Voice Transgression
Voice Transgression
Voice Transgression
_________________________________________________________________
A thesis
of
in the
University of Canterbury
by
Emma Johnston
______________________
University of Canterbury
2014
ii
Abstract
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.
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Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1
Chapter One:
Between the Living and the Dead .............................................................................. 25
Chapter Two:
Between Human and Machine .................................................................................. 71
Chapter Three:
Between Consciousness and the Unconscious .......................................................... 102
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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
didnt 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
(2001), a Free Theatre Christchurch production that juxtaposed Richard Wagners Der Ring
des Nibelungen with Mori 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
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
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
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
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what I intended it to do. The silence only lasted a few seconds. Somehow I found a voice or
the voice found me and I was able to continue my song without any further problems.
Although it only lasted a brief moment, the experience was haunting and affecting.
Something had happened that I could not explain, and I wanted to explore this further. In
order for my voice to resume, I had had to momentarily suspend what I regarded as the
proper way of singing, and allow a different voice, a new voice, to come through. This voice
was driven by both conscious and unconscious desires. It was produced from somewhere
between my head and my body. Its sound was between classical singing and something
unbounded by technique and rules. It came out of a performance where I was trying to break
down music and melody and explore the potential of different forms, but it went beyond my
conscious intentions and pointed the way to something far more radical, exciting and
dangerous. The epiphany was a realisation that everything I thought I had known about the
This thesis emerges from that epiphany, which provoked in me a desire to experiment
with voice, challenging the boundaries of my own classical training, and taking inspiration
from theorists and practitioners in theatre, music, film, and performance art. The notion of
American composers and artists, such as John Cage, Man Ray, and William Burroughs
(Nicholls 220-1), who sought to establish new identities, distinct from their European
counterparts, through works that redefined the boundaries of artistic and musical form;
simultaneously breaking away from conventions and returning to the soil (Cope 1989:
184). This thesis investigates the possibilities of seeking new identities through the voice that
experiments in and around the margins of tradition and convention, but is not explicitly
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concerned with the so-called experimental tradition1. The experimental voice of this thesis
The avant-garde was first coined in the nineteenth century, and was initially used to
identify the political left and its anarchist fringe, but by the 1880s, it became almost
exclusively related to the cultural vanguard (Mann 47). The avant-garde borrowed its name
from military terminology that connoted an elite and expendable shock troop that attacks
with such intensity that it often destroys itself on the enemys lances, serving in death as a
bridge for the army that follows it (Mann 45). These fundamental notions of self-sacrifice
and anarchist politics are arguably what separates the avant-garde from other new or
The European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art
in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style), but art as
an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men [] the avant-gardistes
demand that art become practical once again. (49)
The political agenda of the avant-garde seeks out a new vitality, but definitions of the avant-
garde are highly contentious. Theodor Adorno perceived the avant-garde as the only
possible authentic expression of the contemporary state of the world, and the necessary
(Brger 84, 86). Theorists, such as Brger, argue that the avant-garde failed in its political
aims, and that the avant-garde is now dead, whereas Mann regards the death of the avant-
garde as proof of its historical force, leading to a real disruption, a real disorder, the death of
1
A detailed analysis of the American experimental tradition is outside the scope of this thesis, but I intend to
research this more fully in post-doctoral work.
5
and the new; between revolution and reaction; between conception and death (45). Mann
proposes that this ambiguity is an essential feature of the proper functioning of the avant-
garde, whereby it may articulate a productive conflict which it has been crucial not to settle
(45). From this ambiguous, undefined position, possibilities of something radically new
arise.
that was so striking. The performance was a meeting between Maori and Germanic music and
mythology. The performance space was ambiguous in that there was no bifurcation between
performance and audience space. The set was a semi-circular catwalk that bridged the steel
rods of industry to the bundled branches of nature. The voice was central to this passage,
particularly in the scene where I had my epiphany. My singing was at the turning-point of
that scene, which was at the turning-point of the entire performance; my singing was
somewhere between rehearsed and improvised, and between classical and something other.
These moments of suspension were always passing through on their way to somewhere else
from harmony to disharmony, and from contained to uncontained but for a moment,
everything was suspended in something that was in-between and inconclusive. The way we
experimented with voice in this production seemed to have an intrinsic connection to the
liminal.
The term liminal was coined by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep to describe the
intervening phase of transition contained within a traditional rite of passage. The term was
later expanded to a wider social platform by Victor Turner, in From Ritual to Theatre (1982).
Derived from the Latin threshold, the limen is the ambiguous, marginal stage of a ritual
where the subjects are governed neither by their previous or subsequent social statuses, but
exist in a kind of social limbo (Turner 24). In Footprints/Tapuwae, the mythological setting
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created this sense of limbo, outside society and outside the usual conventions of mainstream
theatre. According to Wagner: the incomparable thing about the mythos is that it is true for
all time, and its content, how close soever its compression, is inexhaustible throughout the
for his music dramas, but also because it provided him with a liminal space, outside of, but
implicit in, the society from which they were performed. Within this liminal form, Wagner
was able to explore new music and new voices, seeking a degree of ambiguity from his
singers. Although the music was strictly notated with no space for musical improvisation,
Wagner hoped to develop a new style of delivery that would allow for dramatic spontaneity,
favouring emotional expression over beauty of tone: taking our singers back to the starting-
point of their so degenerated art, to where we find them acting still as players (Wagner
quoted in Millington 157). This new style would resonate somewhere between singing and
declamation, with an almost incantatory style, coming out of the boundaries and intersecting
points between music and dramatic expression (Millington 357-9). The function of this
intersection of singing and drama was part of the overall function of his Gesamtkunstwerk, or
total work of art, which was to be the meeting point of myth, music, poetry, and drama,
where each separate art would combine to create a more expressive and powerful total
form. It was through this Gesamtkunstwerk, this liminal, mythological meeting place of the
past, present and future, that Wagner envisioned the possibility of revolutionary change in
both life and art, through these emotionally-charged, Volk forms of expression (Furness 76,
88).
Wagners operas are probably never sung in the way he hoped for. The ambiguity of a
singing line that is not quite contained is not something that happens in the major opera
houses of the world. Perhaps this is because audiences want to hear beautiful, approachable
singing, and are less interested in innovation and the singers emotional interpretation of a
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role, or perhaps it is because there is something intrinsically dangerous about a voice that
threatens to cross the expected boundaries. It is also dangerous and potentially career-
destroying for the singers to step outside convention, into unchartered vocal territory where
ideas of beauty and control are troubled. My experience of being out of control in
Footprints/Tapuwae was terrifying and unsettling, and that was in a setting that encouraged
this form of transgression. Turner writes that during the liminal phase:
in many societies the liminal initiands are often considered to be dark, invisible, like
the sun or moon in eclipse. [] They are associated with such general oppositions as
life and death, male and female, food and excrement. [] They are at once dying
from or dead to their former status and life, and being born and growing into new
ones. (26)
There is something inherently dangerous about the liminal places in-between, but also
something creative and regenerative. At the moment my controlled voice seemed to fail me,
In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas examines the connotations of the liminal,
surmising that: Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one nor
the next, it is undefinable (97). Douglas maps van Genneps theory of the liminal onto the
The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation
afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret
rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to
see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to
social structure reproduced in small on the human body. (116)
The voice is not emitted as a visible substance. We never see the voice or its original source,
but we do see the throat and the mouth through which it emerges. Douglas claims that
bodily orifices seem to represent entry or exit to social units (4) and that the symbolism of
the bodys boundaries is used [] to express danger to community boundaries (124). In this
way, the mouth represents both a physical and a social threshold over which the voice must
and Douglass line of inquiry into the liminal, but examines it from a psychoanalytic
perspective focussing on the abject, of that which is excluded and therefore transgresses the
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs
identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-
between, the ambiguous, the composite. (4)
The voice has the potential to upset borders and rules by its presence as something which is
relationship between corporeal and social boundaries, as Douglas suggests, the voice can be
understood as a constant threat. The experimental voice, which actively seeks out these
itself which becomes one of the prime elements of liminality. Most strikingly in Tristan und
Isolde, Wagner used the closely-packed intervals of chromatic scales to build up a tension
that was never musically or dramatically resolved until the final chord, suspending the
audience in musical limbo throughout the remainder of the performance. According to Barry
affected the course of music history and began the emancipation of harmony from the
Classical tonal system (301). Chromaticism exposes the musical cracks between regular
tonal intervals, and the constant layering and suspension of these dislocated, othering sounds
lures the listener into a sense of the in-between. It is crucial to note that the revolutionary
Tristan chord does resolve. The liminal world of liminal tones of frustrated lovers limbo
ends as the heroine sings/sinks to her death, assured of resolution and reunion in the afterlife
This raises a significant point about the liminal. Although it is outside social structure
and form, in its original meaning the liminal is a conservative entity that supports the status
quo by bridging the transition between different statuses within a society. Van Genneps
example of the rite of passage could be compared to the medieval carnival, where social
structures are subverted and social roles are temporarily discarded, but afterward everything
is returned to order. While this allows for momentary relief from social hierarchy and
everyday drudgery, it does not change the socially oppressive circumstances from which the
need for subversion arises. As with the Tristan chord, the liminal space is expected to be only
As a less conservative alternative to the liminal, Victor Turner introduced the idea of
the liminoid. Rather than serving as a bridge from one state to another, the liminoid remains
particularly in the artistic realm, where the liminoid can be an independent domain of
creative activity, not simply a distorted mirror-image, mask, or cloak for structural activity in
the centers or mainstreams (33). Thus, the liminal may be seen to invert mainstream
society, but it is only in the liminoid realm where one may subvert the status quo. The liminal
tends to reincorporate or return to the status quo, while the liminoid potentially brings lasting
social change.
The relationship between liminality and performance has been much discussed since
the middle of the twentieth century. Richard Schechner, an experimental theatre director and
Performance Studies theorist who worked with Victor Turner, suggests that the two are
inextricably linked:
Schechner emphasises that it is in experimental theatre that the potentials of crossing artistic
thresholds and bridging life and art are most profound. It is the ambiguous, liminoid
acting and being can be developed through experimentation, leading to a social critique that
goes beyond artifice and transgresses established social and artistic forms.
avant-garde directors and performers: Antonin Artaud, Alfred Wolfsohn, Jerzy Grotowski
theatre that would carry the seeds of revolution in both art and society, assimilating all arts
into the dramatic performance. Also like Wagner, Artaud sought inspiration from folk
culture, but rather than delving into his own French roots, he looked to other cultures, notably
the Balinese and Mexican. Combined with the influence of Catholic and Gnostic ritual,
Artaud explored the space between cultures, between performance and ritual, between life
and art, and between life and death. The voice was fundamental to his Theatre of Cruelty,
which, like the work of Wagner, sought an incantatory style of vocal delivery that Artaud
claimed would make metaphysics out of spoken language, and lead us to turn away from
meaning our theatre has forgotten (35). Beyond Wagner, and following on from the
Dadaists separation of language from semantics, Artaud exploded the structures of language
as a means of destroying the structures of society. Rather than song, Artaud looked to the
more violently embodied form of the scream as the ultimate expression of life in art.
The scream was also the fundamental inspiration to experimental voice teacher,
Alfred Wolfsohn, whose pupil Roy Hart went on to establish his own theatre company to
continue Wolfsohns principles within the theatrical realm. Wolfsohn began to experiment
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with voice as a way of healing himself and rediscovering his voice after his traumatic
experiences as a stretcher-bearer in World War I. After the war, his major symptoms of post-
traumatic stress disorder were manifested through aural hallucinations of the screams of men
dying in the trenches. Wolfsohn described this vocal sound between life and death as a voice
in extremis and wondered at how a human voice can utter such a sound (Newham Singing
Cure 45). Ultimately, Wolfsohn sought to embody this voice in extremis as a therapeutic
device, and went on to teach his techniques to singers and actors as a means of developing
superior and more embodied forms of expression, emanating from this dangerous place in-
between.
The exploration of voice through the body was a key component of the theatrical
work of Jerzy Grotowski, and many of his most important discoveries relate to the ambiguous
nature of vocal production. Some of his early experiments centred on locating and
envisioning various resonators, or vibrators, throughout the body, such as the occipital at the
back of the head, or the maxillary in the jaw, from which the actor could project vocal energy
and resonance (Grotowski 122-3). These resonators produce vibrations that, from my own
experiments, emanate from somewhere between the mind and body, between the imagination
and physicality. This sense of the in-between was part of Grotowskis wider search that
pushed the boundaries of theatrical production, and sought a theatre that would embody a
secular holiness (34), grounded in ritual and myth, but going beyond the conventional
frames.
As with Artaud and Grotowski, the search for and revival of ritualistic and mystical
forms of vocal expression is also central to the work of Wodzimierz Staniewski, and his
contemporary theatre ensemble, Gardzienice, named after the village in Poland in which the
group is based. The group seeks inspiration from the music and performance traditions of the
remote villages of eastern Poland, where Catholic communities co-exist with more marginal,
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ethnic cultures. Reminiscent of Wagner, Staniewski uses these folk forms as a basis for his
development of a new form of music theatre, the ethno-oratorio, in which he sees the
potential to build a theatre from the ruins of the indigenous cultural forms (1). Staniewski
also looks to Ancient Greek forms, in a search for pre-codified music that existed prior to the
restrictions enforced by the Christian Church, where dissonance was regarded as sin and the
(63-4). Staniewskis ethno-oratorios aim to explore the musicality that occurs at the edges
of codified music. He claims we have become deaf to this pre-codified music: We dont hear
microtones, and [] we dont accept the dissonances. But the microtones and dissonances
were fundamental for the music of the Antiquity (CD-ROM). These microtones exist
between the semitones of the chromatic scale, between the between tones. Vocal
means listening between the cracks, and this exploration of the cracks, edges, and margins of
consciousness; between cultures and traditions; between the tones and cracks of music itself.
The voice is a transitional and ephemeral entity that is made audible as it transgresses the
boundaries of our bodies. This creates a certain level of danger that leads to containment
within social and cultural forms. It may be at the intersection of experimental voice and
avant-garde performance that voice can find form while challenging the limitations and
ii
This thesis comes out of my own experience experimenting with voice in avant-garde
performance, and these experiments and performances have functioned as starting points for
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Free Theatre Christchurch on a range of projects in which we explored vocal forms and
Grotowskian resonators and looked to cultural forms, such as Tuvan throat singing, to
explore the overtones that can be produced when multiple resonators are employed. These
liminal approaches to voice, seeking out the tones produced between various parts of our
bodies, were modelled on the liminal spiritual practices of Shamans and Satanists, seeking
communication between spiritual and earthly worlds through the medium of the voice, in
voice between human and instrument. Inspired by Jean Genets The Balcony and exploring
the physical and musical vocabulary of Argentine Tango, Distraction Camp was set in a
house of illusions where clients would come to play out their fantasies. In one of these
fantasy play scenes, I played the role of the Generals horse, vocally restricted with a
BDSM ball gag in my mouth, while the General held and played me like a cello, using his
whip to bow my stomach, with our real-life cellist and cello mirroring beside us onstage.
Weaving in and out of the melody, I explored the way sounds could be produced from a voice
and body that was constricted and controlled. As with my ruptured voice in
Footprints/Tapuwae, the restriction of the ball gag and the Generals whip held against my
supervisor of this thesis, proposed a theatrical context in which I could more fully explore the
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Hereafter, is a monologue by German playwright, Werner Fritsch, and is the story of Wolf
Sexmachine Bold, an underworld figure who is recounting the life that has led to this
moment: held at gunpoint following his wifes mutilation and murder. It is not clear if Wolf
is dead, alive or dreaming. It is not clear whether he is his wifes murderer. It is not clear who
is holding the gun to his head, concealed behind a carnival mask of Hitler. Wolf and the
The original Jenseits emerged from the cracks of Fritschs Germany. He based the
brutal monologue on the speech patterns, colloquialisms and colourful language of real-life
underworld figures, using tape realism to record these voices from the margins of society,
and giving them a voice in the liminoid realm of avant-garde theatre. In the Free Theatre
the genteel Garden City. University of Canterbury sociologist, Professor Greg Newbold,
claims there is a big nutcase factor down here and attributes the enduring character of the
stratified, class-segregated society, with less social mobility than other parts of the country,
which helps to entrench the citys lumpen proletariat (Hume). These marginalised groups
or individuals are deprived of a social voice and denied the opportunity to transgress the
with the marginalised voice of real-life Wolfs, but were also concerned with the missing
feminine voices, suppressed even further down under the underbelly. While the original
German text engaged with the marginalised masculine voice, the women remained silent.
2
This perception of an underbelly of Christchurch is exploited and exaggerated in the novels of contemporary
local crime writer, Paul Cleave. Cleaves novels are largely narrated in the first person by his protagonists. In his
first novel, The Cleaner, Cleave takes his readers inside the head of a serial killer, sharing dark secrets,
distasteful jokes and violent thoughts in a style similar to Wolf in Hereafter.
15
They were only represented through the masculine voice, which tended to reduce them to
body parts and participants in sexual acts. Researching the Christchurch context in relation to
the text, we became aware of a number of local homicide cases where women had been the
victims of severely brutal sexual assaults, similar to those described in Fritschs text. In all
these local cases, there was a connection to the voice, where women had been strangled, or
choked by undergarments forced down their throats. While the primary function of strangling
and choking may be to cease a persons breathing and hence end their life, it is also an act of
silencing and of stifling the voice, which seems to relate to a much deeper social desire to
diatribe. Falkenberg suggested I play the silent role of the Hitler-masked figure, holding the
gun to Wolfs head throughout the performance. It was from underneath this expressionless,
deathly mask that I was to sing and vocalise. In this way, I was cast between male and
female, between movement and stillness, and between life and death. From this powerful and
ambiguous position, holding a gun to Wolf throughout his monologue, I experimented with
language and its reduction of the feminine, I was interested in exploring a voice that could
transgress language and create its own form of communication outside the constraints and
In The Laugh of the Medusa, Hlne Cixous theorises the development of a feminine
writing voice that emerges through womens bodies from the element of song: first music
from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman (Medusa 881). This voice comes
from in-between the cracks of the body and society, breaking up and destroying existing
discourses:
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This potential for new and other voices to be heard in the wake of destruction, reminiscent of
Brnnhilde raising Valhalla to the ground in order to renew life, was significant in our
we experienced a much more literal rendering of rupture. After translating Fritschs script,
our first rehearsal took place in the Free Theatre in Christchurchs historic Arts Centre on 21
February 2011. The following day there was a series of violent earthquakes that changed
Christchurch forever. Lives were lost, buildings and homes were destroyed, and the city
centre, including the Arts Centre, was red-zoned, fenced off from the general public,
awaiting the fate of demolition or restoration. Christchurch was thrown into a liminal state,
where every structure was thrown off balance, and new structures and voices emerged in the
aftermath. Our opening night was postponed until the following year, on the first anniversary
of the earthquakes on 22 February, and took place in a derelict warehouse on the outskirts of
Christchurch.
An earthquake lends itself well to van Genneps terminology of the liminal, where the
initial rupture causes a separation from everyday social structures and forms. Amongst
other community and arts organisations, Free Theatre has embraced the subsequent
Christchurch and the role of theatre in society. While the government seems eager to return to
the status quo of a (re)built society, merely tolerating this in-between, incomplete period,
previously marginalised groups such as Free Theatre are enjoying the opportunity to be
17
central players in this liminal phase.3 It is in this in-between, in-the-cracks state that avant-
garde, liminoid forms might thrive and radical new voices, both metaphorical and literal,
might emerge. It is from this social context that this thesis emerges.
and the voice, following on from Distraction Camp, and my explorations of the gagged,
tortured female voice. I tried different ways of forming internal blockages by playing with
vocal fry (non-pitched, non-verbal, low-pitched and throaty vocal sounds, Salzman and
Desi 27) and manipulating the vocal apparatus. I was also physically constricted by the
resonances and acoustics that could emanate from within to without. I found through these
early experiments that rather than confining or constricting me, the mask empowered and
enhanced my vocal ability. With my face covered, I felt more able to contort and express,
without the fear of being watched or judged. Whatever I was doing underneath, the audience
only saw the Hitler visage glaring solemnly and uncannily back at them. The power of this
mask was compounded by my costume: a mans suit trousers and jacket, with white shirt and
brown boots. In stark contrast to the skimpy leather bondage gear I wore in Distraction Camp
while my mouth was gagged and my body bowed, in Hereafter I was anonymous and
androgynous and my body gave away no clues. All expression came through my voice.
In selecting the female vocal material for Hereafter, Falkenberg asked me to present
recordings of experimental voice practitioners that most appealed to me. I brought along
by Diamanda Gals; Visage, a piece comprised of female voice and electromagnetic tape by
3
In October 2011, Free Theatre Christchurch presented an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleists novella, The
Earthquake in Chile, performed in and around St. Marys Church, Addington. Kleists novella and the Free
Theatre production presented the utopian ideal of the liminal phase that comes after disaster, but warned of how
the authorities are likely to reassert the status quo with a vengeance. Cixouss use of the earthquake metaphor in
The Laugh of the Medusa was also inspired by Kleists novella.
18
Luciano Berio with Cathy Berberian; and Hush Little Baby, a free jazz interpretation of the
traditional lullaby, by Patty Waters. I had no conscious idea of how they might fit, but felt
especially drawn to these pieces. After playing all three, Falkenberg concluded that they
would all fit within the frame of the performance, although I was initially unsure of how they
would do so. We also selected a Mori piece together: Te More, by Whirimako Black and
Richard Nunns. For the ending, we picked a piece by John Tavener and Bjrk: Prayer of the
Heart.
Although I selected these pieces based on the criteria of what appealed to me, rather
than how they might be connected to the performance, it soon became clear how perfectly the
pieces fitted within the frame of this theatricalisation of limbo. All five pieces could be said
to represent different liminalities: Diamanda Gals and Whirimako Black borrow from the
Greek and Mori traditions where womens voices are used to mediate communication
between the living and the dead; Bjrks unorthodox voice delivers an Orthodox prayer to
Jesus Christ for safe passage in death; Luciano Berio splices up Cathy Berberians recorded
voice to compose a piece that is between human and machine; and Patty Waters lullaby
sings of a bridge between consciousness and unconsciousness that gradually spirals to what
seems a conscious outburst of her own unconscious. This thesis will be structured around
these different liminal voices, with each chapter beginning from a piece used in Hereafter,
before examining the wider provocations and implications of these ambiguous voices.
The first chapter will focus on vocal forms that serve to mediate between the living
and the dead. By this, I mean ritualised singing, chanting or calling, such as Greek lament and
Mori karanga, that forms a bridge between the Here and the Hereafter. I am particularly
interested in Greek lament and its twin functions: to ensure a good death for the soul in
transition as it simultaneously provides an outlet for the grief of those left behind. The social
positioning of the lament is of central importance, as it opens up a space for the often silenced
19
women to step forward and claim a principal social role through the act of singing, while the
men assume the role of silent participants. Such vocal performances, in the liminal zone
between life and death, allow for a temporary transgression of everyday gendered roles,
before the social order is reasserted at the other end of the ritual.
experimental works of avant-garde artists, where the potential for transgression is enhanced. I
trained vocalist, who uses the tonalities and styles of the Greek lament tradition to critique the
living by using her voice on behalf of the dead. Galss experimental use of the traditional
Greek lament form was fundamental to the development of the vocal score for Hereafter. We
were looking to develop an opening musical piece that would help to establish the liminal
setting of the production, and Galss haunting laments were evocative of a place between
life and death. In addition to working with Galss vocal style, Falkenberg suggested I
explore Mori vocal forms, experimenting with the way Gals uses traditional ritual forms,
but from a New Zealand context. Similarly to the Greek ritual lament, Mori women use their
voices to salute the ancestral dead through karanga and waiata tangi.
