Five Years of Crisis (2006 - 2010)

Then and Now

The human voice has been a topic of investigation for many years. After all these years of investigation, the voice is still an object of mystery. Voice is still a very neglected aspect of theatre not only as a skill base, but as a creative aesthetic.  Physical exploration and experimentation is widely accepted, however, vocal exploration is widely neglected. There are several possible reasons for this. The first is the fact that the voice (and subsequent textual communication) obtains heavy semantic qualities, and any obscuring and distortion of these semantics relies the audience to work harder to decipher the meanings behind the vocal experimentation. Sometimes, audiences and performers tend to rely on intellectual stimulation. This is why audiences often say ‘I wonder what that meant’, or ‘I couldn’t understand what was going on’, or even ‘I didn’t get that’. These are all intellectual responses involving the ego, hence the word ‘I’. In physical theatre, only bodies are expressing feeling, narrative etc. and audiences really do not have to work hard. Once the voice comes into it, they need to activate their ears as well as their eyes. The other second reason for the suppression of vocal exploration is the fact that the voice is connected to our inner psyche. In fact, the word ‘persona’, broken up (per-sona), loosely means ‘of sound’. So, this could mean that our true personalities are expressed through sound. I was interested in this idea of bringing sound to the forefront – but not conventional vocal sound. What would be more fascinating is if performers would treat the voice as an extension of their bodies, part of their physical make-up, and not something separate, or an ‘add on’. 

It all commenced in 2006 when I began to investigate the affects of Butoh dance on the voice and the physical aspects of Butoh and the resultant vocal sound. I started to connect the body and voice in a way that was fairly unconventional, sometimes going against the natural synergy of movement and voice. It began with sound exploration – preverbal expressions of internal images that were sometimes very abstract. There were no boundaries, only freedom to express images drawn from the inner psyche of the performers. There were moments of magic, but there were also moments of pure self-indulgence that veered towards something that resembled therapy or free expressionism. It needed parameters and at least a framework for the actors to freely depict these images within a structured context. Sometimes the performers were encouraged to vocalise after the body had been placed under a certain amount of physical exhaustion, this way, the performers did not have time to think about how they would say the words, or what kind of sound they would express, rather, they would only vocalise what they were feeling at that particular moment. This was my first investigative introduction to what I call vocalisation from a state of ‘Physical Crisis’. 

Two other forms of Crisis was investigated, that being ‘Conceptual Crisis’ and ‘Vocal Crisis’. The notion of revolt against the convention forms of physical and vocal treatment and its relationship to abstract imagery contribute to the overall ‘Conceptual Crisis’. Conventional Western voice practices may be far from the concept of crisis as they focus on the freeing and expression of the natural voice, and the overall relaxation of the body in which the voice is housed. This overall notion is extremely important as relaxation is the key to successful performances, but, I believe that theatre should represent a reality that is far beyond the safe, and sometimes superficial sanctuary that is the conventional, contemporary theatre. The voice in this investigation expressed the inner world of the performer as a result of a physical crisis they encountered through expressing abstract imagery from an arcane energy source, resulting in an extra-daily performance including non-verbal theatre. 

The physical aspects of the method reminded me of the work I had experienced previously such as Bioenergetics, Fitzmaurice voicework and Tadashi Suzuki’s physically rigorous training. For me, as a voice person, I wanted to further explore the vocal affects in terms of actor training. I strongly believe that performance training should be rigorous, not to the point of pushing performers to the absolute extremities of their humanly possible capabilities, but to their own, personal capacity. After all, each person is individual and every performer is on a different physical level. Since then, the body has played an important role in training and performance.  All performances form White Dark (2007) to Iam Nocte (2010), incorporated intense physical applications in training that became evident in the performances. 

This production is, in essence, the pinacle of five years of research and study. It is not the final production; to us, it really is the beginning. There are now plans to codify the training aesthetic and use Iam Nocte as a springboard for further investigations. I can now look at the production and say that we have achieved our interpretation of Conceptual, Vocal and Physical Crisis.