E.4 The Voice
Fri Oct 28 / 9:00 – 10:30 / Music Room, rm 2006, Hart House
chairs /
- Stefan Jovanovic, Concordia University
- Mikaela Bobiy, Dawson College
What exactly is a voice? This session invites submissions from scholars and practitioners exploring the vocative dimension and its role in the arts from all cultures and time periods. Critical writing on the voice comprises a marginal, yet highly motivated topic in the fine arts, comparative literature and philosophy. We hope to encourage a fruitful dialogue on the voice drawing upon a range of other disciplines and practices in the visual and performing arts including music, cinema, theatre, spoken-word performance, digital games and popular culture. Some issues to be engaged with may include (but are by no means limited to): the voice and aesthetic perception; the voice and critical theories of subjectivity (including sexual/gender, racial and/or ethnic identity); the voice in narration and oral testimonies; the ‘acousmatics’ of the voice in cinematic diegesis and in film/video installation, and the function of VoIP communication in today’s networked culture.
keywords: voice, speech, interdisciplinarity, performance, narration
E.4.1 People Talking: Conversation and Relation in Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives
- Thea Ballard, Duke University
The voice has been productively theorized as inherently relational, as has sound itself: see the work of Adriana Cavarero, Nina Sun Eidsheim, and Brandon LaBelle. But in order to move towards a generative account of the vocal- or sonic-relational aesthetics of contemporary art, we must take into account the Bourriadian baggage that accompanies the term “relational,” and consider how the specificity of vocality, or conversational aesthetics, within recent art practices may change its terms—especially in the case of voices that are recorded, amplified, or otherwise technologically mediated. How do themes of relational ambivalence or inconvenience change the way we hear conversation in an aesthetic context?
This paper moves towards answering this question by considering the (mediated) voice in relation within American composer Robert Ashley’s opera-for-television Perfect Lives (1983). A seven-episode audiovisual odyssey set in the American Midwest, with a libretto is delivered in Ashley’s signature speech-as-song vocal style, Perfect Lives is a paradigmatic effort from within the post-60s collaborative, multimedia American experimental art scene, entangled within experimental arts institutions and mass media alike. I briefly consider relationality in Perfect Lives from several angles, focusing on the episode “The Bar”: through its experimentally multivocal audiovisual performance, and through its “ritual,” or participatory, televisuality as theorized by Ashley. Conversation is here variously an egalitarian mode of performance and a mediatized—and frequently absurd—philosophical process. By hearing it both ways, can we also begin to hear (and see, and otherwise sense) a minor vocal relational aesthetic built around the challenges of conversation?
keywords: Robert Ashley, relational aesthetics
Thea Ballard is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University, where her research focuses on sound, song, and experimentalism in contemporary art. Her dissertation examines conversational voice through the figure of song in experimental performance, installation, and video art from 1983 to the present. Using Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives as a paradigmatic case study, the dissertation considers Wynne Greenwood’s Tracy + the Plastics, Moyra Davey’s essay films, and the collaborative work of Wu Tsang and Fred Moten. Ballard’s art and music criticism has appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, Momus, Pitchfork, Frieze, Bellona Mag, the Fader, ArtReview, Dis, and the Nation. She has held positions as Editor at the New Museum, and Senior Editor at Modern Painters.
E.4.2 Don’t Let the Fat Lady Sing! Body Politics in Opera
- Zuly Inirio, University of Pittsburgh, Afro-Latinx Song/Opera Project
- Tracy Cox, Performing Arts Consultant
Opera is memorialized in popular culture by a singular image: a fat lady in a horned helmet using her voice in ways most people never could. In Don’t Let the Fat Lady Sing! Body Politics in Opera, we will examine modern opera ecology’s reinforcement of broader society’s systemically oppressive social structures and norms and its effect on singers. Conventional beauty standards, including the pursuit of thinness, have anti-Black origins. We aim to explore how the demand for these aesthetic norms in the industry impacts singers and their instruments, from the misunderstandings of the athleticism and capabilities of fat singers to the punishing of divergence from patriarchal gender norms, and the strict enforcement of Western aesthetic ideals informed by misogynoir. The human voice cannot be divorced from the body which it inhabits, and we will explore the ways in which these structures and norms silence the voices in bodies that do not fit the dominant aesthetic agenda.