Galss artistic approach is also strongly influenced by the work of Artaud. The
lament we used in Hereafter came from Galss Masque of the Red Death trilogy (1986),
later revived as Plague Mass (1991), in which she subverts Christian ritual and attacks the
Churchs marginalisation and condemnation of those infected with the contemporary plague,
HIV/AIDS. In Artauds famous analogy of Theatre and the Plague, social and corporeal
boundaries are imploded from the disease within. I will examine how Artauds Plague can be
understood vocally, as well as conceptually, and how it seeks to transcend and transgress
Artaud was inspired by the figure of the shaman, who mediates between the world of
the living and the world of the spirits. Artaud envisioned the role of the actor as a shamanistic
figure, sacrificing his body and his voice in the service of metaphysical powers. In his
Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud situates the figure of the shaman in a wider ritual setting,
combining mystical elements of Gnosticism and the blasphemy of the Black Mass. I will
compare Artaud to the ritualistic theatres of Grotowski and Staniewski, where the actors
voices take on a spiritual dimension, channelling the voices of another time or place.
The first chapter will conclude with an analysis of the closing piece from Hereafter,
which we performed during and after the final monologue, as the lights faded to black. Based
on John Taveners Prayer of the Heart, which he composed for Bjrks primordial voice,
the piece is a sung Greek Orthodox prayer, pleading for Christs mercy. The primordial
characteristic of Bjrks voice is enhanced by the way she sings through the cracks and
breaks in her voice. In her own compositions, Bjrk seeks out microbeats, the cracks between
the beats, reminiscent of Staniewskis search for the microtones, the in-between tones which
we usually do not hear. These liminal sounds suggest something other and uncontained, and
are inherently transgressive. This first chapter is therefore directly concerned with the way
experimental voice in avant-garde theatre can be seen to transgress the liminal space of ritual
encounter, creating a liminoid space in which social and artistic boundaries can be
challenged. To that end, Victor Turners concepts of the liminal and the liminoid will be
considered in relation to Mary Douglass models of social containment and Julia Kristevas
The second chapter will explore vocal forms that come into existence somewhere
between the human voice and the machine. By this I mean the human voice that is
human voice, but transgressing the boundaries of the human body and becoming mechanical.
21
In this way, the mechanical voice could be heard to resound somewhere between the living
and the dead, taking the life out of the voice, and capturing and resurrecting it in an eternally
vocal work in the mid-twentieth century, and the concept of the acousmatic, a term coined
by Pierre Schaeffer to describe a voice or sound whose source cannot be seen, resounding
In Hereafter, the second musical piece was based on Luciano Berios 1961 electronic
tape piece, Visage, which sets Cathy Berberians spliced-up, recorded voice against an
manipulated, and my suited body was visible on stage, but the mask that covered my face
throughout the performance created an acousmatic effect, concealing and confusing the
identity from which the voice was brought forth. By examining the disembodied voice
situated between human and machine, we can gain an understanding of the voices troubled
relationship to the body and explore the potential for artistic and social transgression made
spectacular range of human vocal expression are dissected and disassociated from their
embodied source. Berberian creates a nonsensical language out of the phonology of English,
Hebrew and Neapolitan dialect, and through analysing this, I will discuss the relationship
between the voice and language, and the political act of destroying and recasting language in
the service of the sonic (Causton 17). I will compare the act of cutting up and reassigning
Berberians voice to the fetishistic way that Hereafters protagonist, Wolf, recalls his former
wife, whose body has been discovered brutally murdered and dismembered. I will contrast
this potentially victimised image of the disembodied voice with the more powerful position
of the acousmatic, and explore the implications of the voice without a visible source, a
22
phenomenon greatly exploited in film, but largely unexplored in theatre. Antonin Artauds
final performances explored the power of the acousmatic voice and the potentials of
deconstructing and experimenting with language. With the radio performance Pour en finir
avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgement of God), Artaud claimed to
Donna Haraway proposes that the transgressing of social and corporeal boundaries is
most effectively encapsulated in the concept of the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism
which she proposes as a feminist tool for breaking down oppressive categorisations and
borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex (Haraway 166). In her Cyborg
Manifesto, Haraway argues for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for
liminal spaces that the potential exists for the creation and empowerment of alternative
identities, and alternative voices. Various audio technologies that amplify, distort or
manipulate the voice may be used by women to alter the sounds of their voices, thus
facilitating the creation of identities that transgress the social and material realities of their
female bodies. I will examine Haraways cyborg myth of transgressed boundaries, potent
I will explore Michel Chions concept of the acousmtre, in relation to film and
electroacoustic music, Sigmund Freuds discussion of the uncanny, and Mladen Dolars
argument that the uncanniness of the voice arises from the knowledge that the source of the
voice can never be revealed. By looking at the voice in this alienated way, with technology
23
used to both enhance and contain its power, we can gain more of an understanding of the
The third chapter will explore vocal forms that negotiate the passage between
consciousness and the unconscious. By this I mean both the traditional form of the lullaby
that lulls the infant from hysterical wakefulness to peaceful slumber, and experimental vocal
forms that shatter the silence of consciousness with the hysterical screams of the unconscious.
In particular, I am interested in the way avant-garde theatre practitioners have reclaimed the
scream and other shadow voices as powerful and life-affirming vocalities, seizing the signs
In Hereafter, the third musical piece was based on Patty Waters 1966 free jazz
performance of Hush Little Baby, where the initial reassurance of Hush gradually turns to
terror, as the comforting, protective voice builds to a climax of sobbing and screaming
sounds, before returning to the calm and control of the initial lullaby. By looking at, or
listening to, these repressed, primal voices, we can gain an insight into the relationship
between our voice and our unconscious, as a means of understanding more about both.
The third chapter will begin with an examination of the lullaby, a traditionally
soothing vocal form that often conveys dark undertones. I will discuss this in relation to
psychoanalytic theories of the maternal sonorous envelope, as explored in the work of Kaya
Silverman, Michel Chion, and Julia Kristeva. I will compare the sonorous envelope to
Hlne Cixouss analysis of hysteria and Arthur Janovs theory of the Primal Scream, as a
means of examining the concept of the repressed, pre-verbal self as expressed through the
As the ultimate expression and expulsion from within to without, the scream was also
central to the Expressionist movement and I will discuss the Expressionist Schrei Theater and
its influence on contemporary artists such as Diamanda Gals and Yoko Ono. In relation to
24
this, I will examine Alfred Wolfsohns development of extended vocal technique inspired by
the screams of dying soldiers on the battlefields of the First World War. Wolfsohn regarded
his experiments as a practical, vocal embodiment of Carl Jungs vast body of work, and I will
discuss Wolfsohns experimental vocal work in relation to Jungs theories of the shadow, the
This thesis comes out of my own experience as an actor and a singer, beginning from
a frustration with the cracks and blips in my voice, which could not quite be contained or
theatre, and my research for this thesis, I have come to understand the containment of the
voice as a wider social, political and ideological tool. Experimental voice seems to be defined
by its in-between-ness, ambiguity, uncertainty, and it may be in the liminoid realm of avant-
garde performance that these in-between, liminal vocal forms have the potential to transgress
not only the boundaries of the voice, but those of identity and society.
25
This chapter will examine vocal expressions that represent and enact a communicative
bridge between the living and the dead. These expressions take on ritual forms, such as
lament, prayer and shamanic performances, that serve to mediate between the earthly and the
spiritual worlds. The efficacy of these traditional vocal performances is dependent on the
overall ritual frame that both enhances the supernatural powers of the event and contains the
potential dangers inherent in the transgression. Ritual vocal forms offer a rich source of
inspiration for experimentation with the voice, but outside of the performative structure of the
ritual they become devoid of meaning and potency, lacking a contextual frame and a
receptive, initiated audience to imbue them with significance. Much of the avant-garde
theatre of the twentieth and twenty-first century has engaged with the performative potential
of the ritual setting (Innes 3). I will examine vocal ritual traditions in the context of avant-
garde theatre directors and performers who utilise ritualistic elements, but transgress the
The theoretical exploration of voice as a medium between the living and the dead
comes out of my own practical experiments inspired by traditional and avant-garde vocalists,
particularly Greek-American singer and composer Diamanda Gals, whose work consistently
seeks to mediate between the living and the dead, largely inspired by the ritual of Greek
lament singing. In researching Gals, I was particularly struck by one piece, EEYME
(Deliver Me), a haunting lament that formed part of a larger work, Masque of the Red Death.
In Galss performance of the work, she reframes the ritual signifiers of the piece, conjuring
it out of a momentary stillness, on a stage filled with lit candles, following a thunderous,
Hammond-organ overture. EEYME could stand alone as a beautiful and evocative piece,
26
but the performative frame of ritual and theatre enhances the scope of the piece and suggests
a power beyond that of the body from which the voice emanates.
Hereafter, Galss EEYME was the first we chose to start working from. It embodies
much of what is typical and exciting about experimental voice: it mixes and blurs eastern and
western tonalities; it soars between moments of tremendous beauty and vocal ugliness; and it
voice with the liminal masculine voice of blues legend Robert Johnson, whose recordings
were played to audiences as they arrived for the performance. Blues is another form of
lament, another voice that emerges from the margins and another musical form of Galss
varied repertoire. Placing blues beside lament in Hereafter, we created a vocal and musical
Before discussing these experimental voices in more depth, I must clearly establish
the theatrical setting from which I explored my own experimental voice. This thesis comes
out of an ambiguous position in which I have shifted between the roles of audience,
performer and theorist, and I remain somewhere in-between these identities. The practical,
performance aspect of this role has been fundamental to my understanding of the topic and
has informed my receptive and theoretical approaches to the topic. Experimental voice is a
near impossible concept to capture in writing, and therefore the practical work I have
undertaken is an essential element of the research and articulation of this thesis at its core. In
order to understand this nonconventional voice, it has been necessary to re-examine the
Hereafter provided me with a context from which to explore four very different forms
of experimental voice that would not have fitted in a conventional or non-theatrical setting.
Going over the threshold of conventional vocal expression requires a theatrical context that
27
puts the performers and audience into a liminal space. Only in an experiential space and time
can experimental voice be heard in a meaningful manner. The notion of passing over a
something that is constantly permeating boundaries and challenging forms. This vocal
crossing of boundaries is only made visible through performance and, more crucially, through
theatricality, so that what would perhaps be perceived as just noise could be made
given a theatrical frame within the context of Hereafter, and how this staging and setting
brought the audience over a conceptual and literal threshold, into a realm of ambiguity and
between-ness.
In order to establish a context for my performance of these vocal pieces, I will firstly
describe the performance space of Hereafter and provide an account of the audiences arrival
at the venue, something that was crucial both to the establishment of the liminality of the
performance and to an understanding of this thesis. This arrival could be seen to have formed
the initial separation phase of van Genneps Rites of Passage, serving as an initiation and
Robert Johnson at the crossroads: Passing over the threshold between the Here and the
Hereafter
Christchurch, established in the 1870s. The complex sustained major damage in the 2011
earthquakes, and the skeleton of the structure is now undergoing significant redevelopment as
part of a boutique retail and hospitality precinct. At the time of Hereafters staging, in
February and March 2012, the one-storeyed, brick warehouses were sitting vacant and
dishevelled, waiting in limbo to be revived out of their ruptured states. The separate areas of
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the Tannery were divided internally by concrete partitions, but much of the complex was now
lacking external walls. What became the intimate venue for Hereafter was one such
partitioned area, located at the farthest end of the Tannery complex, near railway lines. The
space was patched up in preparation for our performance, with plywood double doors added
to enclose the space and holes filled up, apart from a small gap between the ceiling and the
top of the walls around the periphery of the room. This unwanted gap allowed the exterior
elements to enter the interior space, but the sounds of crunching gravel, passing freight trains
and howling winds, actually enhanced, rather than detracted from, the overall soundscape of
the performance. Furthermore, although the Tannery had not been used as a skin processing
plant for many years, the stench of rotting flesh that wafted from the nearby gelatine factory
was a visceral reminder of the locations former life, and its strong associations with death.
The performance space was located at the far end of an old, disused rail track,
formerly used for carting skins and carcasses. It now functioned as a poorly-lit, pot-holed,
gravel driveway that cut through the ghost-shells of buildings. The audiences were required
to take this journey on foot, and many reported that this preliminary experience was
disorienting and somewhat unnerving. There was, in fact, a much closer entrance to the
venue, from a side street about twenty metres away. This would have been a safer and more
convenient entry point, but it would have denied audiences the experience that the longer,
more treacherous passage provided, suspended between everyday reality and arrival at the
performance. In a sense, this journey down an unknown, dark road could be seen to
correspond to the first separation phase of van Genneps Rites of Passage, where the
initiands are separated from the rest of society in preparation for the liminal phase of
transition. It could also be seen as a metaphorical descent into the underworld, both the
seedy, gangland underworld described in Hereafter, and the liminal zone between heaven and
hell, or life and death, that is alluded to throughout the performance. By the time the
29
audiences arrived at the performance venue, a slight shift, or separation, from their everyday
lives had taken place. This experience of arriving at the performance had been constructed to
evoke a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty in the audiences, and to further blur the
boundaries between the world of everyday life, and the theatrical underworld of Hereafter.
Inside the performance venue, individual seats were placed in crooked rows, facing
towards the corner of the room, where black polyurethane was laid out on the floor and along
the back wall. This polyurethane evoked a sense of television crime shows, where the
material is often seen to contain and conceal murdered bodies, or to protect surfaces from
incriminating traces of DNA. In the centre of this polyurethane-demarcated area sat a man,
naked except for a long white sheet wrapped around his waist. He was sitting on top of what
appeared to be a massage bed or a hospital gurney and was facing away from the room,
towards the back wall, at a picture hanging above him. The picture, in a large ornamented
frame, was a copy of an Egon Schiele portrait featuring a reclining woman, naked except for
her knee-length stockings. It was unclear whether the woman frozen in the portrait was meant
to be dead or alive. To the left of the man was a double-bass, laid out on the floor like a fallen
body, and to the right was a bar stool. This pre-show tableau presented an ambiguous
scenario: who was this man and why was he sitting on a bed, dressed in nothing but a sheet?
Had the performance already begun? What sort of (under)world was this?
During this pre-show phase, while the audiences were arriving and gathering, a
recording of Robert Johnson blues music was playing in the background. Werner Fritsch
regarded as perhaps the greatest of the Delta blues musicians, whose legend is enhanced by
the mystery surrounding the acquisition of his prodigious guitar playing skills and the popular
supposition that he made a pact with the Devil in order to master his instrument. According to
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this legend, Johnson travelled to a country crossroads and at the stroke of midnight, sold his
soul to the Devil in exchange for virtuosic musical powers (Copeland and Goering 438).
Underlying this myth is an opposition between Gospel music, where congregations and
choirs sing praise to Jesus and God, and the more personal blues music, where the singing is
of misery and despair, and in the absence of a Christian God to appeal to, the darker force of
the Devil is implicated. The myth also suggests an implicit belief in the function of singing as
a bridge between the living and the dead. In Hereafter, the playing of Johnsons blues music
in the pre-show environment positioned music and the voice at the centre of a transitional
moment, forming a bridge, and blurring the boundaries, between outside and inside, and pre-
central, liminal force, but unlike the voice that I was to explore throughout the performance,
this was a distinctly masculine voice, more aligned with the protagonist, Wolf, and his
stagnant state of limbo, than the liminal possibilities of some other voices.
According to Thomas F. Marvin, aside from the obvious Faustian connotations of the
Johnson myth, the legend has roots in West African religion, referring to the god, Legba, who
presides over crossroads, bridges, doorways, and all liminal sites (587-588). Legba is said to
limp, because he has one foot in the visible world and the other with the spirits (Marvin 587).
Marvin claims that: Jazz and blues musicians may be considered children, or followers, of
Legba because they are liminal figures who stand at the crossroads where cultures meet,
connecting their listeners with the spirits of the ancestors and the lessons of history (587).
Marvin here positions the musician as medium between the world of the living and the world
of the dead, and in particular, the innovative, experimental musician who merges musical
cultures and traditions, suggesting the potency of musical forms that merge at the crossroads
About ten minutes before the performance was scheduled to begin, the Robert
Johnson recording was turned off and Michael, the double-bassist, approached the
performance area, and crouched down on the floor, beside his instrument. From Michaels
position beside the double-bass, he began to stroke, strum and pluck the strings and body of
the bass, exploring textures and sounds, while softly singing Hellhound on my Trail under his
breath. This deconstructed version of Johnsons song formed a bridge between the recorded
blues music and the live, acoustic music to be performed in Hereafter. It also added another
layer of ambiguity between the pre-show and the performance proper, provoking audiences to
move towards the stage and claim a seat. Michaels playing continued until the audiences
were seated, the doors were closed, and the lights had faded to black. In darkness, Michael
stopped playing, slowly donned a mask, and stood up with his double-bass. Simultaneously, I
walked through the audience to the stool at stage left, placed a mask over my face, and took
The putting on of the masks marked a separation from our pre-show personas,
mingling with the audience, to a much more ambiguous performance state, where the masks
cast us between identities. Margaret Coldiron explores a similarly ambiguous state in the
context of the Balinese Topeng drama, where: The performer is the link between the two
worlds, a human being who, through the mask, gives form to the gods (173). While
Hereafter came out of a completely different cultural and spiritual context, the use of masks
similarly enhanced the ambiguous, liminal aspects of the performance, where the masked
performers could be seen to form a bridge across multiple identities, suggesting the
When the lights came up again, a modified tableau was visible. The naked man was
still there, on top of the bed, but he was now lying motionless, laid out like a body on a
morgue table. The man was lit with a tight, neutral spot, creating a tunnel of light that
32
illuminated the deathly stillness of his body, further enhancing the ambiguity of the situation,
and making it unclear to the audience whether this man was meant to be alive or dead. This
man, whom the audience had earlier watched watching a possibly dead woman, now
appeared to be dead himself, and the audience was now sitting, contemplating him, just as he
had contemplated the woman. At stage-right, lit by a cold, blue spot, the double-bass was
standing fully erect next to its player, who was now wearing a mask of Frankensteins
creature. This change from the unmasked Michael kneeling beside his double-bass, to the
sinister, masked figure standing beside the towering instrument, enhanced the sense of
ambiguity and unease. At stage-left, lit in green, and cradling a gun, my own face was hidden
behind a carnival mask of Hitler, a visage evocative of violence, power and death. The
elements, such as my long hair hanging out beside the mask onto the shoulders of my mans
suit, and my small, feminine fingers spinning the barrel of the gun. These feelings of being
both masculine and feminine and simultaneously hidden and exposed gave me a sense of
freedom from which to experiment. The ambiguity of my presence may have helped prepare
me for crossing the thresholds of my usual experience with voice, where correctness, beauty
and form are often at the forefront of expectations. By exploring these different identities, I
This entire sequence, from the passage through abandoned warehouses to the arrival
at the makeshift venue, to the playing of recorded and live, deconstructed blues, to these
initial, perplexing tableaux, was designed to prepare audiences for the ritualistic form of
Hereafter. If the performance were to function as liminal in van Genneps sense of the term,
then a phase of separation was required, removing audiences from their everyday realities,
and preparing them for something else. Victor Turner described the liminal phase as being:
when the past is momentarily negated, suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet
33
begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance
(44). In Hereafter, this initial separation phase shifted the audiences toward an other world,
opening up their senses to a more embodied reception of the monologue through these
Extending this separation phase further, we added a musical prologue before the
surrounded by candles and coming out of the silence remaining after the Hammond organ,
our musical prologue began from the stillness of the opening tableau, with the two masked
figures framing the man in the bed. Michael, wearing the Frankensteins Monster mask,
began to bow a long, sustained tone from the depths of his double-bass. As one bow ended,
he produced another, creating a constant, meditative drone. As the audiences became tuned to
this sound, another texture appeared. Starting from the same tone as the double-bass, I began
to hum from underneath the Hitler mask, a sound that was barely distinguishable from the
sound of the double-bass. Beginning low in both pitch and volume, my voice initially emitted
a masculine quality, but as my hum slowly rose and opened up, it took on a more
recognisably feminine sound, and as the piece progressed, it played between these feminine
The tonality of my singing also played between identities. The beginning of the piece
emerged from a pentatonic scale, reminiscent of Middle Eastern and Oriental music, but as I
4
Hereafter was also performed at the Temple Gallery in Dunedin, 21-23 March 2012. The venue was a former
synagogue, which now functioned as an art gallery. This setting was in stark contrast to the grittiness of the
industrial Tannery setting, but the underlying sense of a separation phase remained. To reach the Temple
Gallery, tucked away off a central city street, audiences had to take a winding path up through a walled garden,
before crossing over the threshold that led to a long, candle-lit passage. At the end of the passage, a flight of
wooden stairs continued up to the gallery, where the performance was staged. Unlike the uneasy sense of
descending into an underworld that audiences may have experienced in the old Tannery yard, this ascent
through the garden and along the deserted, candle-lit corridor may have evoked more heavenly associations,
particularly with the buildings history as a place of worship. Despite the marked contrast, both arrivals
facilitated a separation from the everyday, outside world, and opened the way for the creation of a theatrical
world that might operate outside conventional boundaries.
34
weaved my way up to a vocal climax, my singing became more operatic. From these heights,
I descended back into the lower part of my voice, where I sang a contemplative Mori chant
that meditated around three tones. The chant had nothing of the urgency of the earlier
singing, as if a transition had taken place through the course of the music. Through this
singing, at the crossroads between western classical singing, Middle Eastern keening and
Mori chant, there was a sense that something had been conjured up, and this sense made me
feel powerful and confident in my singing, ridding me of my usual nerves and anxieties when
performing. Diamanda Gals has said that early in her career she said prayers to the devil
before every performance, calling on him to assist her. She did not know exactly who she was
addressing, but she felt that she needed to appeal to something other to help her go beyond
herself (Juno 20). The opening musical piece seemed to function in this way for me, as a sort
of incantation and a channelling of something other. While it was not a conscious decision to
enact an invocation, the music I was singing was inspired by traditional forms that function as
a bridge between the living and the dead, so perhaps a sense of this was inevitable.
Diamanda Gals at the crossroads: Conjuring up a new voice between blues, jazz, opera
and Maniot lament
The first part of the musical prologue was based on Diamanda Galss EEYME
(Deliver Me), from her Plague Mass trilogy, Masque of the Red Death, which she developed
through the 1980s in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. EEYME features on the
second part of the trilogy, Saint of the Pit, which Biba Kopf describes in the albums liner
notes as being: the most ambitious and perilous leg of Galss journey with the damned.
Here, she plots the soul in transition, from death to transcendence (Kopf). Gals voices this
transition through a merging of classical operatic singing with glossolaliac babbling and
vocal fry and the tonalities and expressivity of Maniot (Greek) lament form. Gals creates a
35
voice that resounds at the intersection of forms, an ambiguous voice that avoids
categorisation and sings (and shrieks) through boundaries, on behalf of those who dwell at
them.
