One Voice / One Body

Description

An exercise for two people. One produces vocal sounds and words (and remains primarily physically inactive*), the other embodies physical actions (and remains primarily silent*). They both attempt to maintain energetic responsiveness to the other, becoming neither a passive follower nor an an active leader.

*There are exceptions to these guidelines when the vocalizer’s actions or the mover’s sounds support the one voice/one body goal.

Prior History

This was an exercise I had been exploring for a few years as a tool to sharpen physical and verbal listening skills and to encourage a playful translation of meaning across sound and action. In this exercise the performers strive to find a united mindset. The desire to identify and combine verbal, vocal and physical meaning is embedded in the practice. In a way, the questions embedded in this exercise are the birthplace of this Body of Text research project.

Throughout the research period, the Body of Text collaboration offered additional shape and value to the initial exploration:

• Jean-Rene uses several parallel versions of this score in his teaching. In some of these the leadership goes in one direction only (e.g. the person generating sound leads the other person’s body into action) and in others there is more shared ownership. Detailed verbal language was never encouraged or expected in the work we were doing with Jean-Rene. The focus was on the production of sound as it is connected to the body and emotion, using that impulse to produce sound as a grounding element of presence.  (click HERE to go to vocal practice)
• After seeing us work with this exercise, Karinne devised an approach to language generation at a completely different angle from Jean-Rene. She zeroed in on the act of seeing and naming as an exercise of physical presence in an attempt to help us find the facility to think of language as environmental and responsive, and not only as expressive. “Seeing and naming” became shorthand for a different kind of warmup exercise that joined language and presence in a room as a kind of base layer, instead of using language as a semiotic layer that was separate from embodied experience. (click HERE to go to writing for performance training]
• The work with Jean-Rene and Karinne led to two very different tuning scores that we began to use alternately as a way to warm up to the exercise (which at this point was transitioning into a performance score in our minds). I thought of these two different warmups as separate pathways to get to the same house. The topography of each excursion provided very different perspectives and ways of knowing upon arrival in that “house.”

Value Background

This exercise points to an ongoing conversation we were having about blurring the distinctions between talking, moving and vocalizing. At times our interest was in blurring these distinctions in order to access a fluidity of meaning across the modalities. At other times we were more interested in preserving their unique qualities and juxtaposing their meanings. In this exercise the goal is to find shared meaning but also to allow any dissonance between vocal meaning and textual meaning to be present. Over time our work on this exercise became very detailed, and we began to treat it as a performed score.

Intersection of Philosophies

The singular perspectives these lead artists bring to the project is essential.

After watching Jean-Rene explore an exercise with the group, Karinne suggested we think: How can we avoid categorizing “voice as truth” and “language as meaning,” so avoiding the implicit idea that there is a bodily or sonic truth more fundamental, and less available to social influence, than language. This was an interesting statement in light of the work we have been doing with Jean-Rene, which finds great traction with that way of thinking.

For Jean-Rene, voice, especially vocal resonance focused on and erupting from the core of the body, is ancient and connects to the source (of the emotion, and of life). In many exercises, work in the torso reflects this raw source of the feelings, the arms relate to sentences, and the fingers relate to the details of language and meaning. Embracing this helps us release the shackles on our vocal production and inspires us to be full, un-tethered and bold in our work with voice and body.

From this place of access and openness I am interested in making work that is also sculpted and detailed.  Jean-Rene beautifully reminds us that with the primal voice we are vibrating with all of our body (as opposed to the mask-like speaker of the social voice) and that we are not learning to cry or to reach someone if we are trying to be too precise.

Karinne beautifully proclaims that with practice we can learn to see language as a poetic landscape that indeed can reach people and allow us to cry and “know” with depth. It is lack of practice and lack of comfort that keeps our mind and body separate when we deal with language in performance. She suggests that body=truth is just another variation on the mind/body schism, and reminds that the sense of words is tied to their sound, and that all forms of life are engaged in modeling and signaling as they navigate their environments.

The conversation between Jean-Rene and Karinne at this meeting highlighted the goals and interrogation at the heart of this project.

Jennifer Kidwell spoke of her own skills in term of “lily pads”: movement, vocal work, and verbal language each existing on separate pads that she has to hop across in order to switch from one skill set to the other. For her, words feel more concrete than the other two lily pads, making it difficult to blur the edges.

Much of the work we are doing in this project encourages the dancers to massage the connection between these three modes so that they are not so separate, that one could seamlessly yield to another, or be practiced alongside each other. The project often asks them to register information in many ways simultaneously: through kinesthetic touch, visual understanding, vocal resonance, vocal sound, verbal meaning, physical and emotional empathy. We are working to identify a performance practice that allows us to register and structure information in multiple ways.