and can be heard to resound somewhere between human and machine; and from a psychoanalytic perspective, where the voice may bring to consciousness the repressed fears and desires of the unconscious. The liminal phase of ritual performance is a time of inherent possibility, where the usual social structures are inverted or subverted, but the liminal is ultimately temporary and conservative. Victor Turner suggests the concept of the ‘liminoid’ as a more transgressive alternative to the liminal, allowing for permanent and lasting social change. It may be in the liminoid realm of avant-garde performance that voices can be reimagined inside the frame of performance, as a means of exploring new forms of expression in life. This thesis comes out of my own experience as a performer and is informed both by theoretical discourse and practical experimentation in the theatre. Exploring the voice as a liminal, transgressive force requires analysis from an experiential perspective. iii Acknowledgements Thank you to everyone in the Theatre and Film Studies department of the University of Canterbury. The legacy will live on! Thank you to all my collaborators and friends in Free Theatre Christchurch. I look forward to many more experiments with you. Very special thanks to Peter Falkenberg, who has encouraged me to find my own voice since first jolting me into it in Footprints/Tapuwae. Thank you to Sharon Mazer for years of encouragement and advice. Thank you to Greta Bond for being an incredibly supportive friend, colleague and proof-reader. Thank you to Marian McCurdy for sharing these experiences. Thank you to Stuart McKay for very helpful suggestions, and for singing with me. Many thanks to Naomi Campion, Julia Milsom, Gijs Ochsendorf, Ryan Reynolds, Liz Boldt, Mark Hamilton, Coralie Winn, Simon Troon, and Nick Frost. Thank you to Michael Kime for collaborating so generously with me on the music for Hereafter, and to Chris Reddington for early experimentation and encouragement. Thank you to my friends and family for being so supportive over all these years. Special thanks to Mum, Dad, Sarah, Justin, Henry, Eva, Jilly, Nigel, and Delilah. Tremendous thanks to George Parker for love, support and encouragement, and for many wondrous collaborations together in the theatre. Thank you. iv Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: Between the Living and the Dead .............................................................................. 25 Robert Johnson at the crossroads: Passing over the threshold between the Here and the Hereafter…………………………. 27 Diamanda Galás at the crossroads: Conjuring up a new voice between blues, jazz, opera and Maniot lament……………….. 34 “Towards the dead and towards the living”: The liminal female voice in Greek and Māori ritual……………………………………... 38 The voice of the plague: The embodiment of pain and transgression………………………………………………. 44 ‘Screaming the dead’: Galás, Artaud and Maniot Lament……………………………………………………….. 48 “Death infecting life”: Voicing the abject………………………………………………………………………… 52 The ritual voice of transgression: Between Gnosticism, Shamanism and the Black Mass…………………………………... 56 Between tradition and blasphemy: Grotowski and Staniewski in search of the voice………………………………………… 62 Channelling the primordial voice: John Tavener and Björk’s Prayer of the Heart…………………………………………… 66 Chapter Two: Between Human and Machine .................................................................................. 71 “Swallowed up in the mechanistic process”: The pre-electronic mechanized voice……………………………………………………….. 74 “The Tenth Oscillator”: Visage and the theatre of voices…………………………………………………………….. 77 Behind the curtain: The uncanniness of the acousmatic voice…………………………………………………... 82 “Pleasure in the confusion of boundaries”: Constructing the cyborg voice…………………………………………………………….... 93 v Chapter Three: Between Consciousness and the Unconscious .......................................................... 102 The maternal voice: Between ‘umbilical web’ and ‘sonorous envelope’……………………………………….. 105 The Primal Scream: Between expression and hysteria………………………………………………………….. 113 The voice in extremis: Between anima and animus……………………………………………………………….. 119 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 125 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 133 Introduction i Lying on my back, with my legs dangling over the side of a raised semi-circular catwalk, ignoring the audience standing and sitting underneath, I had an epiphany that I didn’t completely understand at the time. I was too busy trying to sing. I was singing something both familiar and unfamiliar, rehearsed and improvised. The epiphany was the beginning of a questioning of everything I had come to know about how to sing and why to sing and what it meant to ‘sing.’ This epiphanic moment was part of a bicultural opera called Footprints/Tapuwae (2001), a Free Theatre Christchurch production that juxtaposed Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen with Māori myth and music. The catwalk I was lying on formed a semi- circular ring that enveloped half of the width of the theatre. The ring was constructed out of a progression of materials that could be seen to form a bridge, a continuum, from ‘nature’ to ‘industry.’ At one end, it was constructed of branches, which then progressed through coarse wood into polished wood, and finally into steel rods that came together to form a grid platform. At the time of my epiphany, I was lying in the middle of this platform, on the polished wood, almost halfway between the extremes of branches and steel, but slightly closer to the side of ‘nature.’ This was the setting for the scene about halfway through the performance, at a pivotal moment when the mood shifted from triumph and harmonised group singing into individual resignation, defeat and death. The scene was comprised of three actors, singing from the Wagnerian leitmotif of ‘love,’ and a pianist who weaved in out of these musical fragments, both initiating and responding to the singing of the actors. Der Ring des Nibelungen is structured around a comprehensive system of leitmotifs, short musical phrases of 2 reminiscence that Wagner layered and expanded on throughout the tetralogy. These motifs are predominantly written for the orchestra and often signal the subconscious thoughts of the characters, allowing for a psychological interpretation of their feelings and motivations. In Footprints/Tapuwae, we sang and improvised from certain Wagnerian leitmotifs, allowing us to explore and create our own subtextual expression. The pivotal scene began on the metallic side of the ring, with a focused, conventional soprano voice delivering an orthodox rendition of the ‘love’ leitmotif. At the other end of the ring, tangled in branches, an untrained singer delivered his rendition. By this stage, the musical motif was barely recognisable. The text was distinguishable as coming from the same source, but the music was deconstructed and had lost its melody. I performed the bridge between these two voices, singing after the conventional soprano and before the deconstructed, fragmented sounds of the baritone. From the wooden, central section of the ring, I began by singing the motif through, similarly to the soprano before me, and then slowly began to deconstruct it, coming in and out of the melody and creating my own melodies, in relation to the improvisations of the pianist. It was sweeping, Romantic, Wagnerian music, where the only possible end to its decadence could be through destruction or deconstruction, like the climactic raising of Valhalla in the Nibelungen myth. Lying on my back, with my legs dangling over the side of the raised, catwalk-like ring, I began to discover what it could actually mean to use my voice. In hindsight, the epiphany came during one particular performance when I opened my mouth, intending to sing the word “caught,” but nothing came out. I felt a sudden terror, imagining that I had completely lost my voice. In that moment of panicked silence, everything I had learned about singing, all the classical technique and mechanics of vocal production, was irrelevant. I was not in control of my voice and there was nothing I could consciously do to make my voice do 3 what I intended it to do.
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