Gals was brought up at a crossroads of cultures and musical genres. She was born in
San Diego in 1955, to parents of Anatolian and Greek descent. She played a diverse range of
music from a young age, studying both classical and jazz piano. She accompanied her
fathers gospel choir, played with his New Orleans-style band, and performed as a soloist
bio). In the 1970s, Gals played piano in the improvisational, free jazz scene in San Diego
and Los Angeles. Free jazz developed in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
as an expression of freedom from both harmonic and social structures, seeking to expose the
ruptures by sounding out the disharmonies from between the cracks. Many of its early
believed that by accepting existing musical structures, musicians were acquiescing to the
musical form (Gioia 310). It was from her experiences with free jazz that Gals became
After playing piano for awhile with all these guys from the post-Ornette Coleman
school, I thought, No, the voice is the first instrument. These players have always
modelled their mode of expression after the voice. [] The voice is the primary
vehicle of expression that transforms thought into sounds. (Gals quoted in Juno 10)
Exploring the voice as an instrument is a political and potentially revolutionary act, in that it
supersedes the structures of language, and allows for the expressivity of thoughts that may
not be containable within the confines of language. It can be compared to the voice which
Cixous envisions will dislocate and explode the masculine signifiers which restrict
women within masculine discourses (Medusa 887). Gals significantly chooses the word
36
thought over emotion, suggesting a rationality outside of language that may be channelled
This initial epiphany about the voice led Gals to experiment with the possibilities of
vocal sound from both an aesthetic and a political stance, detailing her experiments in her
1981 essay, Intravenal Song: In 1975 I decided upon the creation of a new vocal music
representation of thought (60). A matrixed voice is one enwombed within the cultural,
social and political environment from which it develops (OED). This unmatrixed voice
would go beyond language and music, crossing the threshold into the unknown and seeking
consciousness, while taking a leap into the unknown. Coming from the free jazz movement,
where musicians aimed to subvert musical and social structures through their unmatrixed
music, Galss early experiments can be seen to challenge and reimagine the social structures
projected onto her female body. The intravenal song would flow from the inside to the
outside, from the internal organs, through the veins, delivered from the voice like blood.
From this early stage, the theatricality of vocal performance was central to Galss
In these early, solitary experiments, the performance and presentation of the voice was a
crucial factor. Artistic control over the production of her voice was also fundamentally
important and Gals rejects the label of performance art in favour of Gesamtkunstwerk
(Schwarz 133-4). This rejection of the categorisation of performance art reaffirms Galss
37
focus on the musical and theatrical aspects of her experimental performance. Performance art
originates as a subsection of Fine Arts, with the body used as the raw material for artistic
expression. Galss body is also at the core of her work, but it is layered with the theatricality
of costuming, make-up, lighting and technology elements that are crucial to her total work
of art. Performance art tends to avoid the theatrical in favour of stripping off, often literally,
the layers of cultural and political meaning, whereas Gals exposes a social meaning through
the adding of layers, bombarding her audience with juxtaposed, conflicting voices. Like
Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk, and like performance art, Galss performances exist at the
intersection of multiple forms. Part of this intersecting vocal base includes her subsequent
training in bel canto singing technique, which allowed her to command more control over her
voice and to literally take her voice to new heights (Schwarz 134). The training in bel canto
provided her with yet another theatrical and musical layer; another voice to set against the
rest.
Galss vocal performances evolve from the spaces between her different musical
backgrounds: between jazz, gospel, opera and unmatrixed, intravenal sound. One of Galss
major inspirations, that may be seen to bind these disparate influences together, is the lament
form of the Greek Maniot culture, from which she is maternally descended. The Maniot
lament informs much of the musicality, structure and content of Galss works. It is an
inherently liminal form, both in its ritual context as a guiding voice of passage and in its
antiphonal structure, which is believed to facilitate communication directly with the spirits of
the dead.5 It is a socially and politically powerful form, facilitating the expression of pain,
anger, and protest, from the voices of those who are usually silenced. It is important to
5
In Greece, the womens lament also plays a key role in marriage rituals and in circumstances of exile.
Similarly to death, marriage and exile are concerned with separation. The person being sung over is in the
process of changing social roles, and is dead either literally, or in the process of becoming dead to their former
social self. (Schwarz, 136).
38
address the form and function of the Greek lament here, as it is crucial to an understanding of
Galss work and encapsulates the role of the shamanic female voice, mediating between the
living and the dead, supporting my argument that the experimental voice arises from these in-
Towards the dead and towards the living6: the liminal female voice in Greek and
Mori ritual
In Greek society, womens ritual lamentation, or moirologi, has played a key role in
the rites of death and burial for thousands of years, and survives today, particularly in
isolated, rural populations.7 The actual process of dying should happen in silence, without
weeping, as this is the time of the struggle of the soul when, according to Plato, the daimon
appointed to look after each man during his lifetime endeavoured to lead away his soul
(Alexiou 5). Expressions of grief could delay and endanger this process, as it is a reminder of
unfulfilled vows or obligations in the world of the living (Alexiou 5). Although the death
should occur in silence, the next treacherous passage of the soul of the deceased should not
occur in silence. According to Nadia Seremetakis, Silent death is the bad death. [] Death
The completion of the silent death marks the first phase of the passage, where the soul
is believed to become separated from the body. It marks a point of rupture, where, according
to Danforth: Many people believe that at the moment of death a persons soul, which is
described as a breath of air located in the area of the heart, leaves the body through the
6
The acoustic power of the lament, like its language, faces opposite directions: towards the dead and towards
the living (Seremetakis, 119).
7
Womens role as lamenters for the dead is not peculiar to Greek culture, as Gail Holst-Warhaft notes: One
point on which those who have studied lament in cultures as diverse as those of China, New Guinea, India,
Greece, Saudi Arabia and Ireland agree is that laments are generally performed by women (Holst-Warhaft, 20).
39
mouth (38). It is at this moment of death that the womens lamentation may begin,
suggesting that the women take up this final breath or this soul through their own mouths,
and transform it through their singing. This moment marks a limen, or a threshold, where the
breath of the dead and the voice of the living merge together into the form of the ritual
lament. It is from the rupture of death that a new, mediated voice may be heard. The womens
lamentation is required to assist the soul of the recently deceased in its passage to Hades or to
heaven, ensuring a safe passage for both the soul in transition and the mourners left behind
(Danforth 37). It is believed that the souls of the dead are able to see and hear and are aware
of everything done by the living on their behalf (Danforth 46). There is an underlying fear of
retribution from the dead if they are not fully satisfied with the rites conducted on their
behalf, and lamentation and offerings at the grave are seen as an important way of allaying
The ritual lamentation begins at the prthesis, where the women lament as they wash
the body in preparation for burial (Alexiou 6). According to Loring Danforth, this liminal
period of the soul in transition goes through several phases and lasts until the ritual
exhumation, up to five years later, where clean, white bones signify a souls entry into
paradise (49). Until this time, women are required to tend the graveside and sing laments to
the dead. While the lamentation provides an outlet for the communitys grief and mourning,
its ritual efficacy lies in its function to form a direct communion between the living and the
dead. Gail Holst-Warhaft describes this function of the lament as something which can
bridge and mediate between vital realms of experience. [] The lamenter becomes
the medium through whom the dead speaks to the living, the shaman who leads the
living to the underworld and back, thus effecting a communal confrontation with
death and, through it, a catharsis. (Holst-Warhaft 29)
The Greek lament for the dead places voice, specifically womens voices, in an extraordinary
position of power. Taking on the shamanistic role of medium between the living and the
40
dead, the women not only lament to the dead on behalf of the living, but lament to the living
In the New Zealand context, in traditional Mori culture, it is also the role of women
to use their voices to form a bridge between the living and the dead. Waiata tangi, or laments
for the dead, are performed by both men and women, but the initiation of sung ritual
communion between the living and the dead is considered the domain of women (McLean
115). During the pwhiri, or ritual of encounter between manuhiri [visitors] and tangata
whenua [people of the land], it is the job of the elder women of both parties to begin the ritual
and to allow the passage of manuhiri onto the marae [meeting place]. These women are
referred to as the pae arahi, leaders over the threshold. In her book Hui: A Study of Maori
a long, high call which sends greetings, invokes the dead, and brings an emotional
atmosphere to the marae. The best callers have ethereal but carrying voices, in the
words of an informant like a bird, high, light and airy. Their calls are long and
effortless, floating away to a sigh. [] They invoke the dead in language borrowed
from mythology. (137, italics in original)
Mervyn McLean explains that this sigh is a long drawn out descending cry, often
preceded by a kind of sob or catch of the voice (83). The technique of stylized sobbing and
catching of the voice is similar to the practice of lamenting Greek women, and karanga is
structured in a similarly antiphonal style, where there is a call and response between the
women, and the drawn-out cries often act as a signal of passing over to the next singer. The
karanga is not a lament to the dead, but it is an acknowledgement of the presence and power
piece by Whirimako Black and Richard Nunns: Te More. The text is a genealogical recital
from the Ngati Tuhoe tribe of the Bay of Plenty, describing the passage of the Creation of the
Universe, from absolute darkness to the world of light. In contrast to the initial Gals lament,
41
or to the call of the karanga, Te More was based on the more subdued form of moteatea
[chant], and connected the oldest and most revered traditions of waiata with the
contemplative concentration of 21st century art music (Black and Nunns). According to the
albums producers, traditional moteatea were always monodic and fell within the range of a
minor third (Black and Nunns). In a musical sense, monody is defined as music with only one
melodic line, but in its original meaning, monody refers to an ode sung by an actor in a Greek
tragedy or a poem lamenting a persons death (OED). Although the moteatea of Te More
does not relate specifically to death, the monodic form, with its single melody line contained
within the tight range of the minor third, seems inextricably linked to the experience of
and a social sense. It was, and remains, one of the few powerful female roles in the traditional
patriarchal societies of Greece, and women could use this platform for singing about wider
grievances that they may only voice during this liminal period of lamentation (Caraveli 181).
Because of this discrepancy in power, the lament has been challenged and restricted by
authorities throughout its history. From the sixth century, the laments central role in funeral
everything disorderly and excessive in womens festivals, processions and funeral rites
(Alexiou 15). From the Byzantine period, the lament was condemned by the church for its
provocative effects and for the pagan characteristics that were regarded as fatal to the
church (Alexiou 28). The metaphysical communication of the lament was especially
threatening because it took place outside the official church, with women taking over the
sacred role of the priest as the mediators between the living and the dead. In the fourth
century AD, Archbishop John Chrysostom dismissed the lament as self-centred and self-
The need for authorities to legislate on the womens lament performance suggests its
potential to incite social disorder. One of the serious concerns of the authorities was the
extremely physical nature of the performance. The aim of the moirologi is to present the
deepest possible signs of pnos, or pain. The vocal lamentation is traditionally accompanied
by physical gestures of lament and grief, such as the tearing of clothes and hair, exposure of
Women represent the violence of death through their own bodies. Their postures,
gestures and general facial expressions function as corporeal texts which reaudit the
experience of death as passage and disorder on behalf of the now silent and now
immobile dead. It is through this imagery of bodily disorder and movement that
women not only establish their shared substance with the dead but also establish
themselves as the iconic representatives of the dead in the world of the living. (74)
It is the precarious ambivalence of the lamenting voice that endows it with power and the
danger of transgression. Gals links this transgression directly to the female voice and its
From the Greeks onward, [the female] voice has always been a political instrument as
well as a vehicle for transmission of occult knowledge or power. Its always been tied
to the witches and the shamanistic experience the witch as transvestite/transsexual
having the power of both male and female. (Gals quoted in Pope and Leonardi 328)
Gals takes on this role of the shaman and the witch, creating antiphony between her various
Hereafter, my physical and vocal presence was also somewhere between genders. This
reflected the original Fritsch script, where it is suggested in the final lines of the monologue
that the Hitler-masked figure is Wolfs transsexual Thai lover, Marilyn. We represented this
physically with my wearing of male attire and mask, but also vocally by exploring the range
and tone of my voice. The transsexual power that Gals speaks of, seems again to be
concerned with the liminal, in the dangerous, ambiguous places outside traditional structures.
In Mani, Greece, where the society is structured around clan cults and the law of
vendetta flourishes, women also use their lamentation to incite the clansmen to enact
43
retribution over an unavenged death (Alexiou 18, 22). In this way, it is the responsibility of
the men to manage violence with physical action, while the women manage violence through
their voices (Seremetakis 118). Gals explicitly uses the style and tonality of the Maniat
moirologi because of its shamanistic and vengeful properties, which she refers to as
incantations to the Dead (Juno 11): the women would speak for the dead, expressing the
feelings of the dead [] more importantly the anger of the dead (Gals quoted in Juno
12, italics in original). She refers to the moirologi as being mourning as incitement, which
incited people to be so angry they would fight. It was never mourning in the pacifistic sense
never (Gals quoted in Juno 14, italics in original). The form and function of this style of
angry, incantatory lament has formed the basis of much of Galss work, when she sings on
behalf of those whose deaths or suffering have been silenced or left unavenged. In
Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders From the Dead (2003), Gals used her voice on
behalf of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek victims of the genocide of Asia Minor, who
were killed by the Ottomans between 1915 and 1922. The title, Defixiones, refers to the
warnings, written in lead, on the gravestones of the dead in Greece and Asia Minor, warning
of the extreme harm that awaits anyone who moves or desecrates the grave or the buried
corpse (Evans). Gals refers to this as the last recourse in which the most powerless and
marginalised people can claim some form of vengeance, defiant against their killers desire to
extinguish all traces of their existence (Interview). Gals takes on the voice of the curse and
The centrality of the female voice in Greek and Mori rituals that seek to
communicate directly with the dead, suggests that there is something about the female voice,
or the perception of the female voice, that transcends or challenges notions of containment, in
a way that the male voice does not. These rituals provide a public platform for women to
express and emote, but ultimately, these voices are sent away into the silent void of the dead.
44
Gals uses the lament form to sing on behalf of the dead, but firmly aims her vitriol towards
the living.
Galss Masque of the Red Death trilogy is both an expression and representation of
the pain and suffering of the victims of HIV and AIDS, and an attack upon those in society
who have exacerbated the suffering, through their judgement and condemnation of those with
the disease. Gals juxtaposes the many voices associated with the disease, embodying them
through her vocalisations of the biblical texts of authority, set against the symbolist poetry of
the outsider, interjected with the suffering lamentations of the infected and their communities.
The second part of the trilogy, Saint of the Pit, was released in 1986, just months after the
death from AIDS of Galss playwright brother, Philip-Dimitri, to whom three of the pieces
The title, Masque of the Red Death, makes explicit reference to Edgar Allan Poes
short story of the same name, which influences Galss work both thematically and
performatively. Poe describes his figure of the Red Death, who transgresses Prince
Prosperos cloistered existence and infects the revellers with the fatal plague, as: tall and
gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave (128-9). This figure of
horror exists somewhere between life and death, as a reminder that all boundaries can be
transgressed and that everyone is implicated in the suffering of others. In Galss Masque of
the Red Death, she represents this transgressive figure herself, singing on behalf of those
infected with or dead from AIDS. To be diagnosed with HIV or AIDS in the 1980s was to be
diagnosed as dead among the living. Gals sings on behalf of those suffering both the
45
debilitating effects of the disease and the consequent marginalisation from society, being
Many pop artists and musicians of the twentieth century have attempted to raise
awareness about HIV and AIDS, but Gals claims that pop music generally dilutes the
subject so that people live it without confronting anything unpleasant (Pope and Leonardi,
326). Gals confronts the unpleasantness by challenging the boundaries of vocal technique,
and enacting the suffering through her own voice. She contrasts moments of operatic
technique with rasping sounds that grate against the passage of her throat, or seem to emanate
from the depths of her gut, reminding the audience of the internal body from which the voice
spews forth. Through her voice, Gals communicates a sense of both heaven and hell.
Excerpts from Masque of the Red Death formed the basis of Galss Plague Mass, a
live performance that premiered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City
(1990). Gals distinguishes her Plague Mass from the more traditional Requiem Mass for the
dead, which is intended to help pacify the living so they can feel the dead are resting in
peace, whereas the dead from this disease, I dont think of them as resting in peace (Gals
quoted in Pope and Leonardi 322). David Schwarz described the opening moments of a Gals
concert that he attended in Hamburg in 1992, in which she presented excerpts from Plague
Mass:
The initial seconds of the concert shocked me visually and acoustically. Gals sang at
the front of the stage, naked from the waist up; behind her, the stage looked like the
ruins of a bombed-out building; the stage and Gals were soaked in a bright red light
that made Galss sweat look like blood several minutes into the visceral
performance. (133)
The presentation of Galss semi-naked body, seemingly excreting blood from her pores,
evokes the image of the Red Death at the ball, corroding the boundaries between the infected
and the uninfected, and reminding the revellers that they cannot separate themselves from the
suffering of others. It represents the danger from within and challenges the boundaries
46
between inside and outside, reminding the audience of the festering disease. It also evokes the
image of the Greek lamenting women, tearing at their flesh and clothing in order to
Galss use of the plague metaphor and her desire to vocally and theatrically embody
the disease, conjures up Artaud, whom Gals has claimed was a very strong inspiration for
her work (Juno 15). Artaud compared the visceral immediacy of his Theatre of Cruelty to the
extreme and unrelenting force of the plague: The theatre, like the plague, is a crisis which is
resolved by death or by healing. And the plague is a superior evil because it is a complete
crisis after which nothing remains but death or extreme purification (22). In a reading of
The Theatre and the Plague at the Sorbonne in Paris on 6 April 1933, Artaud shocked the
His face was contorted with anguish, one could see the perspiration dampening his
hair. His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers struggled to retain
their flexibility. He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever,
the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was enacting his own
death, his own crucifixion. (Nin quoted in Weiss K 269)
Nin recounts that this was too much for the audience to bear, this eruption from within, this
theatre and a sense of being seized and consumed by disease; between his own life and his
own death. This extreme embodiment is central to Artauds concept of theatricality, which
according to Jacques Derrida: must traverse and restore existence and flesh in each of
their aspects. Thus, whatever can be said of the body can be said of the theatre (293). The
theatre of cruelty seeks to go beyond representation, to be life itself: in the sense to which
Galss claim that: my work is the thing itself, the sound of the plague, the sound of
the emotions involved (Gals quoted in Juno 14, italics in original), is reminiscent of
Artaud:
They always want to hear about; they want an objective conference on The Theatre
and the Plague, and I want to give them the experience itself, the plague itself, so
they will be terrified and awaken. Their death is total, like blindness. This is agony
portrayed. Mine, yes, and everyone else who is alive. (Artaud quoted in Barber, Blows
and Bombs 62)
The violence and totality of the plague metaphor was fundamental to Artauds theatrical
explorations of the relationship and passage between life and death. He wanted to restore an
therefore society which he perceived to be devoid of meaning and of life (81). Artaud
believed that the theatre was capable of renewing life itself: In life I dont feel myself living.
But on the stage I know that I exist (Artaud quoted in Schumacher xxiv). He wanted to
create a theatre that would renew a sense of life by showing people that they live as in death,
and conceived his notion of the Theatre of Cruelty as a means of jolting people out of their
Artaud used the term cruelty to encapsulate the creativity that emerged from his own
suffering, like the Greek lamenting women channelling their deepest pnos in order to deliver
the most moving and efficacious performance of mourning. Artaud did not envision his
cruelty as a crude attempt at horror and gore, but as something that might communicate a
remaking of worlds, intrinsically located between life and death: It is consciousness which
gives to the exercise of every action in life its colour of blood, its cruel touch, since it must be
understood that to live is always through the death of someone else (Artaud quoted in
Barber 1993: 52). Artaud described the ideal theatre in violent terms: The theatre is at one
and the same time scaffold, gallows, trenches, crematorium, lunatic asylum (Artaud quoted
in Schumacher xxiv). Crucially, the violence and cruelty fundamental to Artauds theatrical
48
vision are not to be regarded as forces of destruction, but as Derrida notes, as a source of
The rigour and vitality of cruelty is evident in Galss staged works, such as Insekta, a
piece about torture in isolation, howled and screamed from the confines of a cage (Rothstein)
and in Plague Mass, where she evokes the image of a suffering antichrist, like an Artaudian
martyred actor, signalling through the flames. Following Artaud, Gals uses the metaphor of
the plague and the cruelty of the theatre to challenge and transgress artistic and social
boundaries. The voice models the destructive and revelatory powers of the plague, where
conventions and laws are overcome by something more fluid (Artaud 7).
penetrative, lamentational voice, going through and beyond what is expected and accepted
in the realm of female vocal production. Rather than attempting to charm or seduce her
audience, Gals uses extreme levels of sound to inflict pain on the audience, infecting them
Of all the audible and visible representations of pain, the scream is of fundamental
importance in Greek and Maniot lament singing. Thrnos and gos are two of the main Greek
terms used to describe the lament for the dead, both originating in the ancient Indo-European
description for shrill cry (Alexiou 102). This points to the core of the lament as the
containment and stylisation of a scream, the archetypal symbol of the transition between the
living and the dead. In Greek rituals for the dead, the notion of screaming the dead is
believed to form a direct communion with the dead, assisting the safe passage of the soul to
Hades (Seremetakis 101). As well as its spiritual function, the scream expresses the horror of
death and fear of the unknown. The transgression of metaphysical boundaries is embodied by
49
the transgressive nature of the scream, which erupts from the body without language and
Gail Holst-Warhaft describes the influence of Maniot lament with the high-pitched
timbres of their voices, the spilling over from song to scream as a fundamental stylistic
influence on the works of Diamanda Gals (10). The scream is one of Galss signature
between incantation and scream. According to Gals, all great artists start from the scream:
The soul and the blood is the craft [] All these artists start with the scream, with the
blood, and then they articulate that. They dont lose sight of that being what theyre a
medium for. (Gals quoted in Juno 17, italics in original)
The scream is at the heart of Galss vocal music, as the voice that manifests between singing
and speaking, between language and sound, and between the living and the dead.
The scream was also at the heart of Artauds theory and practice, centred on the
concern that: In Europe no one knows how to scream any more (95). Allen S. Weiss
identifies the importance of the scream as the fundamental metaphysical agency of Artauds
Guy Rosolato positions Artauds quest for the scream at the impasse, the double-bind, of the
simultaneous and absolute injunctions to live and to die (Rosolato quoted in Weiss K 156,
italics in original). Like the Greek lament, Artauds scream opens up a bridge between the
The scream emerges as immediate, vital expression, free from the constraints of
language and text. Derrida refers to the word as the cadaver of psychic speech (303),
summarising Artauds vehement opposition to what he regarded as the oppressive and dead
forms of literary masterpieces: Once spoken, all speech is dead and is only active as it is
50
spoken (Artaud 56). He declared that: in order for theatre, an independent autonomous art,
to be revived, or simply to stay alive, it must clearly indicate what differentiates it from the
script, from pure speech, literature and all other predetermined, written methods (Artaud
quoted in Schumacher 111). Artaud believed that the pain and suffering of writing loses its
authenticity when transformed into a work of art. According to Sontag, although this
contempt for literature had been made commonplace by the Futurists, Dadaists, and
Surrealists, Artauds contempt was less associated with cultural nihilism, and more concerned
with a specific experience of suffering (Artaud xxii). The aim was not to do away with
language all together, but to find new forms of communication through the body and the
voice that engaged with different levels of consciousness: We do not intend to do away with
dialogue, but to give words something of the significance they have in dreams (Artaud 72).
communication, somewhere between the life and death of vocal expression: instead of
harking back to texts regarded as sacred and definitive, we must first break theatres
subjugation to the text and rediscover the idea of a kind of unique language somewhere in
between gesture and thought (68). The Balinese Theatre show that he attended in Paris in
the strange thing about all these gestures, these angular, sudden, jerky postures, these
syncopated inflexions formed at the back of the throat, these musical phrases cut short
[] is the feeling of a new bodily language no longer based on words but on signs.
(37)
While Artaud may have misunderstood the cultural intricacies and symbolism of these
various gestures and postures, the experience enabled him to envision completely new forms
Artaud began to seek a naked theatre language, which he believed would allow us
to transgress the ordinary limits of art and words, actively, that is to say magically to produce
a kind of creation in real terms, where man must reassume his position between dreams and
51
events (71, italics in original). This new theatrical language would emerge from the spaces
in between cultures, between states of consciousness and between the living and the dead,
through the body and the voice of the actor: Abandoning our Western ideas of speech, it
turns words into incantation. It expands the voice. It uses vocal vibrations and qualities (70).