keywords: fatphobia, opera, anti-blackness, fat politics, beauty standards
Dr. Zuly Inirio is Associate Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies Research at the University of Pittsburgh. She is an Afro-Dominican soprano with a Doctorate of Musical Arts from Louisiana State University. She has appeared as a soloist throughout the US and Europe and actively pursues bringing awareness to Afro-Latinidad in classical music with her Afro-Latinx Song and Opera Project. She also uses her artistry and activism to work toward representation and equity for BIPOC communities. Dr. Inirio was the soprano soloist in Verdi's Requiem in Munich, Germany under the baton of Massimiliano Murrali and has sung the role of the High Priestess and covered the title role in Verdi’s Aida in Sicily, Italy. She was most recently featured as a recitalist in Austin Opera’s Concerts at the Consulate and was the first Afro-Latina to sing the role of Isabelle Ebehardt in Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar.
Tracy Cox was hailed by LA Weekly as a “force of nature”, soprano and Fat Politics activist Tracy Cox is a performer and artist whose talent has been recognized by those in the highest echelons of the industry, garnering her a Sullivan Foundation Award, the Birgit Nilsson Prize at Operalia and the Kirsten Flagstad Award from the George London Foundation. She has been interviewed by Opera News and the New York Times on fat politics, and currently has over 20,000 followers on Instagram where she regularly unpacks fat performance, fashion, and politics. Tracy is an in-demand consultant for singers and opera companies alike, and has presented workshops for the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart, Long Beach Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, NAAFA, & Opera NexGen. Tracy holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master’s in Music from UCLA, and completed fellowships with LA Opera’s Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program, Ravinia-Steans, Wolf Trap Opera, and Music Academy of the West.
E.4.3 Which Voices in Experimental, Non-narrative VR Creation?
Olivia McGilchrist, Concordia University
My current research-creation project entitled: Virtual ISLANDS ties the relationship between Caribbean futures—as an alternative to Western techno-futurism (Lewis, 2014) and the possibility of submersion as a postcolonial stance within VR-making practice. Inspired by the geography of Caribbean insularity and the influence of this geography on Caribbean identities, my project is informed by the violent histories of transatlantic slavery, which I read through the framework of British scholar Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic (1993) in dialogue with the notion of tidalectics developed by Barbadian scholar Kamau Brathwaite (1999). To counter the Western influence of the Hegelian dialectic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, Brathwaite proposes a tidal poetics, or tidalectics, where the constant ebb and flow of the tides around Caribbean islands are constitutive to the philosophical framework around Caribbean identities.
I will explore how the notion of a voice in VR creation is generative in relation to the theoretical questions which prompted the creation of Virtual ISLANDS:
- Can an encounter with a virtual body which comes in and out of sight in VR address how the self and the other are represented in virtual space?
- Can VR as an experiential, artistic project versus narrative-led VR, suggest a different approach to the techno-solutionist assumptions at work, and what happens when VR is evoked as an empathy machine to address issues of identity, embodiment, gender, and race?
keywords: virtual reality, empathy, volumetric videon
Olivia Mc Gilchrist (she/her) is a white French-Jamaican multimedia artist, feminist and doctoral candidate exploring how colonial legacies extend their reach to Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Her work. Building on her experience as a white Euro-Caribbean and research in the portrayal of her hybrid identity within contemporary Jamaican culture, Olivia explores how this can be represented in VR. Working with Professors MJ Thompson, Lynn Hughes and Alice Ming Wai Jim at Concordia University, her Individualized PhD thesis project is entitled Virtual ISLANDs, postcolonial hybrid identities in Virtual Reality.
