Breaking Voices
a day of performances and presentations
ENTRANCE FREE – ALL WELCOME
to reserve a place please rsvp to:
breakingvoices@btinternet.com
Symposium organisers: Isobel Bowditch and Lawrence Sullivan
PROGRAMME
10.00 Introduction
10.15 Angie Brew with Angela Hodgson-Teal – Overhearing Underwater
10.30 Peter Matthews – Bursting into Song: Transcendence and the Film Musical
11.00 Mikhail Karikis – Tears in Heaven and the Breaking Voice
11.30 Tea Break
11.50 Jonathan Rée – The Written Word
12.30 Lunch
13.30 Sharon Gal – Open Wide
13.45 Aileen Campbell – Destination Home
14.15 Steve Connor – Sanglot: The Life and Times of the Sob
15.00 Open discussion
On BREAKING VOICES….
This symposium takes as its starting point the notion of the break in and the breaking of the voice. What is broken or opened up? What limits are exposed, exceeded, reached? What is destroyed in the breaking and what is introduced? What possibilities for transition or transgression are presented in that opening?
The volatile state of the ‘breaking voice’ marks a short-lived transition. During adolescence, the lowering of the vocal chords affects everyone, even if a wavering pitch is more noticeable in boys. The voice then settles into a state of adulthood, authority and accountability.
Breaking voice is also a betrayal or eruption in moments of emotional or physical stress. The voice may falter, change tone, run away with itself or cease. At such times, it is possible to be deprived of language altogether and instead to find voice in a scream, sigh, laugh, or moan.
Here, the breaking of the voice is unbidden. Exceeding its usual limits, the voice breaks out of or through itself, but is never entirely broken. Instead it reverts back to its ‘norm’ or to stability.
Cultural or individual habits determine such vocal ‘norms’ – range, tone , vocabulary, discourse, mode, accent – which may conceal from us the fact that voice is always intermediary, in flux, trying to find itself, straining to maintain itself close to a score that has already been decided for it.
According to Mladen Dolar, there is a ‘philosophical suspicion’ of the voice; the voice escapes logistical or linguistic interpretation. Phonology, which reduces the study of voice to substance, he says, ‘stabs the voice with its signifying dagger’. The voice, in Dolar’s sense, is intimately aligned to thinking, not as a carrier of meaning but as an ‘opening onto meaning’ and as ‘the lever of thought’.
When the voice breaks, such an opening occurs. Breaking is a kind of destruction but not devastation; it allows for the inconsistent and the surprising to arise. Perhaps unsettling, perhaps vertiginous, this opening is like the image of Socrates placing himself in the path of ‘the wind of thought’, an invisible force which ‘unfreezes’ thinking from habitual language.
We can think too of Hermes, delivering messages from Olympus to the mortal world (herma meaning boundary stone or crossing point and the root of the modern hermeneutics). Escorting the dead to the afterlife in his traveler’s robes, he represented the spirit of ‘crossing-over’, transition or transgression, aided by his exceptional gift in oration and interpretation.
Some influences we are thinking of include the pioneering work of Alfred Wolfsohn in the field of vocal expression and of auto-destructive notions of creativity beyond catastrophe (specifically framed here in relation to voice) as propounded by artist/theorist Gustav Metzger.
INFO ON PARTICIPANTS
Angie Brew : is Director of the TUC, the Tooting Underwater Choir, and is a PhD student at Camberwell College. She is studying drawing and cognition, and the role of language in learning to draw. Her research interests include pre-linguistic communication and verbal overshadowing. She is currently working with the classical composer Alexander Campkin on a piece for a massed choir of two hundred underwater singers, accompanied by pencils and balloons.
Aileen Campbell is a visual artist who makes voiceworks. Through her work she explores her intimate understanding of the structure of music gained during her time as a young chorister and from voice tuition to extend her vocal technique. Her performance and video pieces construct situations which question historical perceptions and personal experiences of the voice
Angela Hodgson-Teal, is exploring in her PhD research how to balance her art production with her medical practice, so that they contain one another. Her medical practice involves broken voices in phone conversations about disease and mortality, both with other practioners and patients.
Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, London and Academic Director of the London Consortium Graduate Programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies. His most recent books are Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, The Book of Skin and Fly. His forthcoming book is Next to Nothing, an historical poetics of the air. Lectures, talks, broadcasts and works in progress can be found on his website at www.stevenconnor.com
Sharon Gal is a cross-disciplinary artist, performer and musician and has been active on the London improvised music circuit for many years. She produces and presents a weekly radio show, Diggers, with artist/writer Savage Pencil, on Tuesdays at 5pm on Resonance 104.4 FM.
Mikhail Karikis is a Greek-born artist based in London. With a background in architecture, fine art and music, his work spans from composition and performance to gallery-based work. His recent work focuses on the role of the voice in addressing notions of difference and dis-articulation. Projects include his critically acclaimed album Orphica on Sub Rosa records, international releases with Bjork and Dj Spooky, collaborations with artist Sonia Boyce, Alamire and Cantamus choirs, commissions for Prada, Rozalb de Mura and others. Karikis’s work has featured at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, the BFI, Milton Keynes Gallery and elsewhere.
Peter Matthews is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He is a regular contributor to Sight and Sound, and has written on cinema and the moving image for numerous other publications, including Screen, Vertigo, The Observer and The Criterion Collection. He is currently researching cinephilia, movie spectatorship and the experience of ‘stepping into the zone’
Jonathan Rée is a writer, philosopher and historian. His journalism appears in the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Independent, Prospect, The Nation, Evening Standard and elsewhere. His books include Philosophical Tales, Proletarian Philosophers, and I See a Voice. He also has wide experience as a broadcaster
Lawrence Sullivan is a PhD student at Chelsea College of Art. His primary interest is in the notion of ‘rhythm’, specifically how rhythm is read in relation to the work of Emmanuel Levinas. His practice embraces the realisation of such concern both in terms of work undertaken with musicians and through processes of conversation (to which he extends the definition of rhythm), as well as in the formulation of text which itself attempts enactment of a recurrence (in Levinasean terms) of the condition of ‘absolute novelty’.
TECHNICAL /DOCUMENTARY TEAM:
Cressida Kocienski and Caroline Ward are a UK-based independent media collective. They film and edit events, art-related content and education resources, distributed on many different platforms including video podcasts, web-based streaming, DVD, and public display. They will be shooting the forthcoming Supersonic Festival in Birmingham, and have just completed the production of artists’ interviews filmed during the Berlin Biennale.
Leon Barker is a PhD research student at Camberwell College of Art. His research is entitled: Exploring the Pervasive Interface: Computer Vision and Gestural Interaction.
Breaking Voices is co-ordinated by Isobel Bowditch and Lawrence Sullivan (both Chelsea College of Art & Design)
THANKS
We would like to express our sincere thanks to:
Kari Allen and Phil Petrides at London College of Fashion for the use the Rootstein Hopkins space
Beatrice Schulz, Cinzia Cremy, Mette Gravlev Poulsen, Michael Curran, Rory Pilgrim and Sarah Wishart for their input.
The idea for this symposium grew out of an informal discussion /reading group on the ethics of speech. The discussions in those meetings prompted Isobel and Lawrence to work on this symposium as part of Thinking Through Practice series. So thanks to those who contributed there: Beatrice Schulz, Bernice Donszelmann, Andrew Chesher, Cinzia Cremy, Damian Taylor, Giles Brokensha, Lisa Pember, Michaela Ross, Peter Matthews, Sarah Wishart, Trevor Giles and Vidyajyoti
Read the accompanying discussion at Critical Practice
VENUE: East Space theatre, Rootstein Hopkins Space, London College of Fashion, 20 John Princes Street W1G OBJ