He looked to breathing techniques from the Kabbalah as a means of locating various energy
centres, and to the Hindu mantras for the treatment of language. It was through these and
other vocal experiments that the actor might make a spiritual connection that would
authenticate and enliven their performance: The soul can be physiologically summarised as
a maze of vibrations. [] Belief in the souls flowing substantiality is essential to the actors
craft (90). Artaud believed that: The range of the human voice can be tuned to the point
where it can be made to chant like a real organ. There are ways of making the voice jump, of
making it shimmer like a landscape. There is a whole scale to the voice (Artaud quoted in
Schumacher 139).
sounds into categories of Neuter, Feminine and Masculine forms. In Seraphims Theatre,
Artaud claims that his voice will be [n]evermore in the Masculine (99, italics in original).
The masculine voice retains strength, but it entombs me in strength (Artaud 99). The
masculine voice is containing and contained, and does not allow the cracks of emotion or
unsignified meaning to transgress its rigid structure. Artaud categorises the uncontainable
The masculine shout stays within the structures of body and society, but the feminine scream
pierces through and beyond. This feminine, screaming voice is aligned with animals and
double of excrement, which may be both expression and expulsion, a sign of both creation
and frustration (Radio 287). This link between excrement and the scream suggests the voice
as a vital, urgent force of nature, but it also suggests its associations with transgression, filth,
and the abject. This connection is not merely symbolic, as contemporary psycho-linguists
have shown a direct connection between the pronouncement of glottal occlusives and sub-
In Artauds final performance, the radio play, Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu
(To Have Done with the Judgement of God) (1947), he colours and enunciates the passages of
text in a way that could be heard to revel in the filth, spitting out the consonants and
languishing over vowels, coaxing or expelling the voice from within. These somewhat
sinister textual passages are contrasted and punctuated with glossolalia, screams and sound
effects, jolting the listener out of any sense of comfort. The text speaks of a dissatisfaction
with and animosity towards western, specifically American, ideals, and reviles the judgement
of a Christian God who is either shit or does not exist (Artaud quoted in Sontag Artaud
561). These proclamations speak from the body and of the body: of blood, semen and shit.
The voice becomes part of this ambiguous symbolic order, thrust from the body, over the
Associated feelings of unease may arise from the inherent sense of the abject, the
notion of filth and disorder that Julia Kristeva suggests arises from what disturbs identity,
system, order (Abjection 4). Artauds To Have Done with the Judgement of God, where
cultural, lingual and performance forms are deconstructed and reimagined, leads to a
fundamental metaphysical uncertainty that emanates from a space between sickness and
health and between life and death. According to Kristeva: the corpse, seen without God and
outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject ( Abjection 4).
The abject is at the core of Artauds theatre and his concept of the plague, and in this final
pervaded by an overall sense of ambiguity that resonates and unsettles, confusing the
boundaries between voice and language. His use of glossolalia is strange, yet familiar; the
voices and sound effects are visceral but invisible; we hear the body but we do not see it.
unified, borderless language which carries connotations of the divine, the mad, and the
primordial (142). Glossolalia is sound without meaning, the signified without the signifier,
expressing the ideal original language while existing outside of semiosis and linguistic
order (142).
Following on from Artaud, the exploration and enactment of abjection can be seen
and heard in Galss performances that sings from and for the voices at the margins, the
socially ejected abject. In her Masque of the Red Death and Plague Mass works, the opening
piece is entitled This Is The Law of the Plague, and engages directly with the biblical laws of
exclusion, using text from the Old Testament book of Leviticus, Chapter 15, in which various
And the woman with whom this man would lie will be unclean;
And whoever touches her will be unclean.
This is the law of the plague,
to teach when it is clean and unclean. (Leviticus 15)
Galss selected passages focus on the contagion of the Plague and stipulate its
containment through the avoidance of all unclean bodily transmissions. Delivering this
smiling down at us from the pulpit. She contrasts the rhythm of her clipped consonants
against vowels which slowly unfurl or attack from the outset. In the Plague Mass version,
slightly different to the original Masque setting, this Levitical voice is interspersed with a
lamenting voice that ululates and shrieks at the end of each biblical stanza. It is this wailing,
wordless voice that seems to penetrate through as the voice of reason, evoking the terror and
embodied humanity behind the irrational rationality of the condemning voice of judgement.
Galss vocal antiphony and her challenging of the Christian God is reminiscent of Artaud,
particularly in the final piece of Plague Mass, Sono lAntichristo, where she proclaims: I am
the butchers meat. [] I am the shit of God. [] I am the plague. [] I am the Antichrist
(Plague Mass). It is the suffering, marginalised, diseased voice that has come to the surface,
disrupting and commandeering the social order by insisting that its presence be heard.
stage that likewise engaged with signifiers of the abject, with the presentation of her body
naked from the waist up, with her breasts exposed and with the dousing of her body in stage
blood during the consecration. Her presence was ambiguous and threatening, with the
strong, low masculine vocal sounds emanating from her naked, bloodied, feminine body. In
addition to these more apparent signifiers, David Schwarz suggests more subtle forces were
at work. He describes her frequent sliding between tones and microtones as smearing,
bending and crushing (149). These terms are all recognised colloquialisms for the
practice of sliding or glissando, but in this context, they embrace the danger of the
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and may be out of place. When something is bent or crushed, its form is altered by an
overwhelming force, and its boundaries are forever changed. Singing between the tones
In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas claims: Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at
its margins. The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins (122).
Douglas further suggests that this social body is particularly endangered by orifices, the
intersecting corporeal points between the inside and the outside (116). When Gals smears
her notes, or juxtaposes multiphonic voices against each other, she is making the audience
aware not only of the transgression of musical and tonal boundaries, but of the transgression
of the voice itself, from the pit of her belly out into the world.
The abjection of this type of vocal transgression may be especially pertinent to the
voices of women. In her book, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, Catherine Clment
proposes that singing between notes and tonalities represents a danger to social boundaries
and order, and this transgression is implicitly tied to the feminine and to death. Clment
examines the use of chromatisme8 in relation to Wagners Tristan und Isolde, suggesting
that: chromatism, whether that of the rainbow or of music, is always associated with
affliction, with suffering, with mourning and death (56). She introduces her discussion of
Tristan und Isolde with a digression into mythological representations of women, concluding
that: Sickness, stink, poison all that is feminine. Sickness comes from womans body; and
the odor of woman odor di femine sang the tantalized, hysterical seducer always stinks
(56, italics in original). This feminine stink exudes from the orifices, from the abyss, linking
8
The French term chromatisme is here translated as chromatism, meaning the state of being coloured. The
original French has a double meaning, and also translates as chromaticism, the compositional technique used
in Tristan und Isolde, that incorporates the foreign, non-harmonic tones of the scale (OED).
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the vagina and the female mouth as dangerous points of infection and destruction, but also
It is the feminine voice that cries between life and death and signifies the natural
forces set against a masculine God. It is the lamenting Maniot women, clawing at their hair
and clothes, or Gals, half naked and steeped in stage blood. The feminine voice is a
reminder of the void and of death. Fear of the feminine relates to a fear of the dangerous
other, of those at the margins and the borders, and is not restricted to those with female
bodies. Claiming the stinking feminine voice, and the shit and the Antichrist, asserts the
Tristan und Isolde ends with the heroines death, both tragic and sublime because she
has been returned to the rational system, as Susan McClary describes it: a tonal piece must
establish closure, must resolve that slippery, fragrant chromaticism to the security of a
rational tonic triad (McClary in Clment xiii). Isoldes death is the opposite of abjection,
because it restores order and structure. Artaud sought a theatre that would arise from or
through abjection in order to purge society and conventional theatre of its true disorders.
Artauds ideal theatre would overwhelm through discord: instead of restricting these
discords to dominating one sense alone, we mean to make them overlap from one sense to
another (84). Gals and Artaud embrace the abject voice of the odor di femine, claiming its
discords and dis-eases as vocal and theatrical sites of revolution, rather than resolution.
The ritual voice of transgression: Between Gnosticism, Shamanism and the Black Mass
Although, and perhaps because, Artaud was done with the judgement of God, his
theatre was as profoundly mystical as it was abjectly embodied. One of his concepts for an
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early sound film was to be called The Dybbuk. The film was never made, and the script did
not survive, but according to Mikhail Yampolsky, the title is highly suggestive:
The myth of the dybbuk is linked to many of Artauds preoccupations: it is a spiritual force
that is channelled through the living, making both the body and the voice abject by troubling
the relationship between body and voice, between self and other, and between the living and
the dead.
The sense of theatre as a medium for engaging with otherworldly or spiritual powers
energy (Artaud quoted in Schumacher 78). The exorcism analogy is apt for a theatre that
would battle between opposing forces, like the prayers and chants of the priest battling the
demonic vocal abjections of the demons, channelling the ills of society through the martyred
and suffering body of the actor. The exorcism and cruelty of Artauds theatre would serve to
revitalise theatre and society, through the meeting of opposing forces: I use the word cruelty
in the sense of hungering after life, cosmic strictness, relentless necessity, in the gnostic sense
of a living vortex engulfing darkness, in the sense of the inescapably necessary pain without
which life could not continue (Artaud quoted in Schumacher 107). According to Susan
Sontag, the gnostic sense that Artaud refers to was central to his theatrical vision (Artaud
xlvii), and is highly pertinent to this discussion of the experimental voice between the living
alien in this world, abandoned by the divine and possessed by demonic powers, trapping the
individual spirit in a body, in the social world. The self or spirit can be discovered through
breaking with the social world, and taking the spirit out of its body and out of the world,
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either through total asceticism, or through libertinism and acts of transgression (Sontag
Artaud xlvi). Sontag proposes that Artaud wanted to create theatre that would enact a
violent act of spiritual alchemy (Artaud xlvii). Jane Goodall locates Artauds fundamental
concept of theatres double in the Gnostic experience, which purports the idea of a double
self, wherein the embodied self is set against a prior self that is both a visitation from
without and an irruption from within (16). The gnostic search for oneness is intrinsically
performative, as opposed to cognitive, effecting the release of the spirit through ritual
performance.
Gnosticism. The Catholic Mass is the seminal ritual performance of western society, and the
strict rules that govern it effect a channelling between the living and the spirit. The use of
voice is fundamental to the enactment of the ritual. The consecration and transubstantiation of
the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ is effected through incantatory
virtue of the words of consecration, pronounced by the priest assuming the person of Christ
and using the same ceremonies that Christ used at the last Supper (Cavendish 393). With
certain accompanying actions and the incantation of the stipulated Latin text, the priest
channels the voice and power of the Holy Spirit, inseminating it into the bread and wine for
communal consumption.
The extraordinary power of this ritual performance, both spiritually and politically,
has led to many parodies and inversions. The fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum claimed
sacramental things of the Church (Cavendish, 367) and this theme of sacrilege became one
of the fundamental features of the shadow of the Catholic ceremony, the Black Mass. The
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sacred actions and incantations are retained and enhanced, affirming their efficacy as tools of
transformation, but they function sacrilegiously against the power of Christ and against the
power of the Catholic Church. The Black Mass is both a spiritual ceremony and a political act
against the authorities. Galss Plague Mass uses the form of the Catholic Mass as a political
act against the Church, sacrilegiously profaning the sacred acts of consecration, and incanting
biblical language against its source. The sacrilege and blasphemy is made more extreme by
her half naked female form being used as the vessel that channels the Holy or Unholy Spirit
during the consecration. Unlike a Satanic Black Mass, which simply inverts the form and
function of the Mass in order to worship Satan over the Christian God, Gals subverts the
form and function of the Mass in order to unsettle and question the designations of good and
evil, or clean and unclean, in society. Gals uses the theatricality of the Mass for political
effect.
Gals claims to use the voice in the same liturgical way that the Mass has always
been used []. All masses are the same; all have the ability to conjure up evil or the devil,
because all gods, all powers are connected in this world nothing else makes sense (Gals
quoted in Juno 11). This sense of vocal conjuring permeates Galss work, which she affirms
has an occult, shamanistic, and ritual feeling that fits with her concepts of divine
language, intravenal song and speaking in tongues (Gals quoted in Juno 9). The
shamanistic feeling she claims can be compared to the channelling of the Holy Spirit through
the body of the priest, but the performance of the shaman is more extreme and less regulated
and prescribed. It is important to examine the traditional role of the shaman here, as a
paradigm of the ritual performer who, via his voice and through his body, enacts
and Central Asia, but similar phenomena have been observed in North America, Indonesia,
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Oceania and elsewhere (Shamanism 4-5). The shaman specializes in a trance during which
his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld (5).
The shaman is responsible for any ceremonies that concern the experiences of the human soul
(182). This includes delivering dead souls to the underworld and bringing back messages
from the dead (212), but also includes healing a vast range of diseases and afflictions in the
living, as according to Eliade: Disease is attributed to the souls having strayed or been
stolen, and treatment is in principle reduced to finding it, capturing it, and obliging it to
resume its place in the patients body (215). Anything to do with the soul on earth or beyond
is the exclusive domain of the shaman (216). The shaman is almost exclusively a male figure,
but he channels both male and female voices, contrasting deep voices with wild cries.
The shamanic sance is an elaborate and efficacious ritual performance that is staged
around an intensifying dramatic structure that ends in spectacle (Eliade Shamanism 511). In
most contexts, the shaman connects with the soul and with the worlds beyond through
ecstatic trance, commonly reached through singing and dancing, where voice is once again at
the forefront of metaphysical communication (243). The shaman may use his voice to
channel the voices of the spirits into conversation with the audience, or he may embody a
range of animal or bird voices (255). Eliade provides an example of a Yakut shaman taking
He cries out wildly. This is followed by another pause; then in a low, serious voice he
intones a solemn hymn. Next comes a light dance, during which his song becomes
ironic or else diabolical, depending on the beings whose voices he is imitating. Finally
he goes to the patient and summons the cause of the illness to depart. (231)
In this description, the shaman uses his voice as a tool for healing, similarly to the ideal of
Artaud and Gals, who seek to purge society of its ills through their seemingly possessed
vocal performances. This can be compared to the role of the Mori Tohunga, or priest, who
when summoned to a sickbed will try to discover the passage by which the evil spirit
emerged from the underworld, and then recite incantations to force the spirit to leave its
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victim and return to the other realm (Eliade Shamanism 369). It should be noted that Eliade
describes the shaman as imitating the voices of other beings, emphasising the theatricality
Eliade argues that the meaning of all dangerous passage rites is this:
This sense of a return is echoed in the Gnostic search for the pure and absolute knowledge
by which human beings are able to perceive their alienated condition for what it is (Goodall
11). This concept is fundamental to Artauds theatre, in his search for an authentic life and
theatre before the corruption of western thought and knowledge. For the shamans, and for
Artaud, this passage to oneness can be sought and expressed through the passage of the voice
within the setting of a physical performance for an audience that this act becomes efficacious.
For what the shaman can do today in ecstasy could, at the dawn of time, be done by all
humans. [] Temporarily and for a limited number of persons the shamans ecstasy re-
establishes the primordial condition of all mankind (Eliade Shamanism 486, italics in
original).
Far from the family shamanism (Eliades term) that characterized most ritual theatre
experiments in the sixties, like Dionysus in 69, Artaud calls for a rigorous
intellectuality and mathematical meticulousness in the midst of trance. [] It is not
the randomness of the unconscious that he favours but its articulating and linguistic
processes. (77)
communication that bridges self with other, and life with death. The theatre of cruelty is not
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an insular, individualistic pursuit, but a social, ritual action that channels and bridges the
Between tradition and blasphemy: Grotowski and Staniewski in search of the voice
Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski spent his career searching for the essence of
theatre, and hence of life, in what may be akin to the shamans search for a primordial
condition. He established the Theatre Laboratory in Poland in 1959, where he worked with
his actors at stripping off the excessive elements of theatre, ridding his Poor Theatre of
make-up, superfluous costuming, scenography, lighting and sound effects, and concluded that
theatre cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, live
communion (9, 19). The religious or spiritual connotations are apt here, as Grotowski refers
to his actors as possessing secular holiness (34). Reminiscent of Artaud, Grotowski defines
the metaphor of the holy actor as a person who, through his art, climbs upon the stake and
performs an act of self-sacrifice (43). The holy actor is not to be taken in the religious,
Christian sense, but in the ritual, shamanistic sense of self-penetration, trance, excess, the
formal discipline itself all this can be realized, provided one has given oneself fully,
Grotowski regarded the function of art to be rooted in a desire to cross our frontiers,
exceed our limitations (21). Theatre in particular, with the already transgressive presence of
the human organisms breath, body, and inner impulses was a site of provocation for
Grotowski, an enticement to push physical, social and spiritual boundaries in search of new
forms of expression:
I have therefore been tempted to make use of archaic situations sanctified by tradition,
situations (within the realms of religion and tradition) which are taboo. I felt the need
to confront myself with these values. They fascinated me, filling me with a sense of
interior restlessness, while at the same time I was obeying a temptation to blaspheme:
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I wanted to attack them, go beyond them. [] This element of our productions has
been variously called collision with the roots, the dialectics of mockery and
apotheosis,or even religion expressed through blasphemy; love speaking out
through hate. (22)
For Grotowski, theatre is grounded in ritual and myth, but the vitality comes from the
transgression of these traditions, going beyond and through the conventional frames.
According to Grotowski, the essential thing for the actor is to be able to overstep every
Like the performance of the shaman, the body and voice of the actor were at the core
of Grotowskis theatre. Extensive physical and vocal training were a fundamental component
of the Theatre Laboratorys work that, rather than adding technical elements, sought to
eliminate obstacles and blockages, via negativa (Grotowski 17, 36). Inspired by, but not
emulating, the ritual theatrical forms of Peking Opera, Indian Kathakali, and Japanese Noh
theatre, Grotowskis actors were to give themselves over entirely, integrating the actors
psychic and bodily powers as in trance (16). In this way, the universal wholeness is
channelled through the actor, particularly through the communication of the voice: The
vocal instrument is an empty channel. Just let the voice pour forth (Grotowski quoted in
Slowiak and Cuesta 151). The actors voice and body arguably become receptacles for the
possibility of something other, similar to the shaman, thus creating a bridge to another realm,
In order to achieve this level of openness and receptivity, Grotowskis actors needed
to develop their respiratory and vocal apparatus to a virtuosic degree, extending and
enhancing the relationship between the voice and the body: [The actor] should know how to
direct the air to those parts of the body where sound can be created and amplified by a sort of
resonator (Grotowski 35). Grotowskis system of resonators sought out new thresholds of
vocal production by visualising the projection of the vocal sound through various key points
of the body. Some of these resonators were familiar, such as the head, nasal, and chest, but
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Grotowski expanded the imagery to include occipital, laryngeal and maxillary resonators, as
well as creating simultaneous resonances that led to a total resonator of the whole body
(122-3). This exploration at the boundaries and margins of the production of vocal sound was
both a practical exercise, and an almost mystic search for undiscovered sounds in uncharted
territories. These resonated sounds occur at the intersection of voice, body and imagination,
emanating both from the mouth and from the vibrating area of focus. It was from these
discoveries that an actor would become vocally prepared to develop a performance score that
transcended and transgressed the conventional boundaries of theatre, opening them up to the
Grotowskis later work left behind the theatre of productions, pushing the
boundaries of the theatrical encounter and delving further into the essence of theatre and
performance. He did this initially through his paratheatrical work in Poland and later, from
1976 until 1982, with his Theatre of Sources research, travelling in India, Mexico and Haiti,
in search of the sources of traditional ritual performances, particularly ancient and traditional
source base, gathering ancient vocal texts and searching for lost vocalities and sounds, but his
work has remained intrinsically theatrical. In the 1970s, before founding Gardzienice,
Staniewski was invited by Grotowski to work with the Laboratory Theatres paratheatrical
programme, but after five years with the Laboratory, Staniewski left to refocus on theatre-
making in the search for something with its own performative architecture, possessing more
than changing rituals and ceremonies (3-4). The performances of his avant-garde theatre
company, Gardzienice, are grounded in the musicality and songs of indigenous European
cultures, which were initially gathered in expeditions to rural villages in Eastern Poland,
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where gatherings would facilitate the exchange of songs and performances between the
western actors and audiences and developing new ways of connecting with music, theatre,
nature and identity. He claims that the reduction of western music since the Middle Ages
corresponds with the reduction of actors expressions in sound, and in his theatre wants to:
expand the actors instrumentarium towards musicality, not only shouts and cries but also all
the phenomena, which are sitting inside of us (65, italics in original). Staniewski
distinguishes between the reduced, codified music and a more ancient notion of musicality
that forms an immediate connection with the natural world and our inner beings. He wants to
re-introduce the dissonances and microtones that exist in the cracks of our contemporary
musical experiences, and in his theatre, aims to salvage musicality for theatre work in order
to widen perceptions and experiences beyond the usual patterns (65). This musicality is
everything which sounds beyond the edges of the codified system (CD-ROM). According
work, because it combines music and musicality, existing between the two: Codified music
can be taken as a well-constructed argument whereas musicality is a flow of life (65). The
flow of life evokes the idealised feminine voice, unbound by social and lingual structures,
and intrinsically connected to concepts of nature and the primordial. This unbound voice may
provides a frame for the experience, allowing for experimentation and transgression, but
retaining some form of familiarity and structure (65). In this way, it relates well to my own
allowed for freedom and exploration, while retaining a sense of meaningful communication
with an audience.
Channelling the primordial voice: John Tavener and Bjrks Prayer of the Heart
lament. The piece had a shamanistic quality, building in intensity to an almost ecstatic
climax, before calming down into a more sedate, incantatory Mori chant. The sound of my
singing alternated between the pure vowels of operatic singing, and the abject, penetrated and
smeared notes of something else. These vocal contrasts created a sense of multiple voices,
and suggested a source from the margins or the undersides, hidden in the cracks of the
chromatic scale. The piece signalled the beginning of the performance and the beginning, or
the extension, of some kind of ritual. The vocal prologue was modelled on forms that serve to
mediate between the living and the dead, or between this world and somewhere other, and my
engagement with the material sought to emulate this in some way, although what this other
force might be remained a mystery and possibly exists only somewhere in my imagination.
This was perhaps what Grotowski was referring to when he claimed that the voice is an
empty channel. It is not necessary to define what is being channelled, so long as you let it
Hereafter ended with a similarly incantatory feel, using a vocal piece that sought to
form a bridge between the living and the dead, this time based on a Greek Orthodox prayer.
In many ways, the Greek Orthodox prayer is the antithesis of the Greek lament for the dead,
as the lament is founded on pagan beliefs that were subsequently banished by the Christian
authorities, but both forms seek a connection with the hereafter, while providing comfort for
The piece we used was a contemporary setting of the Orthodox Prayer of the Heart
by British composer John Tavener, written for and performed by Icelandic pop singer Bjrk,
with the Brodsky Quartet. The meditative piece repeats the ejaculatory prayer, Lord Jesus
Christ, have mercy on me, in successive Coptic, Greek and English sequences. We
performed the first seven minutes of the fifteen minute piece, ending on an ascending,
questioning phrase and not performing the concluding English section of the piece. I began to
quietly sing the Prayer underneath the final lines of Wolfs monologue, slowly building and
eventually enveloping the masculine voice inside the feminine sonority of the prayer. By this
stage, I had left my seated position at the side, and was standing atop of the bed, astride the
prostrated figure of Wolf, pointing the gun directly at his head. In the final moments of the
song, after the monologue had ceased, there was a sense that Wolf was now dead, if he had
not already been so, but the liminality of the limbo setting was not fully resolved, reinforced
by the questioning tone of the final notes of my voice and the double-bass.
Taveners music is informed by his deeply spiritual philosophies and resonates with
him into collision with Tradition, and he subsequently sought inspiration from Sufi, Hindu
and Buddhist musical forms (Tavener). He believed that music should ultimately seek truth
and beauty in a bid to communicate the sound of the beloved. He was critical of the po-
faced modernist music that was devoid of spirituality and unable to bring forth God
(Tavener). Tavener believed that no composer had the right to subject their audience to
existential angst and in his own music, opened himself up as a channel through which the
Angel of Inspiration could dictate music of beauty and spirit. This Angel of Inspiration is
Tavener asserted that his Prayer of the Heart couldnt possibly be sung by anyone but
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Bjrk, or someone with a voice very similar to hers (Tavener). Bjrks voice appealed to
Tavener for its raw, primordial sound and its savage and untamed quality (Tavener). Of
all the pieces in Hereafter, this was the most difficult for me to sing, despite being the
simplest musically. Bjrk seems to relish dismembered phrases and cracks between registers,
but I struggled with these ruptures that so deeply contradicted everything I had learned to
conceal and smooth over in my years of classical training. I wanted to strip off the layers of
technique and expose my own primordial voice, but I discovered how intensely I had
internalised the rules and regulations handed down to me from singing teachers, where all the
techniques are aimed at taming and cultivating the voice, and removing any remnants of the
primordial.
Like other pop vocalists her voice sounds untutored, which suggests that she, and her
music, are unsullied by human or technological artifice: the noisy breaths, explosive
consonants, shrieks, howls, and guttural explosions are the opposite of trained
(classical) vocal styles. (54)
The assumption that the untrained voice is uncorrupted, and therefore more authentic and
natural than a trained voice, is in contrast to Diamanda Gals, who strives for the
you cant express or be yourself. [] When you are singing to the gods you must have a
superlative technique to extrovert the ride to ride the outer limits of the soul (Gals
Bjrks signature cracks and explosions are reminiscent of what Roland Barthes has
described as the grain of the voice: The grain is the body in the voice as it sings, the
hand as it writes, the limb as it performs (188). Listening to Bjrk singing Prayer of the
Heart, the focus is directed to the meaning of the prayer, pleading for Christs mercy, and the
sound of the physical effort may reinforce this intent. The conveyance of physical struggle
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through the voice can be compared to Artauds vocal embodiment of the Plague at the
Sorbonne, or to the Maniot lamenters stylised use of sobbing and sharp intake of breath to
communicate the deepest possible levels of pain. Hearing the body from which the sound
emanates has a visceral effect on the listener, communicating the struggle or the pain directly
to their body.
Bjrks anti-virtuosity also seems linked to the ambiguous artistic space she occupies,
somewhere between pop and the avant-garde, as well as folk and world music influences. She
has expressed an aim to create innovative music for the everyday person (Dibben 160),
and has stated that she couldve so easily gone and become a composer and done some
avant-garde music in some corner for the chosen eleven and half person [sic]. But Ive never
wanted to do that (Bjrk quoted in Dibben 159). As opposed to Galss classical lineage,
Bjrk is more closely aligned with rock, punk, and pop vocalists, whose style evolves from
less formal folk traditions. According to John Potter and Neil Sorrell, it was mid-twentieth
century singers such as Elvis Presley who released the natural voice, giving singers
permission to shout and scream as well as croon (254), and subsequent folk singer-
songwriters such as Bob Dylan and rock bands such as The Rolling Stones and The Beatles
who crossed the bridge between song-writing and singing, placing more emphasis on
authentic delivery of ones own work, rather than virtuosic performance of somebody elses.
Grotowski, Staniewski and Wagner for more authentic theatrical and musical forms,
seeking inspiration from the folk or primordial roots of performance and voice.
Bjrks musical position between pop, folk and the avant-garde is combined through
her use of technology. In the 1990s, she merged the electronic beats of popular house music
with traditional song forms (Dibben 74), and experimented with techniques used almost
exclusively by avant-garde and underground musicians, such as her use of micro-beats (79).
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Micro-beats are the accidental blips and clicks of electronic music, emphasising the in-
between tones and sounds (79) and mirroring Bjrks voice, which also embellishes the
cracks and inconsistencies of what is often hidden from conventional vocal music. The use of
music, attempting to open up our modern ears to sounds from the past which we can no
longer hear. Bjrks use of micro-tones may open up our ears to sounds from the future
Like Gals, and also like Artaud and the lamenting Maniot women, Bjrks songs
begin from text, but then refuse to be contained within the bounds of language, transitioning
of the singing voice (Dibben 54), a form of vocal expression between this world and a
primordial ideal. Bjrks music, like that of all experimental voices, emerges from the
crossroads, from the liminal space between: between control and chaos; between
experimental and pop; between the primordial and the futuristic; between human and
machine.
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This chapter will examine the performance of vocal expressions that come into being
somewhere between the human voice and the machine. By this I mean the human voice that
the signifiers and the capabilities of the human voice and becoming something other. These
disembodied voices become meaningful when they are given a corporeality within the
theatricality of the pioneering electroacoustic work of the mid-twentieth century, where the
repositioning of the human voice amidst magnetic tape, filters, and oscillators, unsettled its
usual signifiers, and perhaps fulfilled what Artaud envisioned as [giving] words something
of the significance they have in dreams (72). These sonic worlds created new possibilities
for audience reception, whereby rather than watching a physical performance unfold on stage,
the drama played out inside the minds of the audiences, guided by unconscious fears and
These techniques have been successfully exploited on the soundtracks of thrillers and
horror films, where the interplay between human voice and machine is used to far more
terrifying effect than any form of visual trigger. Michel Chion suggests that the power of this
mechanised voice without a place: takes us back to an archaic, original stage [] during
which the voice was everything and it was everywhere (27). Mladen Dolar relates the terror
of this placeless voice to its unsettling reminder that the source of the voice can never be
seen, it stems from an undisclosed and structurally concealed interior, it cannot possibly
match what we can see (70). The voice that resonates between human and machine may be
an unsettling reminder that the voice in general can never really be located or captured. It is
inherently transgressive.
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This chapter focuses particularly on the 1961 electroacoustic work, Visage, composed
by Luciano Berio with singer, Cathy Berberian, which formed the basis of the second musical
piece in Hereafter. Visage is a twenty-one minute work that Berio constructed by splicing
and realigning magnetic tape recordings of Berberians voice. The vocal source materials
featured a range of expressions, from sighs and gasps, to screams, to various styles of
laughter, to nonsense languages formed out of Hebrew, Neapolitan and English phonologies.
The repositioning of the vocal material and its juxtaposition and synthesis with various
level, but communicates directly and forcibly with the imagination. This is reflected in
Berios own account of the work: To start with I was thinking of Visage as a soundtrack for
an imaginary drama. Instead, it turned out to be a highly complex work which is rather
Visage appealed to me for its deeply theatrical exploration of human vocal expression,
which seemed like an extension of Artauds final radiophonic experiments. Both pieces
deconstruct language and use screams and sound effects in order to overwhelm and disorient
the audience. Both pieces were conceived for radio, and both were initially banned from
public broadcast. In the case of Artauds Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, this is
perhaps not surprising, with its Anti-American vitriol and the scatological and blasphemous
language an obvious and intentional provocation. In Visage, however, only one actual word is
ever uttered: parole, Italian for words. It seems apparent that Visage was deemed
obscene by the Italian public broadcasting company not for any offensive language or
visual images, but for the obscenity that is suggested in the mind of the audience when raw
unseen female voice is given the name: Visage. A visage, a face to be seen and looked at,
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seems to suggest something intrinsically theatrical in the work, an evocation of character and
role that is represented through the voice. In Hereafter, we used the first eight minutes of
Visage as material for creating a piece closely modelled on the original, but adapted to live,
non-electronic performance for double-bass and voice. We were not concerned with
emulating the electronic component of Visage, but wanted to explore the way the work
deconstructs vocal and musical expression and creates new meaning through the
The central monologue of Hereafter recounted a life lived in the underworld, full of
graphic descriptions of sex and violence, filtered through the inarticulate ramblings of the
them. He describes the look, feel and taste of specific parts of female bodies and has a myriad
of ways of naming breasts, but these female bodies always remain in parts and do not form a
whole. By reducing these female bodies to their sexual functions, he objectifies them as
Sexmachines like him. The inherent violence of these dismembered descriptions could be
compared to the process of constructing the deconstructed female voice in Visage, where the
through my voice. Like the unseen voice of the original, my face was also unseen, concealed
behind the Hitler mask. At the beginning of the piece, I fought to find a voice, somehow
constricted by my own vocal apparatus. Slowly my voice struggled through the consonants,
before finding liberation in the vowels. After this initial struggle for vocality, I created vocal
fragments in relation to the play of the double-bass, eventually forming phrases out of
nonsense languages. This vocal fragmentation and dislocation could be seen to echo what
Wolf Sexmachine does through language: the female voice is chopped up and no longer
resembles a whole. However, in Visage, and in our performance, the female voice reasserts
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itself, and resists reduction and categorisation. Our version ended with the juxtaposition of
agonised screams and sobbing with dismissive laughter that seemed to mock and enjoy the
preceding signifiers of terror and victimhood. This female voice reclaims dismemberment as
something empowering that allows it to reflect and comment on the dominating, male
In Alternative Voices (1984), Istvan Anhalt writes of a trend that has been noticeable
the appearance of a succession of new compositions for the voice that use it in ways
other than exclusively in the usual singing mode. Spoken, whispered, murmured,
and hummed delivery is combined in these works with normal singing and with such
marginal sounds as coughing, singing, audible breathing. While some pieces use a
syntactically correct text, others employ language in different kinds of construction.
(3)
Anhalt traces the recent antecedents of this trend to the early twentieth century, with the
Modernist, Futurist and Dadaist movements challenging the boundaries of voice, language,
and tonality. I will briefly outline these earlier influences that were later to be developed in
speaking, led the way to widespread explorations of new types of vocal sounds and
experimentations with pitched, unpitched and extended vocal techniques (Dunsby 6). The
inspiration for the Sprechstimme harked back to earlier examples of melodrama, such as Jean-
Jacques Rousseaus Pygmalion (1772), which sought a voice between the speaking,
declaiming voice and the operatic bel canto style (Anhalt 7). Schoenbergs first fully
developed example of the Sprechstimme was his female solo melodrama, Pierrot lunaire
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(1912), which consisted of twenty-one poems, delivered by a vocalist, costumed in the style
of commedia dellarte (Dunsby 6). The commedia style is also evident in the form and
performance of Pierrot lunaire, where the vocalist both narrates and acts, maintaining
similarities with commedia, where the masked character can be both inside and outside the
role, between the audience and the action on stage. This ambiguity is another example of the
experimental voice that communicates in-between fixed identities: between first and third
person narrative; between singing and speaking; between the high art of a classical music
concert and the low art of cabaret and commedia dellarte. The theatricality of Pierrot lunaire
created a liminal space where it was possible to transgress the usual conventions of vocal
performance, allowing for the creation of a voice that unsettled categorisation, not quite
Around the same time, the founder of the Futurist movement, poet Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti, demanded that the vocalist completely dehumanize his voice, systematically
doing away with every modulation and nuance (Tommaso quoted in Anhalt 10). To do this,
he must metallize, liquefy, vegetalize, petrify, and electrify his voice, grounding it in the
10). Marinetti promoted the embodiment of the machine as a liberating tool, freeing the voice
from socially prescribed notions of the past and of nature. This futurist voice would be
accompanied by the instrumentation of hammers, automobile horns, saws and electric bells,
seeking the noises that would blend with the vocally produced onomatopoeic sounds (Anhalt
10). Rather than restricting or surpassing the human voice, the futurists saw technology as
something that might liberate the voice from the shackles of the past, helping to create a
Evolving out of the devastation of the First World War, the Dada movement was also
concerned with liberating the social and political voice. This was partly done by privileging
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raw voice and sound in a critique against language and peoples unquestioning acceptance of
their own, the Dadaists hoped to make people aware of the construction of signification,
provoking them to reinterpret and challenge art, literature and the entire social system
(Kuenzli 17). According to Dadaist, Hans Arp: Dada wanted to replace the logical nonsense
of the men of today by the illogically senseless (Arps quoted in Ades 18).
From their initial performance base at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the Dadaists
presented cubist dances, short plays, and various forms of poetry that upheld their principles
of illogical senselessness (Kuenzli 18). Founding Dadaist, Hugo Ball, developed sound
poems as a means of seeking out the essence of language that might emerge from the
primeval strata untouched and not reached by logic and by the social apparatus (Ball quoted
in Kuenzli 19). He also developed the simultaneous poem, consisting of three or more
voices speaking, singing, and whistling at the same time, as a way of rupturing the veneer of
The simultaneous poem has to do with the value of the voice. The human organ
represents the soul, the individuality in its wanderings with its demonic companions.
The noises represent the background the inarticulate, the disastrous, the decisive.
The poem tries to elucidate the fact that man is swallowed up in the mechanistic
process. In a typically compressed way it shows the conflict of the vox humana with a
world that threatens, ensnares, and destroys it, a world whose rhythm and noise are
ineluctable. (Ball quoted in Kuenzli 194, italics in original)
In contrast to the Futurist view of the mechanistic process as a potential source of liberation,
the Dadaists conceived of it as a predatory force that swallows us up. This terminology
already suggests a link between the mechanistic process of the machine and the organic
process of the body, where the notion of swallowing conjures up the fear of the abyss implicit
in the unseen recesses of both. The Futurists tried to mechanise the human, while the
Dadaists tried to humanise the machine. In resistance to the mechanics of the machine, the
Dada poets mine the depths of the voice, searching for the primordial essence of vocal
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utterance, while exploring sound in a non-verbal way that seems to emulate the succinctness
and timbre of the machine, creating an organic monster somewhere in-between. The search
for a voice between primordial nature and the mechanical future resounds in the liminality of
avant-garde performance.
In the late 1940s, the fusion of the human voice and the machine became a literal
possibility with the advent of the electroacoustic tape piece (Causton 15). With this new
technology, it became possible for composers to create entirely new musical sound worlds.
This could be done using electrically powered frequency oscillators, rather than the natural
naturally produced sounds beyond recognition (Causton 16). This new technology gave
composers the opportunity to control every aspect of the construction and performance of
Unlike the experience of listening to a piece of music and identifying specific musical
instruments by their timbre and tone, electronically produced sounds have no frame of
reference by which the audience might identify the source of the sound, as there is no visible
or material source. Consequently, these new sounds create new signifiers by the way they are
positioned in time and space, in relation to other sounds, and in relation to the audience, who
asserts that all electroacoustic music is inherently theatrical, and that the tendency to invoke
In this theatrical sound world, the human voice carries much significance. It adds
layers of meaning and complexity through language, vocal tone, and timbre, and ultimately
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may communicate on a visceral level that other sounds cannot. Causton evokes the example
of the sound of a cry of pain, which works directly on the nervous system of the audience,
despite being disembodied and removed from its natural and visible source. Composer and
sonic artist Trevor Wishart proposes that: with music for voice [] it is doubtful whether
we can ever banish from our apprehension of the sound the recognition of a human source
(Wishart quoted in Causton 17). The human voice can never be completely swallowed by the
Luciano Berio took a particular interest in the voice. His work often surpassed the expected
sung forms of classical music, and sought inspiration from non-verbal, non-musical
vocalisms. He claimed:
I have always been very sensitive, perhaps overly so, to the excess of connotations
that the voice carries, whatever it is doing. From the grossest of noises to the most
delicate of singing, the voice always means something, always refers beyond itself
and creates a huge range of associations: cultural, musical, emotive, physiological, or
drawn from everyday life. (Berio quoted in Osmond-Smith Two Interviews 94)
Berio initially explored this fascination with the extreme and banal range of the voice in
relation to his enthusiasm for the new technologies of electronic music. He first heard a piece
of tape music at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1952, which was an experience
devoid of musical content, entirely innocuous, but it left him with an impression of what
could be done with magnetic tape, and cutting up sounds with scissors (Berio quoted in
Osmond-Smith Two Interviews 117). He co-founded the electronic music studio, Studio di
Fonologia, with Bruno Maderna in Milan in 1955. The name of the studio literally translates
to Studio of Phonology and a large impetus of the experimentation was concerned with
exploring the creative potential of phonetics (Osmond-Smith Tenth Oscillator 7). Berios first
completed electroacoustic work was Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958), in which recordings
of spoken passages of James Joyces Ulysses were cut up and electronically manipulated. He
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and his collaborators were especially fascinated with the onomatopoeic qualities of Joyces
text, and the way he deconstructed and re-appropriated the signifiers of language (Osmond-
The voice Berio used in his Omaggio a Joyce was that of his wife and collaborator,
American mezzo-soprano, Cathy Berberian. They met while studying music in Milan in
1950, and much of Berios vocal music was written for, or developed with, Berberians
virtuosic voice (Osmond-Smith Tenth Oscillator 2). Berberian was also popular with other
contemporary avant-garde composers. John Cage was so impressed by her parodied rendition
of a one-woman simulacrum of tape editing that he composed Aria (1959) for her, a vocal
mimesis of edited tape, in which Berberian sings twenty different voice types in five
Tenth Oscillator 5). In the same year, Bruno Maderna created the tape piece, Dimensioni II or
Berberians virtuosic ability led to her being dubbed the tenth oscillator of the
studio, and Berio claimed her voice was almost a studio di fonologia for me (Berio in
Osmond-Smith Two Interviews 94, italics in original). From this perspective, Berberians
voice is not only mixed with the machine, but is seen to become part of the mechanistic
process itself, somehow detached from her own body and creating sounds that arise from a
synthesis between human and machine. This Berberian-oscillator combines the emotional
expressivity of the human, female voice with the efficient perfection of the machine,
potentially losing its own agency and becoming a mere property of the studio. Alternatively,
human virtuosity.
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In 1961, Berio and Berberian created Visage, the culmination of these early
within a parabola from the failure of communication, through trivial conversation, to serious
emotion, and ultimately to song (Osmond Smith Tenth Oscillator 8). Berio claimed that he
worked with words in order to find new meanings in them, by analysing them acoustically
and musically. He worked to rediscover words and their meaning, aware that any vocal
gesture, such as a sigh or a breath, contain meaning and cannot be completely disassociated
Visage began from improvisations of a vast range of vocal expressions, from the
everyday sounds of sighs and laughter, to various made-up languages, to sobbing and
screaming. Within these categories, Berberian explored the various textures and colours of
expressivity. The laughter was sometimes forced and strident, and at other times refined and
distant. The languages were based on the phonology of English, Hebrew and Neapolitan
single phonemes and syllables, and at other times pronounced fluidly and purposefully, as if
some kind of incantation (Causton 17). The only fully formed, comprehendible word ever
The most crucial aspect of Visage is the way these vocal improvisations are placed in
relation to each other and to the electronically-produced sounds. Positioning the voice against
identifiable timbre of a musical instrument, these mechanised sounds cast the audience into
an alien and initially incomprehensible world. The introduction of the human voice into this
setting may be initially reassuring, but ultimately it makes the situation more unsettling. The
first vocal sounds are the beginnings of words, struggling to be enunciated through the hard
but in the mind of the audience, this inability to vocalise may be evocative of choking and
pain. Berberian is announcing the threshold of the voice, making audible the gap between the
inside and the outside, of what is heard and what is not heard, and this is unsettling.
The voice in Visage provides fragments of familiarity and signification, but the
discontinuities and juxtapositions of conflicting emotions make the human experience of this
world even more terrifying. One particularly disturbing moment in Visage features
Berberians anguished screams set against a sharp, electronically-produced sound that seems
to strike down on her, like an axe. Her screams are followed by sobbing, which is then
immediately juxtaposed with maniacal laughter that dissolves into multiphonic vocal fry. The
initial sounds of distress and terror are immediately followed with sounds of pleasure and
enjoyment, and even mockery. At other times, the sounds of the voice and the sounds of the
machine become indistinguishable, troubling any notions that the voice and the machine are
Visage was conceived for radio, but was deemed obscene and was banned from
authoritys decision, with live audiences being deeply disturbed by the works content.
Osmond-Smith suggests that the intertwining of erotic and destructive urges was the most
disturbing element for audiences, giving voice to the border between pleasure and pain
(Tenth Oscillator 9). This was undoubtedly compounded by the fact that these aural images
were created by a synthesis of human and machine, sounding of the ambiguity at the borders
and the margins, where voices and bodies are not easily defined or contained.
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In A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar suggests that the perception of danger at
the margins and borders is implicit in our reception of the voice (50). There is nothing
reassuring or certain about the voice, which embodies the rupture between the interior and the
exterior, and binds language to the body, despite being uncontainable by either (72). The
voice stands at the intersections of inside/outside and language/body, and therefore represents
the dangerous liminal space in-between. Dolar claims that: The voice is elusive, always
changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence,
solidity, durability of the seen (79). He suggests that a visible vocal source is required to
neutralise the danger and obscenity of the untamed voice. According to Dolar, the voice
comes from some unfathomable invisible interior and brings it out, lays it bare, discloses,
uncovers, reveals that interior (80). If we can identify the source, we can isolate and contain
We cannot see the source of the voice and we cannot define the electronic soundscape in
which it is contained. Mediated by technology, this un-locatable voice can multiply and
magnify. It flits in and out of language, but is never quite captured. It appears and disappears,
but we sense its omnipresence, ready to assert itself at any time. The works title, Visage,
reminds us of the usual visual source of the voice: the face. The voice passes through the
mouth and is made rationally meaningful through the articulation of language. The lips
pronounce the words and the face enhances the expression. By naming the work Visage,
Berio points to the absence of a face in the work, but also suggests that the same breadth of
expression may be perceived instead through the voice. In an interview, Berio compared the
way the voice may come to represent an expressivity which is like that of a human face
which can at times be happy, sad, joyful, tired and in the end lifeless (Berio quoted in
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Brodsky). In Visage, Berio and Berberian convey these multiple varied expressions through
Visage is a more ambiguous word than face, as it also refers to appearance. The
Oxford Dictionary provides a pertinent example of this other meaning: there was something
hidden behind his visage of cheerfulness (OED). Unlike face, which has connotations of
transparency (face value, on the face of it), visage has more sinister undertones,
implying that there may be something hidden beneath the exterior. Applying this idea of a
visage to the voice, suggests something hidden beneath the exterior of the voice. In Visage,
this hidden voice comes to the surface as screams and otherworldly, electronically-enhanced
vocal sounds, penetrating the facile nature of everyday chatter and innocuous expression. The
most disturbing aspect of the emergence of the hidden voice may be the underlying
realisation that the voice is always hidden, even when it seems to be revealed.
In Hereafter, my body was present on stage, but like Visage, the audience could not
see the source of my voice, where the voice passes the threshold between inside and outside,
because my face was obscured by a mask and my mouth was not visible to the audience. The
mask presented a static, emotionless visage that was clearly concealing something
underneath. The mask bore the face of Hitler, a symbol of evil, whose rise to power was
boosted by the masterful use of his voice within the theatrical frame of Nazi rallies, and
filmic and radio broadcasts. In Hereafter, a sinister effect was created by the juxtaposition of
the lifeless visage of Hitler, with an incongruous, living voice underneath. This liminal
position between seen and unseen, between male mask and female voice, and between live
body and deadly visage, evoked a sense of the uncanny, something strange but familiar, and
ultimately unsettling. In his book, The Uncanny, Nicholas Royle claims that uncanniness is
In his 1919 essay, Sigmund Freud seeks to distinguish the uncanny from other
frightening things (Uncanny 219), starting from a linguistic examination of the German term,
Unheimlich, and exploring the dual connotations of heimlich. Heimlich can mean
homely and familiar as well as concealed and kept from sight (Uncanny 222-3). In this
way, even the word itself is a source of uncertainty: heimlich is a word the meaning of
which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite,
unheimlich (Freud Uncanny 226). Following this linguistic examination and Frederich
Schellings assertion that everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and
hidden but has come to light (Freud Uncanny 225), Freud suggests that the uncanny relates
to a surfacing of infantile complexes which have been repressed, or primitive beliefs which
have been surmounted: for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something
which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it
This unsettling tension between the familiar and the uncanny is fundamental to
language is immersed in a strange, inhuman soundscape. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect
of Visage is that we cannot quite grasp onto the everyday vocal sounds, and conversely, there
Listening to Visage, we are plunged into an ambivalent, liminal world, where voice and
machine slowly come together to form something not quite belonging to either.
human and machine, can be compared to the figure of Olympia, the automaton from E. T. A.
Hoffmanns short story, The Sandman, a work fundamental to the discourse on the uncanny.
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proposes that the most common cause of evoking uncanny effects is by creating doubt as to
whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless
object may not in fact be animate (11). In Visage, this doubt arises when Berberians vocal
phrases are juxtaposed in unusual, inhumane ways, such as anguished screaming placed
beside laughter, or when her voice is electronically manipulated, such as when vocal fry is
In The Sandman, Hoffmanns casting doubt over whether living or lifeless beings are
animate is used to both critique the cultural artificiality of the courtly behaviour of upper
classes, where automated dolls might be mistaken for living people, and to comment upon the
humans. In the tale, the protagonist, Nathaniel, falls madly in love with an automaton,
perfectly proportioned and gorgeously dressed (99) physique, but is soon also taken with
Olympia played the piano with great accomplishment, and performed equally well a
bravura aria in an almost piercingly clear, bell-like voice. Nathaniel was utterly
entranced. [] The artificial roulades seemed to Nathaniel the heavenly rejoicing of a
soul transfigured by love, and when at last, after the cadenza, the long trill shrilled out
through the room, as though suddenly embraced by glowing arms he could no longer
restrain himself and he cried aloud in pain and rapture: Olympia! (113)
classical, operatic singing. The notion of artificial roulades and shrill trilling suggests an
unreal, mechanical style of delivery that is perhaps not quite human, or somehow not
plays and sings it is with the unpleasant soulless regularity of a machine. [] We have come
to find this Olympia quite uncanny (116). In both Nathaniels and Siegmunds accounts,
technical vocal mastery is equated with technology and artifice. The uncanniness of the voice
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between human and machine may arise from the feeling that the voice will reveal itself to be
feelings of unease arise from intellectual uncertainty over whether a being is animate or
inanimate (Uncanny 230). He instead suggests that the central theme is related to the
mythical figure of the Sandman (Uncanny 227), who steals childrens eyes, by throwing
handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody (Hoffmann
87). Freud proposes that this anxiety about ones eyes and the fear of going blind is a
substitute for the dread of being castrated (Uncanny 231). When sight is lost, other senses
are heightened. The obscenity of Visage seems to be predicated on the audiences projection
of fantasies onto the reassembled vocal material. Similarly, Royle suggests that Hoffmann
introduces the uncanny in the experience of sound, ear and voice, claiming: there is
repeated emphasis on the frightening sound of the sandman (46, italics in original).
Nathaniel dreads the foreboding sound of Coppelius on the stairs and is later haunted by his
call to bring eyes (Hoffmann 91), and by Coppolas refrain of lov-ely occe (109, italics
in original). Near the end of the tale, Nathaniel appears to be cured of his fears and
obsessions, but in the final episode, the presence of Coppelius in the distance once more
triggers Nathaniels madness. The repressed fears are expressed through his voice, as he rants
about puppets and fire and lov-ely occe, and it is these final words that drive him to his
Like Berberians varied voices in Visage, Nathaniels vocal outbursts seem to have no
rational connection to the concrete world. They come from somewhere unknown and seem to
express the logic of another time or place. These voices may be heard to represent the return
to the surface of hidden or repressed desires and emotions, usually concealed beneath the
everyday visage. A sense of unease arises because, following Schellings definition of the
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uncanny, these voices should not have come to light. They are somehow familiar, but they are
The uncanny feelings aroused in Visage are strongly linked to the inability to locate or
contain the source of the voice. Pierre Schaeffer, an electro-acoustic pioneer and the founder
of musique concrte, coined the term acousmatic to describe a sound that is heard without
its cause or source being seen (Chion 17). The expression, acousmatic, supposedly refers to
the uninitiated followers of the ancient Pythagorean sect. These followers would listen to
their master speak from behind a curtain, so that the sight of the speaker would not detract or
distract them from the message he was delivering (Chion 19). Musique concrte composer
and film theorist, Michel Chion, compares the acousmatic voice behind the curtain to the
omnipresent and omniscient voice of God, especially as represented in Islam and Judaism,
which is heard but its source is never seen. The unseen voice of the Pythagorean Master or
the all-knowing God is enhanced and mystified by this lack of a visible presence. This could
be compared to the heightened fear experienced by Nathaniel, as he hides behind the curtain,
electroacoustic music that uses acoustic sounds as source material, as opposed to music
where the sounds are created electronically (Schrader 2). According to Schaeffer, traditional
music begins with abstract ideas that become concrete only in performance while musique
concrte starts with concrete material that is made abstract during experimentation and
musique concrte always have a source somewhere other, and resound in an uncanny, liminal
space. Berio referred to this as: creating a bridge between the familiar and the unfamiliar,
Allen Weiss describes Schaeffers creation of a sound object as: not a musical
composition but a musical drama of sound effects (Radio 298). As with Visage, the audience
creates the theatre in the mind, triggered by these uncanny sounds. Schaeffers first musique
concrte works were created the same year as Artauds Pour en finir avec le jugement de
dieu, and the similarities in form suggest a fusion of the musical and the dramatic in these
new recorded sound works. Artauds search for more immediate forms of communication and
theatrical expression corresponded with Schaeffer, who was especially interested in the
expressive potential of radio and film to be able to engage with concrete or real sounds, and
music world. In 1958, composer and conductor Pierre Boulez wrote of Artaud:
I can find in his writings the fundamental preoccupations of current music; having
heard him read his own texts, accompanying them with screams, noises, rhythms, he
showed us how to achieve a fusion of sound and word, how to splash out the phoneme
when the word no longer can, in short, how to organize delirium. (Boulez quoted in
Weiss Radio 298)
improvisations for Visage, where the reorganisation and juxtaposition of dislocated vocal
expressions conjures up the sense of a dislocated mind. In his later work, Sequenza III, for
female voice, Berberians voice flits between coughing, various forms of laughter, rapid
mutterings and passages of broken down text sung in a coloratura style. Unlike Visage, the
splicing and juxtaposition of voice is performed live. The piece is primarily a display of vocal
a great variety of feelings, highly unstable moods, anxieties, neurosis, and psychosis.
[] We sense that she may be a person whose thinking and perceiving are regulated
more by irrepressible desires or needs, than by any objective reality around her. Her
changes of mood occur erratically and, at times, rapidly. We have no clues as to the
psychic triggers that set off her vocal actions, and she seems to relate to no outside
trigger at all. (25)
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There is an implied link here between experimental, non-rational vocal expression and
delirium and madness. If there is no outside trigger, the context must come from the inside,
and that is unsettling, more so for the audience than for the vocalist. It is the unconventional
organisation of the voice that creates this unsettling sense of delirium, rather than the actual
sounds of the voice. Like Nathaniel, whose sudden delirium is expressed through his
irrational vocal utterances, a voice that is carefully arranged as if completely disorderly has a
very strong uncanny effect, resonating as the surfacing of what should have remained secret
and hidden. Artaud first demonstrated the disturbing effect of voicing the hidden dis-ease at
his 1933 lecture at the Sorbonne, where his voice embodied the plague, transgressing both the
conventional frame of the lecture, and the boundaries between what should be heard and what
Following on from his earlier experiments, Artaud envisioned Pour en finir avec le
jugement de dieu as the realisation of his Theatre of Cruelty. The radiophonic form gave him
the means to communicate his experimental explorations of sound, voice and language to a
vast, mass audience. Disrupting the structures of theatre and language, Artaud might suggest
something new. Weiss, however, suggests the Theatre of Cruelty might not be capable of
realisation within the frame of this mechanised form, which separates and reconfigures the
In recording, the organic rhythms of the human voice are hyperstatized and ultimately
destroyed by mechanical reproduction, and then ironically these lost body rhythms are
returned by electromechanical means. Thus recording produces an exteriorization and
transformation of the voice, a sort of dispossession of the self. Recording and radio
through a sort of sympathetic magic entail a theft of the voice and a disappearance
of the body. (Radio 300)
Through this swallowing up of Artauds embodied voice into the machine, Weiss suggests
that the very structure of the theological and psychopathological conditions that he fought so
hard to overcome are ironically reinforced (Radio 300). Like the original acousmatic voice
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of the Pythagorean master, Artauds recorded voice becomes imbued with the omniscient and
omnipresent voice of a divine being or a paranoid presence (Weiss Radio 301). The voice
between human and machine is distinctly neither, and remains ambiguous. According to
Weiss: the recorded voice is the stolen voice that returns to me as the hallucinatory presence
of the voice of another (Radio 300). The recorded voice is a reconstruction of a human
voice. It is familiar, but it is not locatable, and its hidden source creates a sense of the
uncanny.
The voice without a visible source is often used to exert an uncanny presence on the
soundtrack of films, where the medium has the ability to conceal the voice outside the frame.
In The Voice in Cinema, Michel Chion claims that the richest of cinematic voice-image
relations is the situation in which we dont see the person we hear (9). He labels this voice
the acousmtre, based on Schaeffers terminology. Chion claims that when the acousmtre
remains not-yet-seen, even an insignificant acousmatic voice becomes invested with magical
powers (23). The acousmtre haunts the borderlands, being neither inside the film nor
outside it. The acousmtre is powerful because of this liminal presence. Chion suggests that
the power of this voice without a place may relate to an archaic, infantile stage of the first
months of life or while in utero, where the voice was everything and all-encompassing. He
According to Chion, fundamental to this tension of the acousmatic voice is the notion
that at any time the face or body might appear and therefore de-acousmatize the voice (22).
Chion compares the process of de-acousmatizing the voice to the act of striptease, with the
ultimate stage being the revealing of the orifice, the mouth from which the voice flows forth
(28). Mladen Dolar draws a paradoxical conclusion from this: ultimately, there is no such
thing as disacousmatisation. The source of the voice can never be seen, it stems from an
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undisclosed and structurally concealed interior, it cannot possibly match what we can see
Slavoj iek suggests that the uncanniness of any voice stems from the fact that
voice is not an organic part of the human body, but comes from somewhere in-between
An unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from its voice. The voice
displays a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we see, so that even
when we see a living person talking, there is always a minimum of ventriloquism at
work: it is as if the speakers own voice hollows him out and in a sense speaks by
itself through him. (iek in Dolar 70)
iek cites The Exorcist as a filmic example that exploits this problem of the voice. In The
Exorcist, the primary manifestation of the young girls demonic possession is through the
voice. She is possessed by a voice in its obscene dimensions (The Perverts Guide to
Cinema), a deep, masculine, distorted voice, coming out of a little girls body. The voice does
not fit with the body, and because of this, it transgresses the bodys boundaries and spews
The sense of the voice as something that cannot be contained or controlled within a
visible body has been exploited in many films, particularly thriller and horror films. Peter
Stricklands 2013 film, Berberian Sound Studio, explicitly explores the relationship between
experimental voice and horror films. The film is set in a 1970s sound studio, where the
soundtrack for The Equestrian Vortex is being recorded. Aside from the opening credits,
we never see the films images, we only see the way the sounds are produced to enhance the
image. Conjuring up the sounds of sadistic and extreme violence, foley artists chop cabbages,
smash marrows, and pour oil into sizzling hot pans. As in Visage, the visual image of the
Strickland is a musique concrte aficionado, who became fascinated with the avant-
garde soundtracks featured in horror films, particularly the Italian giallo films of the 1960s
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and 1970s, where composers such as Bruno Maderna and Ennio Morricone created highly
sophisticated scores (Fuller 1). Strickland started to realise how integral avant-garde music
is to exploitation cinema, how horror lends itself to dissonance, atonal music and music
concrte (Strickland quoted in Fuller 1). His key influence was listening to Cathy
Berberians Visage this 21-minute piece of sound poetry, consisting of very intense
howling, intended only for avant-garde circles. [] I always thought it could be amazing in a
horror film. You can imagine someone like that making money on the side by doing a session
In Berberian Sound Studio, two avant-garde vocalists arrive to perform a session for
the soundtrack of The Equestrian Vortex. Performance artist Katalin Ladik portrays a
vengeful witch through heavy, voiced breathing, creaky vocal fry and stifled, choking noises
that extend into maniacal laughter and screaming. The laughter and vocal fry is reminiscent
of Berberian in Visage, or Diamanda Gals, who has twice created vocal dubs for horror film
witches.9 In another scene in Berberian Sound Studio, free-jazz vocal improviser Jean-Michel
van Schouwburg creates a vocal dub for the character of an aroused, predatory goblin. His
vocalisations stem from deep vocal fry that gradually ascends into manic glossolalia,
violently convulsing from his body. According to Strickland: These artists are not changing
their performance or watering them down. All theyre doing is changing the context of what
they do. [] By switching the association in your mind, it becomes very powerful
(Strickland quoted in Fuller 2). This statement underlines the creative potentials of the
experimental voice in performance. Because it cannot be seen or contained, the identity of the
9
Diamanda Gals has performed sessions for a number of horror movies, including: Voices of the Dead in
Wes Cravens The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988); vocal improvisations on the soundtrack of Clive Barkers
Lord of Illusions (1995); the voice of a witch in Conan the Barbarian (1982); and the voice of a ghost-witch in
James Wans The Conjuring (2013).
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Strickland shows us Ladik and van Schouwburg voicing their monstrous characters.
We see their mouths and their lips moving, at the threshold between inside and outside. At
moments, the shot pulls back to outside the recording box, and we cannot hear the sound, we
only see the facial contortions and bodily movements used to conjure up these voices.
Despite this awareness of the bodily source, the sounds of these voices remain unsettling.
Even though we may be able to categorise the deep, rasping tones as vocal fry, or know the
disconcerting about hearing these strikingly embodied voices. They simultaneously reveal the
cracks and crevices of the human body while remaining hidden and out of sight. The
acousmatic voice of film and electronic music reminds us of this underlying fear of the
Female bodies and voices have a particularly ambiguous relationship with technology.
This chapter will conclude by examining the cyborgian voices of Laurie Anderson, Diamanda
Gals and Bjrk, beginning with two theories from Theodor Adorno and Donna Haraway,
which question the relationship between womens voices and machines. The first of these
theories is based on Adornos observation in 1927, that womens voices were not well
Male voices can be reproduced better than female voices. The female voice easily
sounds shrill not because the gramophone is incapable of conveying the high tones,
as is demonstrated by its adequate reproduction of the flute. Rather, in order to
become unfettered, the female voice requires the physical appearance of the body that
carries it. But it is just this body that the gramophone eliminates, thereby giving every
female voice a sound that is reedy and incomplete. Only where the body itself
resonates, where the self to which the gramophone refers is identical with its sound,
10
Haraway 9
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only there does the gramophone have its legitimate realm of validity: thus Carusos
uncontested dominance. Wherever sound is separated from the body as with
instruments or wherever it requires the body as a complement as is the case with
the female voice gramophonic reproduction becomes problematic. (54)
Adornos observation suggests a gender-specific problem of the technically-mediated voice:
the reproduced male voice, when separated from its visible source, remains identifiable as a
male voice, but the reproduced female voice is problematic, because when separated from its
visible source, the sound is not clearly identifiable as a female voice. It transgresses
categorisation.
operatic nature. The female voices he refers to may be singing coloratura arias, like the
automaton, Olympia, with artificial roulades and shrill trilling, that sound not quite
human. Adornos observation may reflect Siegmunds reaction: We have come to find this
Olympia quite uncanny (Hoffmann 116). Adorno also aligns the female voice with musical
instruments, which are similarly difficult to distinguish without a visible source. Musical
instruments are extensions of human sound, resonating somewhere between inanimate object
and human expression. When Adorno describes the recorded female voice as reedy, he
seems to be comparing it to the sound of an oboe, bassoon or clarinet, implying the spectre of
a not-quite-human element in the sound of the recorded female voice. This comparison with
the mechanical suggests a quality of the female voice that is not quite natural, something
between human and machine that is heightened when the voice is swallowed up in the
Adornos observation remains pertinent in the way it links womens voices to mechanics and
technology. Adorno does not specify the type or style of voice he is listening to, but simply
dichotomises male and female voice, reinforcing cultural dualisms and essentialisms that
relegate women to the role of other. This relationship between womans voice and machine
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is viewed as problematic and negative, but more recently, feminists have reclaimed this
Donna Haraway wrote her essay Manifesto for Cyborgs in 1985, to suggest a way
out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to
ourselves (39). Haraway proposes the hybrid, liminal figure of the cyborg, between human
and machine, as both a way of re-evaluating womans relationship with technology, and as a
means of transgressing conventional, essentialist boundaries. She suggests that there are
great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown
of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the
Western self (32). Following Mary Douglass highlighting of the fundamental relationship
between body imagery and world view, Haraways manifesto suggests a politics of
ambiguity, transgressing the boundaries between organism and machine, and other
distinctions of the Western self (31-2). She suggests this may be achieved by women seizing
the tools to mark the world that marked them as other (33).
considered as a cyborgian performance, in the way that she seizes the tools of technology and
machines to blur the boundaries of nature and gender in her multimedia works. Anderson was
born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois in 1947 and moved to New York City in 1966, where she studied
Art History and trained as a visual artist, completing an MFA in Sculpture at Columbia
University (Looser 87). After graduating, she taught at the City University of New York for
two years, where she discovered that [she] loved just standing there in the dark, showing
pictures and talking (Anderson 94). During this period, Anderson became involved in the
highly charged political atmosphere of the university campuses and avant-garde art scene,
where artists from across disciplines were coming together to question existing conventions
and seek out new forms. As a result of this exposure, Anderson moved away from visual art
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into interdisciplinary performance art (Looser 87). She developed an electronic cabaret
performance style that combines gestures, stories and songs with synthesizers, video
projections and computers, and incorporates elements of storytelling, theatre, ritual, dance,
technology to extend her performance range makes her into a cyborg to begin with: her
performances are produced by something that is part woman, part machine (Presence 116).
This cyborg presence is strikingly manifested through the different ways Anderson constructs
her voice. She employs a range of technologies to alter her voice, including relay effects,
which produce an alienating effect between the voice and the body, and the Harmonizer, a
digital filter that Anderson uses to lower her vocal pitch in order to sound like a man.
Anderson refers to these altered voices as audio masks (Looser 92). The first time she used
the Harmonizer in performance was in 1978, performing at the Nova Convention with
William Burroughs. Anderson reflected that: The machismo surrounding Burroughs was
thick and this filter was my weapon, my defence. It was the first time I used an audio mask
and being in drag was thrilling (Anderson quoted in Goldberg 18). Anderson uses the audio
mask of the Harmonizer both to alter her voice, and to alter the audiences perception of
Anderson labels her male voice the Voice of Authority, and she often uses this
audio mask as a means of undermining or interrogating male authority. She also uses the
Voice to confront narratives of political authority, such as in her 1986 concert film, Home of
the Brave, where she uses it to challenge the nationalistic American voice. In the film, the
Voice of Authority complains in the spoken song Difficult Listening Hour that someone has
broken into her/his home, eaten all her/his grapes (the ones I was saving), and torn up
her/his wallpaper samples (Auslander Presence 114). This invasion of the home, the realm of
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the Heimlich, is made both funny and unheimlich by the contradiction between the masculine
voice and the stereotypically female concerns of the home. It is also a reminder of the
unheimlich character of a voice that is not quite at home in its body, like a ventriloquists
This invading capability of the voice is affirmed by the someone who has broken
into the house who reveals that language is a virus from outer space, quoting Burroughs
famous line. Burroughs made an appearance in Home of the Brave, and his avant-garde
literature and spoken word performances influenced Andersons own approach to language
(Goldberg 117). His technique of the cut-up, influenced by the Dadaists, and developed
with painter Brion Gysin, consisted of the cutting up of passages of prose and pasting them
together at random. This technique was also used with tape, film and mixed media
(www.languageisavirus.com). Burroughs and Gysin developed the idea around the same time
that Berio was creating Visage in his studio di fonologia in Milan. This cutting up as a means
of creation undermines the power and authority of structures of language, and allows the
virus:
Its a strange thing for a writer to say that language is a disease communicable by
mouth. Its also a very Buddhist thing to say. I mean, in Buddhist thought theres the
thing and theres the name for the thing and thats one thing too many. Because
sometimes when you say a word, you think you actually understand it. In fact, all
youre doing is saying it, you dont necessarily understand it at all. So language, well,
its a kind of trick. (Anderson quoted in Goldberg 99)
Andersons work seeks to expose the tricks, juxtaposing and challenging not just language,
but the voices, such as her Voice of Authority, that reinforce these ideologies.
Anderson also uses non-verbal, inanimate objects, such as the violin, as extensions of
her voice. Anderson is an accomplished violinist, and has developed a range of modified
its body, and the tape bow violin, with a tape playback head mounted on the bridge, activated
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by a bow made of prerecorded audiotape (Goldberg 77, 80). Anderson has claimed that: For
me, the violin is the perfect alter ego. Its the instrument closest to the human voice, the
human, female voice. Its a siren (Anderson quoted in Goldberg 77). Reminiscent of
Adornos description of the reedy female voice, Anderson aligns the sound of the female
voice with a musical instrument, and with the danger and seduction of the siren, which is not
Two other extensions of Andersons voice are her dummy and her clone. Her digital
clone was created for the television show, Alive from Off Center, in 1986, and was digitally
manipulated to look like a little man with a big head (Goldberg 127). The clone provided
Anderson with another voice through which to talk: The clone is the concept of a surrogate.
At times I use it to say things I dont have the guts to say (Anderson quoted in Goldberg
127). The dummy is a ventriloquists dummy, strongly resembling Anderson, with electronic
components inside its body, enabling it to move and talk. It was first presented in the Nerve
Bible tours of the early 1990s (Looser 102). Both the dummy and the clone speak with the
Voice of Authority, both can be said to represent male versions of Anderson, and both
evoke a sense of the unheimlich. These audio masks allow Anderson to locate the source of
her voice outside her own female body, transgressing dualistic notions of gender, body and
voice, and creating a liminal, cyborgian voice that is somewhere between human and
machine.
Andersons use of audio masks can be compared to the polyphony of voices that
Diamanda Gals embodies in Plague Mass. In This is the Law of the Plague, Gals takes on
two masculine voices of authority: a sharp, cutting, Levitical voice, and a low, drawling,
resonant Preachers voice. These masculine voices are juxtaposed with interspersed
ululations and cries of lament of the high-pitched, shrill voice of the other, representing the
sick, the marginalised and the feminine. The theatricality of Andersons voices is created
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devices, and speaker systems to take her voice beyond humanly possible uses of register,
Galss voice already transgresses conventional forms. Freya Jarman-Ivens argues that it is
the overwhelming bodiliness of Galss voice that marks her sound, and this is enhanced to
extreme levels when combined with technological manipulation (139). Jarman-Ivens suggests
Although by its definition, the cyborg is both cybernetic and organic (part human, part
machine), this version Galss manifestation of the cyborg blurs even further than
is typical the boundaries between those two realms, at the same time as exaggerating
what either of those realms means. Her voice, even on its own [] has the capacity to
produce alien forms within, to make so audible the internal technologies of the
voice that it is altogether unclear at many points where the limits are of the internal
and the external. (139, italics in original)
Galss sound resonates between human and machine, using the extremes of both, and
blurring the boundaries between what is organic and what is machine. She possesses a natural
range of three and a half octaves, but technology enhances this to five or six octaves, and
many commentators assume this to be her naturally extreme range. Technology is not an
term taken from instrumental music to describe where a monophonic instrument is made to
sound multiple pitches simultaneously (139). Vocal multiphonics are usually referred to as
throat singing, but Galas insists on using the instrumental term. Jarman-Ivens suggests that
Galss insistence indicates a desire to make the voice into an instrument that is somehow
separate from her body (140). In this way, Gals transgresses the limits of her voice and
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body, confusing the boundaries between human and machine, and embracing the reedy
problematic of the female voice, as referred to by Adorno. Galss work aims to break down
dualisms, such as the clean/unclean dichotomy presented in Plague Mass that can be
extended to represent all marginalised others. Unlike popular music that describes the
thing, Galass work becomes the thing itself (Juno 14). Gals uses her voice to break
down dualisms, embodying the transgression by blurring the boundaries between self and
other, male and female, and human and machine. By breaking down dualisms in the form of
Bjrks work could also be said to be the thing itself, without describing or
interrogating the politics of the thing. Her music explores the spaces between human and
machine, embodying aspects of a cyborg identity, without engaging in the politics of these
liminal identities. In 1996, Bjrk said of pop musics relationship with technology:
I think that in popular music today people are trying to come to terms with the fact
that they are living with all these machines, and trying to combine machines and
humans and trying to marry them in a happy marriage: trying to be fiercely optimistic
about it. [] But everything is with those regular rhythms and learning to love them,
but still be human, still be all gritty and organic. (Bjrk quoted in Dibben 74)
This attempt to make a happy marriage out of human and technology is often manifested in
suggests that Bjrk naturalises the electronic beats of her music by singing through the beats
and remaining outside of the mechanical grid (86), and uses beats mimetic of the sounds of
the human body (77). She also technologizes the sound of the human voice, by filtering it
through electronic media, or by using the voice to mimic the timbre of musical instruments,
Bjrk explicitly embodies the figure of the cyborg in her 1999 music video for her
song, All is Full of Love. At the start of the video, we see a white robotic body being carefully
crafted by mechanical arms. When Bjrks singing begins, we see that the robots face is in
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fact Bjrks, and that this newly-constructed cyborg is singing, or lip-synching, the lyrics of
the song. The sleek, curved, feminine figure of the cyborg is soon joined by another cyborg,
similar in physicality, and also imbued with Bjrks facial features. They slowly begin to
embrace and make love, caressing each others plastic skin, and kissing the identical lips of
The continuation of this exploration of the relationship between human and machine
is central to Bjrks most recent work. Her 2011 album, Biophilia, was partly recorded on an
iPad, and was released as the worlds first app album in collaboration with Apple
(Youngs). She claimed that the new touch screen technology allowed her to compose more
organically, and suggested that technology is becoming more organic: Electronic music has
been criticised for being too cold or gridlike. But with a touch screen the grid becomes like
water (Bjrk quoted in Mitchinson 537). Bjrk combines her cutting-edge, technological
approach with an almost primitive, mythical perspective, such as in the track Cosmogony,
where the verses correspond to different creation myths, from Native American culture, to
Sanskrit scriptures, to Australian Aboriginal culture, to the Big Bang theory (Mitchinson
537). Bjrk compares her compositional process to the Pythagorean pursuit of the music of
the spheres: Pythagoras was tapping into harmonics and how sound works, but that is
similar to how atoms and the Solar System work (Bjrk quoted in Mitchinson 537).
Bjrk embraces an essentialist view of the voice that combines human, machine and
the universe. Her hybridisation of distinct forms and identities dissolves dualistic binaries, but
does not challenge the construction of human identities, in the way that Haraways
revolutionary concept of the cyborg provokes. Like most avant-garde artists, Bjrk looks both
backwards to mythology, and forwards to the latest innovations and technology, but Bjrk
does not identify with the modernist avant-garde. Bjrk presents a postmodernist,
This chapter will examine the performance of vocal expressions that represent and enact a
passage between consciousness and the unconscious. By this I mean both the lullaby, which
soothes an infant to sleep, and psychological performances and therapies of the voice, in
which the repressed, traumatised voices of the unconscious return to the surface. These
hypnotic, hysterical, primal, or shadow voices can be made meaningful within the
Lullaby singing has been popular across cultures for thousands of years. Lullabies are
calming and inducing sleep. They are often soothing and hypnotic, but in some contexts
convey a darker, more mournful tone, akin to a lament (Perry). The lament and the lullaby
can be compared in a number of ways: they are both predominantly female vocal forms, and
they both function as agents that assist the passage of the listener the dead or the infant
from one state to another. Although they may seem to appear at opposite ends of a spectrum,
with one singing to the dead, and the other singing a new life to slumber, sleep is sometimes
referred to as a little death (Perry), and the passage to the unconscious is as shrouded in
mystery and darkness as the passage to death. The context in which they are sung is the most
striking difference. Unlike the social ritual and antiphonic singing of the Maniot lamenting
women, the lullaby is an intimate, private form, where the only antiphony is between the
In his study of Spanish lullabies in the 1920s, poet Federico Garca Lorca proposed
that one of the main functions of the lullaby is to give voice to the mothers fears and
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worries.11 Like the Maniot women incorporating everyday concerns into their singing of
laments, the lullaby provides a setting and a non-judgemental audience for the purging of
these pains. In this way, the lullaby, like the lament, can be understood as a form of therapy.
Similar to the psychoanalytic talking cure, this singing cure allows for a channelling and
surfacing of repressed fears and desires. The lullaby may then serve as both a passage
between the infants consciousness and unconsciousness and as a bridge to the mothers
unconscious.
In Hereafter, the third vocal piece represented both the soothing form of the lullaby
and the eruption of the voice of the unconscious. This piece was based on Patty Waters 1966
free jazz interpretation of Hush Little Baby, which was recorded live as part of her College
Tour album. The song begins with a soft, husky rendition of the traditional lullaby, sparsely
accompanied by piano, double bass, drums and flute. As the song unfolds, Waters gradually
moves away from the melody and the lyrics, into gentle moaning sounds that slowly build in
wailing, perhaps signifying a hysterical baby, or the surfacing of a primal scream from the
depths of her unconscious. After this momentous purge, her voice returns to calmness, and
resumes the whispered, husky lullaby: Hush little baby, dont you cry. Mama wont go
away.
Waters was born in Iowa in 1946, and began singing in public from the age of three.
As a teenager, she sang in dance bands, and at the age of eighteen, left home to tour with
regional orchestras (Gavin). She moved to Manhattan in 1964, where she waitressed by day
and went to jazz clubs at night. Free jazz saxophonist, Albert Ayler one of Diamanda
Galss early influences heard Waters singing in a club and introduced her to his record
11
Lorca was referring specifically to Spanish lullabies, and distinguished between these and other European
examples: The European cradle songs only object is to lull the child to sleep, unlike the Spanish which pierces
its sensibility (Lorca quoted in Kline).
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producer, who signed Waters to record her first album, Patty Waters Sings (1965). On the B-
side of the album, she presented her first foray into the exorcist-like transformation into
wailing that was continued in Hush Little Baby (Gavin). This first exploration was with the
folk song, Black is the Color of my True Loves Hair. It follows a similar, but more drawn-
out, trajectory to Hush, beginning with soft, husky singing that gradually dissolves into
pained screams and wails that emerge from her repeated singing of the word black. In
Hush, Waters voice leads the other musicians into seemingly unconscious depths, but in
Black is the Color, the piano appears to force her away from the calm of the folk song. The
pianist, Burton Greene, begins by scratching and tugging the piano strings, creating sharp,
metallic, sinister sounds reminiscent of some kind of torture chamber (Gavin). This music
seems to drive Waters to her pained wails, as if the music represents a form of torture being
enacted on her body, or her mind. The structures of music and language appear to collapse
The voice plays a central role in free jazz expression, even in non-vocal pieces. Vocal
imagery is often used to describe the unusual timbres created by the musicians. John
The notion that Ayler screamed through his instrument, is reflected in Galss experience
as a free jazz musician, discussed in the first chapter of this thesis. It was her exploration at
the boundaries of instrumental music that led Gals to conclude that the voice is the primary
instrument, and that all free jazz music is modelled on the voice (Juno 10). The vocal model
for free jazz is not singing as such, but a primal, screaming voice, which could be said to
be an expression of the unconscious. According to Greene, the rawness of the free jazz primal
expression led to many of its artists being shattered by the wear and tear, psychologically,
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physically, spiritually, of being so free (Greene quoted in Gavin). After Waters 1968
College Tour, she did not perform again in public until 1996 (Unterberger).
Despite the freeness of the genre, there is a clear overall structure in Waters Hush,
and we followed it closely in our interpretation of the piece. The wailing features as the
central climax of the piece, framed by the lullaby, and providing a play between freedom and
control. In Hereafter, our performance of the piece was further framed within the wider
narrative of Wolfs monologue. My sung descent into the unconscious was aligned with the
character of Wolf, mirroring a turning point in the narrative, where his bravado began to give
way to more intimate revelations. As the song built up to the climactic wailing, Falkenberg
screams, I imitated the way I imagined a horn might approach the music. In this way, I was
able to maintain a sense of control over my voice, rather than descending into overindulgence
or parody. I was aware that my singing was unsettling for an audience, but I enjoyed the play
between control and loss of control; between hysteria and calm. In our contemporary culture,
lullabies are commonly perceived as gentle, soothing songs, representing an idyllic image of
mother and child. Waters lullaby transgresses into the voice of a subconscious other. This
A baby can hear sounds from around the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy, and from
this time, they are able to hear all the muffled noises of the outside world (Perry). According
to child development psychologist, Sally Goddard-Blythe, the most powerful sound for the
baby is the sound of its mothers voice, because its heard both internally and externally
with her body acting like the sounding board or the resonator of the sound (Goddard-Blythe
quoted in Perry). In this way, the maternal voice is the archetypal liminal voice, singing
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between the internal and the external, accompanying the passage from conception to birth and
beyond. This saturation of the maternal voice is commonly theorised as a blanket of sound,
encompassing the foetus or new born infant within its aural cover (Silverman 72). From a
feminist psychoanalytical perspective, this primal envelopment of the maternal voice has
fundamental and lasting implications in the way the female voice is heard or silenced. I will
outline these theories that investigate the power of the liminal, maternal voice, and its lasting
In her book, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema,
Kaya Silverman contrasts two similar but opposing fantasies of this encompassing, maternal
voice: the umbilical web and the sonorous envelope (72). She begins with Chions take on
In the beginning, in the uterine darkness, was the voice, the Mothers voice. For the
child once born, the mother is more an olfactory and vocal continuum than an image.
Her voice originates in all points of space, while her form enters and leaves the visual
field. We can imagine the voice of the Mother weaving around the child a network of
connections its tempting to call the umbilical web. A rather horrifying expression to
be sure, in its evocation of spiders and in fact, this original vocal connection will
remain ambivalent. (61)
Chion presents this claustrophobic, predatory image of the maternal voice in relation to
theories put forth by Denis Vasse in his book, The Umbilicus and the Voice, which were
developed out of his clinical experience with psychotic children and adults (Chion 61). Vasse
proposes the wound of the umbilical zone as the mark of desire in the infant, which is
consciously or unconsciously associated with the act of the cutting of the umbilicus.
According to Vasse, because this act of closing off at birth correlates with the opening up of
the mouth and the first cry of the infant, the voice is inscribed in the umbilical rupture
(Vasse quoted in Chion 61). This rupture from the mothers body assigns the child to its own
body, and from then, bodily contact with the mother becomes mediated by the voice (Vasse
quoted in Chion 61). Chion suggests that the voice might then conceptually take up the role
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of the umbilical cord, as both a nurturing connection, and a binding tie, trapping the subject
in the umbilical web (62). Chions dark, ambivalent take on the voice of the mother relates
to his discussion of the acousmtre, outlined in the second chapter of this thesis, where the
Silverman begins her analysis of Chions umbilical web from his opening intentional
miscitation of the biblical text from John I, suggesting the implication that the maternal
voice of sound is set in opposition to the paternal voice of meaning (75). In the beginning
of the maternal voice with the chaos upon which the divine word imposed its order and
illumination at the moment of creation (75). Of the two prototypical acousmtre, it is the
acousmatic voice of the rational male God that must overpower the acousmatic voice of the
Chion suggests a dangerous, predatory image of the maternal voice, where enclosure
state, and exteriority as the ideal condition of potency (Silverman 75). The voice of the
mother is associated with the pre-linguistic phase where the child hears, but cannot
understand, and produces sounds, but cannot make them meaningful. In order for the infant to
enter the exterior realm of the symbolic, the mothers voice must be placed inside, and the
container must become the contained, thus cutting the umbilical tie and choking the
maternal voice (Silverman 76). The horror of the umbilical web is directly linked to themes
of liminality and transgression. The uterine darkness is our first liminal home, and the
transgression from this original place to the outside world of the symbolic ruptures this first
intimate relationship. Chions imagery suggests a maternal voice that is always trying to pull
Silverman contrasts Chions sinister account of the maternal voice to Guy Rosolatos
notion of it as a sonorous envelope, which surrounds, sustains, and cherishes the child
(Rosolato quoted in Silverman 72). Rosolato situates the mothers voice as the first model of
auditory pleasure, and associates it with the primordial oneness of the music of the spheres
(Silverman 84-5, italics in original). While this sonorous envelope represents a blissful,
idyllic stage of unity between mother and child (84), it also retrospectively represents an
objet (a), or a lost object. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the maternal voice and gaze are
added to the list of objects inherited from Freud (Dolar 127), alongside faeces, and the
mothers breast, that are the first to be distinguished from the subjects self, but whose
mirror, by which the infant first comes to recognise itself in the vocal mirror provided by
the mother. The analogy of the mirror speaks of the blurred relationship of mother and infant,
inhabiting a shared space between interiority and exteriority and between self and other. It is
in the frame of this conceptual mirror that the image of the maternal voice becomes blurred.
The loss of the objet (a) constitutes a monumental loss, comparable to an amputation, and can
come to represent that which alone can replenish the subjects lack. Conversely, the objet (a)
is fundamentally bound up in the trauma of the first rupture and can come to represent what is
and wholeness, as well as a reminder of separation and loss. The maternal voice acts as a
bridge to an infantile or primitive existence, and in order for the subject to remain inside the
rational, symbolic order, this voice needs to be contained, silenced, or reduced. Silverman
argues that the acoustic mirror comes to represent the function that the female voice is
Whereas the mothers voice initially functions as the acoustic mirror in which the
child discovers its identity and voice, it later functions as the acoustic mirror in which
the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble. (81)
The maternal or female voice is cast as the inferior in a system of dualisms, where its
otherness is associated with both the pleasure and the fear of the pre-symbolic. The male
subject projects his own lack onto the female other, depriving the female voice of its agency
and power, and reducing it to the realm of the infantile and the primitive. From this
perspective, the act of experimenting with the voice, and transgressing its conventional forms
and containments is a deeply political and liberating act. By reclaiming the dangerous liminal
patriarchal society. Her fantasy of the maternal voice dismantles the dualistic system by
discarding the oppositions between inside and outside, between mother and child, and
between consciousness and the unconscious. Kristeva encapsulates this fantasy within the
notion of the maternal chora,12 a concept that fuses and confuses mother and infant, based
on Platos use of the term to denote an unnameable, improbable, hybrid, anterior to naming,
to the one, to the father, and consequently maternally connoted (Silverman 102). This chora
could be compared to Haraways concept of the hybrid figure of the cyborg, which
deconstructs the binary system of female otherness in order to reconstruct powerful, liminal
compared to both Chions umbilical web and Rosolatos sonorous envelope in the way that it
simultaneously envisions strongly positive and negative associations of the maternal voice.
The essential difference can be attributed to the context of the maternal voice, and whether it
12
In Hereafter, Wolfs murdered wife was named Cora, which is pronounced the same as chora. Wolf was
fixated on her breasts and expressed jealousy at seeing their son suckling at her breast. Coras dead body had
been found with her breasts cut off.
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relates to the pre-Oedipal child or to the adult subject, the latter being the usual focus of
psychoanalytic reference (Silverman 104). The chora signals both an ideal, primordial state
of mother and prehistory, and a chaotic encapsulation of mother and child which must be
destruction. Significantly for this thesis, Kristeva proposes that it is in the avant-garde artistic
realm that this voice may be heard, that the maternal substratum of subjectivity surfaces in
106). In The Subject in Process, Kristeva analyses the writing of Artaud, which like the
chora, seeks a language prior to language (Scheer 116). The voice of the subconscious is
made meaningful within the frame of an avant-garde context, and this voice appears
In her essay, Aller la mer, Cixous advocates for a reclaiming of the feminine voice
in the realm of the theatre. Although the theatre has a tainted history of misogyny and
objectification of women, Cixous regards it as the primary medium through which women
can reassert and reimagine their physical, bodily presence, especially in comparison to film:
It is high time that women gave back to the theatre its fortunate position, its raison
dtre and what makes it different the fact that there it is possible to get across the
living, breathing, speaking body, whereas the cinema screens us from reality by
foisting mere images upon us. (547, italics in original)
Cixous calls for a theatre that is not theatrical, in the original sense of being a visual medium:
lessening our dependency on the visual and stressing the auditory, learning to attune all our
ears, especially those that are sensitive to the unconscious, to hear the silences and what lies
beyond them (Aller 547). Cixous has explored this auditory, sensorial theatre in her many
a play that she wrote based on Freuds infamous Case of Dora, or Fragment of an
Analysis of Hysteria. Dora was presented to Freud with a range of hysterical symptoms,
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including a complete loss of voice. The case is widely discussed among feminist theorists,
who admonish Freuds imposition of sexual explanations while neglecting the social causes
of such symptoms (Showalter Malady 159-60). Cixous claims that Le Portrait de Dora was
for her a first step in a long journey that badly needed to be taken, so that a womans voice
could be heard for the first time, so that she could cry out, Im not the one who is dumb. I am
silenced by your inability to hear (Cixous Aller 547). According to Elaine Showalter,
Cixous regards Doras hysteria as a powerful form of rebellion and perceives hysteria in
general as a kind of female language that opposes the rigid structures of male discourse and
hysteria are intrinsically connected to the voice, while its connotations and etymological links
to the uterus are fundamentally tied to the female body. By reclaiming what were regarded as
vocal and bodily abnormalities as creative powers, it may be possible to transgress the
theatre, where the taint of misogyny and objectification of women is perceived as being
particularly strong. We explored the rebellion of the female voice in Free Theatres
House of Illusions, where men came to play out their BDSM fantasies with the
prostitutes/actresses. The physical and musical vocabulary of the performance was based on
the Argentine Tango, an arguably sadomasochistic dance, where in dance terms, men lead
and women decorate, but in feminist terms, where men subjugate and women submit.
I performed in the third of three ritual fantasy scenes, playing the horse for the
Camp Commandant, as he tamed me with his whip, bridled me with a ball gag (a kind of
induced aphonia), then led me through a tango-inspired dressage routine. Clad only in a
leather harness, fishnet stockings and high-heeled tango shoes, I may have appeared to
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represent the worst clich of the objectified, avant-garde actress, and one female reviewer
seemed to suggest this, referring to me simply as the bound, beaten and thonged up woman
who becomes his prancing, trotting and ridden horse (Fala). This reductive description was
troubling to me, because it cast my performance as that of a victim, which I had not perceived
to be the case. While my body may have been tamed and controlled, my voice was released
and empowered.
The most violent image of the scene came after the dressage, when the Commandant
restrained me from behind, forcing one hand around my throat, while the other hand guided
his whip across my stomach, simulating the bowing of a cello. From this bound, gagged
position of subservience, I began to use my voice. The sounds I produced were primarily
modelled on the sounds of our cellist, but they also responded to the sensation of the choking
hand around my gullet. Throughout these vocalisations, the ball gag remained in my mouth,
restricting the types of sounds I was able to produce, and forcing me to find expression
my voice led to new possibilities of vocal production, the constriction of the gag demanded
voice was forced to rebel and experiment, playing between aphonia, guttural utterance and
stifled shriek. In the context of the accompanying visual image, the vocal sounds may have
sounded like the pained cries of a tortured woman, but they were not quite that. They were
something that could not be contained, that literally came out of the struggle to express a
voice.
While I was producing these alternately instrumental and animalistic sounds, the
whip, he began to sing gently, almost under his breath as a lullaby to himself, the lines of a
sentimental tango song, Volver, meaning to return. The juxtaposition of the sentimental
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male voice with the brutalised female voice created a vocal struggle which the Commandant
appeared to find too hard to bear. Coming to an abrupt stop, he ceased his bowing and spun
me around into a momentary tango embrace, before pushing me away, removing my gag, and
storming out of the theatre, leaving me alone on stage. Facing my reflection in the mirror, I
began to sing Volver, the tango that had seemingly disempowered the Commandant: And
even if I didnt want to come back, one always comes back to the first love. The first love of
a man is always his mother. For me, the song was empowering, but for the Commandant, the
female voice, or the memory of the maternal voice, was too much to bear.
Aller la mer is a pun in French, which can mean both going to the sea, and going
to the mother, and Cixous ends her essay by explicitly making the connection: women will
be able to go there and feel themselves loved, listening and being heard, happy as when they
go to the sea, the womb of the mother (Cixous Aller 548). For Cixous, this dual liminal
image of the sea and the womb represents a sonorous envelope from which silenced voices
No matter how it is conceptualized, the image of the infant contained within the
sonorous envelope of the mothers voice is a fantasy of origins a fantasy about
precultural sexuality, about the entry into language, and about the inauguration of
subjectivity. (74)
Cixous goes to la mer as the source of the female voice, where a maternal form of expression
which he believed could cure neuroses by revisiting and confronting repressed Primal
trauma. In his book, The Primal Scream, Janov describes the origin of his theory:
Some years ago, I heard something that was to change the course of my professional
life and the lives of my patients. What I heard may change the nature of
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Unlike the post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories discussed in the previous section of this
chapter, Primal Therapy works from the belief that we were born real (Scream 20); we
were not born already traumatised by an umbilical web or longing to return to a sonorous
envelope. Janov proposes instead that neuroses develop out of parental and societal demands
to act and to perform and to deny the childs true needs and feelings (Scream 25-6). This
performance eventually comes to dominate the childs life, and the true feelings are denied
or repressed by consciousness (Scream 25). Janovs therapy aims to strip patients of their
built-up defences in order to release the true, repressed feelings underneath the neurotic
performances. This could be compared to Artauds stripping off of the shackles of civilisation
Like the lament of the Maniot women, or the metaphorical vocal embodiment of the
plague by Artaud and Gals, the Primal Scream is an expression of pain (Scream 90).
However, unlike these examples that express conscious or physical experiences of pain,
Primal Therapy is a bringing to consciousness of pain that has been repressed in the depths of
exorcism, and in this therapy it is the metaphorical voices of children and demons that are
brought forth:
As the patient discusses a new, early situation, we continue watching for signs of
feeling. The voice may tremble slightly as if jostled by tension. We repeat the process
of urging the patient to breathe and feel. This time, which may be an hour or so later,
the patient is shaken. He wont know what the feeling is, just that he feels tense and
uptight that is, tightened up against the feeling. I start the pulling and breathing
process. [] He begins gagging and retching. [] He will start to form a word only
to begin thrashing about and writhing in Pain. I urge him to let it out, and he will
continue to try to say something. Finally, out it will come: a scream. (Scream 83)
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The bridge that Janov attempts to form between consciousness and the unconscious is
constructed out of the voice, and culminates in the release of the scream. The process begins
from the everyday talking voice, and as unconscious details come to the surface, the voice
begins to break, exposing the cracks. The use of deep breathing techniques, described above
as the pulling and breathing process, engages the entire body, creating something akin to
Grotowskis total body resonator. According to Janov, [m]any describe it as a lightning bolt
that seems to break apart all the unconscious control of the body (Scream 84).
Two of Janovs first and most famous patients were John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who
attended Primal Therapy together in 1970. After his therapy, Lennon recorded his first solo
album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970), which incorporated Primal themes, a rawness
of expression and screaming-tinged vocals, which were said to reflect his experience of the
therapy (Gomez 234). Ono also released a subsequent album, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
(1970), which featured full throttle screaming, groaning and other expressively Primal
Ono had been exploring the scream in performance long before attending Janovs
therapy sessions, and was already infamous for this style of seemingly hysterical expression,
which she claimed provided an essential and therapeutic outlet for her emotions (Gomez
231). As a performance artist in New York in the 1960s, Ono had begun to explore the raw
emotion of sound, and in 1961 premiered an aria of high-pitched wails (Gomez 233). The
last track on Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, AOS, was taken from a 1968 recording with
Ornette Coleman and his free jazz ensemble, in which Onos voice initially takes on the
timbre of a wind instrument, weaving in and out of the other instrumentalists, before moving
onto a more recognisably female, orgasmic sound that erupts into animalistic screeching.
While seeking a rawness of human expression, Ono embodies the unhuman textures of
instrument and animal, developing a voice that is both embodied and disembodied. Her
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juxtaposition of emotive sounds is evocative of Berberian, and her wails are reminiscent of
Waters.
The free jazz wailing of Ono and Waters, and the all-encompassing physical and
vocal expulsion of the Primal Scream, were prefigured in the theatrical setting of German
Expressionist theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As with Janovs
therapy, the Expressionists sought a direct connection with the unconscious (Innes 41), but
the Expressionists political goals transcended personal therapy, and strove to revolutionise
society by renewing its faith in humanity, as expressed through the voice and body of the
The Expressionist strategy in the theatre for coming to terms with the crises of
contemporary German history was to anthropomorphize them abstractly in the voice
and body of the actor. [] what the Expressionist actor sought to demonstrate, to
textualise, was the historical power of expression itself. (2)
The Expressionist actors physical movements and gestures were reduced to abstract
hieroglyphs that were also envisioned to function on a direct unconscious level (Innes 42).
Verbal expression was similarly reduced through the Telegrammstil style of delivery, which
broke down speech to its essential elements. The restraint of these physical and verbal
gestures would build up pressure and eventually explode in overwhelming gestures and
impassioned monologues. This tension between reduction and explosion formed the essential
The prototypical image of the Expressionist movement was Edvard Munchs 1893
lithograph of The Scream, and the scream, or the Schrei, was fundamental to Expressionist
theatre. The Schrei was more than a scream. The Schrei was the embodiment of the
spiritually sublime (Kuhns 103). Similar to Janovs description of the Primal Scream, the
Schrei came out of the culmination of the accumulated pressure and tension that would
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explode from the actor, along with ecstatic gestures and a primitive purity of expression
which was regarded as the vital sign of an historic liberation from the dead past (Kuhns 93).
The aspirations of primitive purity and liberation from the dead past are comparable to
the Artaudian scream, with both functioning as channels through which to regenerate a more
immediate and primordial sense of theatre and life, by breaking through the socialised voice
Gals explicitly acknowledges the influence of Expressionist theatre in her 1994 radio
piece, Schrei 27, which she staged live as Schrei X (1996), and presented as a film, Schrei 27,
in collaboration with Italian filmmaker, Davide Pepe (2011). The work is about the effects of
torture and institutional isolation, and comprises several short pieces of extreme Schrei
vocals, totalling twenty-seven minutes, with moments of silence between each piece. Gals
was attracted to the overwhelming theatricality of Expressionism, where the idea was to get
to an interior place and an extreme heightened emotional state (Gals quoted in Guillen).
The vocal rigour of the Expressionist actors reflected her own demanding training, in which
the goal was not to simply become a virtuoso, but to develop a technique from which the
most extreme levels of emotional communication would be made possible. Gals staged the
live performance of Schrei X in total darkness, forcing the audience to confront their own
As with the Expressionist actors, Gals uses her voice as a political tool, channelling
a direct link with her unconscious as a means of crying out against the dehumanising
hysteria, devoid of any social function other than terrifying an audience. Musicologist Susan
McClary suggests that Galss embodiment of these signifiers of the hysteric madwoman is
undeniably risky, given the tendency for women in Western culture always to be
understood as excessive, sexually threatening, mad. She can be read as simply
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reaffirming the worst stereotypes available. But she can also be read as extremely
courageous as she confronts these stereotypes head-on, appropriates them, and
rechannels their violent energies in other directions. Her images enter into public
circulation, challenging the premises of the prestigious male-constructed madwomen
preserved within the musical canon. (111)
McClary suggests that Gals, as the composer and creator of her own work, challenges the
usually passive and masculine-generated role of the madwoman in opera and music.
In her book, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality, McClary argues that
male composers have long been drawn to the subject of madwomen, which are first and
foremost male fantasies of transgression dressed up as women (110). The climactic Mad
Scenes of demented divas are as commonplace and popular in opera as the soprano who sings
her own accompaniment to death, and the two tropes are often related. McClary claims that
composers, who use the dramatic frame as an outlet for their own emotional and musical
excesses, projecting the transgression of musical convention onto the socially transgressive
woman (101). She cites Schoenbergs Erwartung as the exemplar of the avant-garde
appropriation of the madwoman, where the composer was able to realise his chromatic dream
figure of a madwoman (107). McClary argues that Schoenberg contains the madwoman
From this moment on, the rational frame guaranteeing social order comes to permeate
the dissonant discourse of the madwoman, and the chromaticism of the feminine
sexual excess no longer poses a threat: henceforth it is appropriated even generated
by the highest achievement of intellectual discipline. One can now experience that
frenzy, that illicit desire, without either the panic that attends chaos or the traditional
demand for narrative closure, because the composer and analyst can prove that every
pitch is always contained. (108-9)
The screams and excesses of the operatic soprano may forever be used as fantasies of
transgression that are safely framed and contained within the rationality of artificial
roulades and musical structure. The Primal Screams of Ono and Waters and the
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Expressionist Schrei of Gals are not so easily contained, as they explode from the
The elusive, transgressive voice is not exclusively female. Alfred Wolfsohn was the
founder of what came to be known as extended range or extended voice, the experimental
exploration and expressive expansion of the voice discussed in this thesis, that engages
unconventional sounds such as throat singing, harmonics, multiphonics and vocal fry
(Salzman and Desi 27). Wolfsohn and his successor, Roy Hart, did not like the term
extended voice, as they insisted that what appeared to be remarkable displays of vocal
virtuosity were merely part of the natural, albeit neglected, human vocal repertoire (Salzman
and Desi 275). Defining the voice contains it, and this was antithetical to the goal of
unchaining the voice. Wolfsohns development of the voice was not about applying
techniques, but was about unleashing the power of the voice in extremis.
analytical psychology and an exploration of the relationship between the voice and the
unconscious. After his deeply traumatic experiences in the front-line trenches of the First
World War, Wolfsohn was hospitalised with shell shock, haunted by aural hallucinations of
the cries of dying soldiers. While in hospital, he encountered Freuds theories on repression,
and began to wonder whether his own suffering was related to the unexpressed terror and
guilt that he had not yet been able to express and release (Newham Singing Cure 83-4). He
began to exorcise these pent-up emotions through singing lessons, in which his teacher
allowed him to integrate shouts and cries into his singing. He claimed that through this
process of working on his voice, the unyielding presence of death which obsessed me in
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those voices was gradually overcome by the presence of a new and intensified life
Wolfsohn opened his own voice studio in Berlin in the 1930s, which he subsequently
relocated to London during the Second World War (Newham Singing Cure 86-7). He worked
with their vocal capabilities, as he regarded the two as inseparable. Wolfsohn considered the
voice to be first and foremost the direct expression of the soul, and believed that the
extension of the human vocal range, both in expression and in octave range, implied a
comparable growth of the psyche (Pikes 51). He compared this process to the Jungian
concept of individuation, or a coming to selfhood, and regarded his work as the vocal
Wolfsohn applied the Jungian concept of the shadow to depict the dark, unconscious
voice that he had discovered during his personal singing therapy. The shadow voice lurked in
the spaces between, behind and around the voice, a liminal force existing in the cracks of
conventional singing and speaking, and exposing aural glimpses of a darker, seemingly alien
voice (Pikes 54). Wolfsohn regarded the shadow voice as a source of tremendous expressive
power, which could be channelled and projected into theatrical roles. His most prodigious
student, Hart, continued this specifically theatrical exploration after Wolfsohns death, with
the Roy Hart Theatre Company. The concept is also similar to the vocal work of Artaud,
Gals, Berberian and Waters, where the uncanny voice, the voice that should have remained
The voice that forms a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious can be
compared to the voice that negotiates a passage between the living and the dead. Both death
and the unconscious represent a void, an unknown abyss. Wolfsohn aligns death and the
compares his therapeutic, vocal journey into his unconscious, to the myth of Orpheuss
In Wolfsohns interpretation of the myth, Eurydice represents his own anima figure,
his voice (Braggins). Extended vocal technique could be said to be founded on this search for
the unchained, unhindered expressivity of the feminine voice. Unlike the avant-garde
composers who expressed their musical excess through surrogate female voices, Wolfsohn
looked to find it in his own unconscious and in his own voice. He also encouraged his female
students to search for their unconscious male voice, their animus, suggesting that for them the
experimental voice is a masculine one (Pikes 56). Ultimately, Wolfsohns search was not for
the rebellious, trangressive voice of the avant-garde, but for an androgynous oneness which
aimed toward therapy, rather than defiance or rebellion. It is for the individual, rather than a
Wolfsohns therapeutic search for the hidden voices of the unconscious can be
compared to Janovs Primal Therapy, both in its fundamental search for the human scream or
cry, and in its aim to reconnect the patient with the infant or childhood self. As with Artauds
search back to a time when people knew how to scream, Wolfsohn and Janov seek a cure for
the social ills of society upon the individual by mining deep into the unconscious, to a
primordial or infantile oneness. Wolfsohn regards the baby as the ultimate vocalist, with its
two tiny tender vocal chords [able to] achieve extraordinary things without suffering any
harm, and attributes this to the babys embodied wholeness that wants nothing with its
head, nothing with its will (Pikes 38). Janov idealises the baby that is born real, but is
subsequently corrupted by parents and society (Janov Scream 20). These idealisations of the
feminine, infant voice are in contrast to the psychoanalytic concepts of the sonorous
In Patty Waters singing of Hush, it is not always clear whether she is channelling the
voice of a mother or the voice of an infant. When I performed the piece, I imagined a voice
somewhere between mother, baby and musical instrument, as perhaps she did, too. During
the lullaby in Hereafter, projected onto the portrait above Wolfs bed were filmic images of
breastfeeding mothers, interspersed with hard core pornography. These images unsettled
lullaby, and evoking the troubled fetishisation of the maternal voice and body. Some
Although the visual images were disturbing, the lullaby was deeply unsettling without
this filmic component, which was made evident during our dress rehearsal, when a member
of the public had a violently aggressive reaction to the piece. As I reached the climactic point
of my wailing, I heard heavy objects being thrown against the flimsy outside walls of the
venue, and a man shouting with some force. After the performance, I was told that he had
been screaming at me to shut the fuck up. He lived next-door to the un-soundproofed
venue, and was apparently able to hear much of the unamplified sound from his house. While
acknowledging that the sound spill may have been frustrating, this was the only moment in
which he protested throughout ninety minutes of Wolfs masculine ravings and the other
musical pieces already discussed in this thesis. The lullaby seemed to evoke an overwhelming
fury in him, as if my wailing was triggering something in his unconscious, something that
should have remained hidden. His impassioned screaming created an antiphony with my own,
reflecting the split voices of Hush, and conjuring images of a primordial struggle against the
terror of the umbilical web. I found his screams equally unsettling. The violence and anger
with which he tried to silence my voice was clearly gendered. He may have been fighting a
struggle with the feminine, maternal voice, and was projecting this battle onto me.
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subtext for Wolfs rambling stream of consciousness. His stories were full of lustful
glorifying and loathing womens bodies. In the first minutes of the monologue, the audience
was assaulted with a colourfully abject description of his wife: The super tits under the
blood red of the bikini that almost bursts. And the cunt with the sweet sour raspberry and
rhubarb jelly just before her period (Hereafter). Here, and at many times throughout the
performance, the female body was described as excess, with breasts spilling out and
menstrual fluids about to pour forth, portraying the female body as a sweet and sour product
to be consumed. In Fritschs original text, the female body is everywhere, and despite its
descriptions of excess, it is contained within the fetishistic and reductive terminology. The
The addition of my female voice provided an alternative to the violent masculine text.
My voice was unbounded by language, and was grounded in vocal forms in which womens
voices play powerful and commanding roles. In this misogynistic realm of Wolfs fantasies, I
reasserted a distinctly female vocal presence, reclaiming the voices of hysteria and pain, with
As well as making the silenced female voice heard, the presence of my voice
represented the silenced, repressed voice of Wolf. His violence could be seen as a yearning
for the mother he never really had. His obsession with breasts seemed to relate to a thwarted
primal desire, and an anger and yearning for the monstrous mother who fed him on
Jgermeister, rather than breast milk. He recounted the birth of his son, when he felt so full
of life, like since I came out of my mother I have never been again (Hereafter). His desire to
return to the womb, or the mothers breast, is transformed into anger projected onto the
female body. Wolfs women are constructs of fear and desire. My screaming, lamenting, or
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soothing voices could be said to represent these constructs, encompassing the abject,
monstrous, hysteric, seductive, maternal female voices, but also transcending them.
Wolfs monologue and my voice remained distinct until the very end. Throughout the
performance, my voice was like a dream or a reflection that was expressed during breaks in
his speaking. In the final moments of the performance, when Wolf was lying on his back, in a
position of submission, I stood astride him, with a gun pointed at his face. As he gasped out
his final lines, my singing steadily overtook his words, until he went silent underneath my
voice.
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CONCLUSION
theatre. This thesis will similarly conclude from an experiential perspective, presenting
insights gained through performance as vital research tools, and will continue past the final
In the 2012 Free Theatre production, I Sing the Body Electric, the company explored
the way women and technology could both be seen to be constructed through male desire as
fantasies of seduction and destruction. The performance took place in a large drama studio,
but all the actors and audiences were contained within the perimeters of the lighting rig. The
audiences were led in individually, guided through the blacked out studio by torchlight, and
were seated on stools in the centre of the space. Surrounding the audiences, hanging from the
lighting rig, was a jungle of electrical cables and household appliances, while the sound of a
recorded heartbeat sonically enveloped the audiences, creating a kind of womblike enclosure.
This experiential arrival had a sense of liminality similar to that of Hereafter, where the
audiences had to undergo an unsettling rite of passage to arrive at the performance space. In
Body Electric, the darkness initially denied the audiences their vision and instead opened up
their ears to the sounds and sensations around them, creating the frame for a sensorial,
Lying on the ground, near the point at which the audiences entered the performance
space, were two male sailors, whose fantasies formed the basis of this exploration of
women and technology. At different points around the periphery of the lighting rig, hanging
in harnesses, were five female actors, each embodying a different female archetype, and each
expressing itself through a unique form of technology. These actors were hidden in the
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darkness, and did not become visible to the audiences until encountered and revealed by the
males. As the sailors journeyed through the tangle of cables, they encountered: a Lorelei,
whose haunting, alluring voice was enhanced by an echo, but ultimately became distorted and
deadly; a Rapunzel, whose uncanny, doll-like appearance was matched with an electronic
seduction through the sound and movement of colour detection technology; and a Medusa,
who used smoke, mirrors and lasers to ensnare the men within her technological glare. I was
the Siren, and my technology was a radio microphone taped to each wrist and covered in
cling wrap. When I moved my wrists, the crackle of the plastic on the microphones created a
As the Siren, I was the first to be encountered by the sailors, referencing Homers
Odyssey and the famous episode in which Odysseus is tied to the mast of the ship, so that he
may hear the enchanting voices without being drawn to his death. The Siren is the archetypal
fantasy of the seductive, destructive female voice, and the prototypical liminal voice. She
sings the passage between life and death, luring sailors to their deaths upon the treacherous
rocks. She is a hybrid of woman and bird, representing both earth and sky, and living in a
liminal setting between rocks and sea, where she sings her enchanting laments, surrounded by
The Sirens song is so irresistibly alluring because it sings directly to the depths of the
unconscious, as both seductress and mother. Ancient Greek vases depict the Sirens in a
maternal role, nursing the sailors to their deaths (Robson 60). This suggests an understanding
of the Siren song as a form of lullaby, singing a bridge between consciousness and the
unconscious, between life and death, and once more evoking the voice of the monstrous,
carnivorous mother. The voice of the Siren is like the uncontainable contagion of the voice of
the plague, infecting the minds of all who hear it. In this way, the Siren is a fantasy of
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misogyny, punishing the womans voice to compensate for creating sweet but unattainable
desire.
In Body Electric, my Siren sang a song between human and machine. It began as an
unamplified, lulling echo, in response to the sailors song, but gradually gained in pace and
volume as I drew the men closer toward me. As my singing intensified, I produced
increasingly agitated sounds with my plastic-covered microphones, and as I did this, they
picked up the sound of my voice, taking the volume beyond my natural capabilities. The
initially soothing oceanic sounds of my microphones, and the sweet, seductive melancholy of
my singing, built up in intensity, volume and pitch, until finally released in the scream of a
storm.
In 2013, I found myself once again singing in the middle of a theatrical, sonic storm. I
was wearing most of the elements of my Siren costume, including the expansive, white wings
that had signalled my human-bird hybridity, but in this context, they represented angel wings.
In Body Electric, I had been hanging from the lighting rig, in a position of recline, luring my
audience toward me. In this performance, I was suspended from a knuckle boom lift, over a
statue plinth, in a prostrated, flying position, with my arms held out in front of me. Suspended
in mid-air, with the wind gently blowing me, I began to sing Diamanda Galss EEYME
once again. As the piece rose in intensity, sonic artist Bruce Russell began to play his guitar,
creating sounds of chaos and destruction through the use of feedback and intensely high
propels him into the future to which his back it turned, while the pile of debris before
him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 257-8)
Suspended over the statue plinth, surveying the broken central city of Christchurch below, I
sang Galss lament for a city suspended between life and death, devastated initially by
This performance was part of Free Theatres Canterbury Tales, a large-scale multi-
architecture, design and scenography students from around Australasia. Canterbury Tales
centred on a procession of giant puppets, inspired by Chaucers characters, that led the
gathered crowds from the Bridge of Remembrance, along Oxford Terrace, beside the Avon
River, before turning at the Worcester Street Bridge and arriving at the ruins of the Cathedral.
The scene of Catastrophe took place at the turning-point of the procession, beside the
Worcester Bridge. This intersection was more than a literal turning-point. It signalled a
change in the mood of the procession, from carnival and entertainment, to something more
confrontational.
The procession was drawn towards our site by a gentle guitar solo, played over a very
loud amplifier. The guitar piece was haunting and dreamlike in its repetitive, soothing tone,
almost like a lullaby. This transformed the atmosphere of the crowd, seducing them into the
sonorous envelope of the music, but provoking some uncertainty of what was to come.
Activated by this music, I gently improvised along with my voice, and a dancer on a nearby
stage began to embody the sound through her initially trancelike movements. When the music
stopped, the lament took over, rising out of a moment of stillness in the crowd. Within
minutes, the guitar feedback surged into the sonic frame, overpowering my singing, but also
forcing me to adapt, and to explore similar textures of rupture and distortion in my own
voice.
129
This thesis comes out of my own experiences working with experimental voice in
avant-garde theatre, but is also strongly informed by the immediate social context that has
accompanied the writing of this thesis. I may never have explicitly explored the fundamental
connection between liminality and the voice, had it not been for the devastating earthquakes
that so shockingly reminded the residents of Christchurch that structures, systems and the
very earth that we stand on, are never fixed. There is still hope that the potency of this
transitional, liminal phase might create some kind of change in Christchurch, although the
city is already being reclaimed and repossessed by the conservative residing powers.
The writing of this thesis has also been plagued by manmade ruptures. Since enrolling
as a PhD candidate, the University of Canterbury has introduced three change proposals,
through which it attempted to close down my home department of Theatre and Film Studies.
In the first of these change proposals, the University suggested that Theatre and Film Studies
was not core, and therefore did not fit within the Universitys structure. The main impetus
behind the attacks seemed to be a fear of the departments liminality and its resistance to
discrete categorisation, teaching both theatre and film, through both theory and practice.
Perhaps the attacks were also related to a fundamental fear of avant-garde theatre and
performance, where ideas are explored through the body and the voice, and are not contained
within a tidy, literary tradition. The third attempt to close the department was successful and
it will be phased out by 2016. I write about the earthquakes and the University closure not to
complain or to lament over what has been destroyed, but as a paradigm for what I have
discovered about the voice, and to reinforce the hope that creative expression continues to
In my thesis, I explored how the experimental voice is intrinsically associated with the
practice, the experimental voice may transgress both vocal and social forms. In my first
130
chapter, I discussed how traditional vocal expressions, such as the Maniot lament, can be
seen to form a bridge between the living and the dead. These specifically female voices take
on social and spiritual powers during the liminal phase of the rituals for the dead, but are
subsequently reintegrated into their socially silenced roles and re-contained within the
patriarchal culture. In traditional rites of passage, the liminal phase is associated with danger
and transgression, and the women take on this danger through their voices.
The liminal phase of ritual is inherently conservative, but the liminoid realm of avant-
garde performance is not. Gals assumed the voice of the lamenting Maniot women as a
means of channelling the anger and pain of those at the margins, the socially dying. Artaud
used the primordial power of the scream to shock people into life, and Grotowski and
Staniewski explored the voice as a means of connecting to some other. Kristeva suggests
that death is the utmost of abjection (Kristeva Abjection 4), and the voices ritual
connection to death seems to reinforce its inherent ability to disturb and disrupt. Douglass
transgressions, also suggests that the voice passing invisibly through the mouth, from
In my second chapter, I explored the voices that emerge between human and machine.
The voice already has an ambiguous relationship with the body, and this is enhanced when
channelling the voice through technology, or technology through the voice. Following on
from the experiments of the Futurists and the Dadaists, pioneers of electroacoustic music
sought to find new vocal expressions and meanings by alienating the voice from its familiar
context, and resituating it within the liminoid frame of avant-garde music and performance.
These acousmatic voices, familiar and strange at the same time, evoked a sense of the
uncanny, reminding us of the inherent ambiguity and uncontainability of the voice. Donna
Haraways Cyborg Manifesto advocated for the feminist integration of technology through
131
the concept of the cyborg, a hybrid identity that transgresses conventional dualisms, allowing
consciousness and the unconscious. The lullaby that lulls us to sleep is a reminder of the first
experience of our mothers voice from inside her womb, the first acousmtre. From a
psychoanalytic perspective, our entry into the symbolic order of patriarchal language severs
the intimacy of this bond, and becomes a lost object, whose otherness is never completely
disentangled from our selves. The mothers voice thus becomes a sonorous envelope to
which we long to return, or an umbilical web from which we try to extricate ourselves.
These repressed fantasies of the maternal voice are projected onto the female voice, and lead
to a desire to possess, contain, or silence the supposedly unruly, hysteric, female voice.
Avant-garde artists, such as Gals, Waters and Ono, reclaim the scream, the voice of hysteria,
The scream is also at the basis of both Janovs Primal Therapy, where it marks the
sound of the unconscious coming into consciousness, and Wolfsohns search for unchained
forms of vocal expression, inspired by the haunting cries of dying soldiers. The scream marks
the threshold of both life and death, and this inherent transgression is particularly linked to
women, whose bodies mark the threshold of birth, and whose voices scream the dead.
Wolfsohn sought the feminine voice of his anima through which to develop the range and
expression of his voice, and Artaud regarded the scream as the ultimate manifestation of the
voice of life, death and the theatre. The voice is fundamentally a liminal entity, coming into
being as it transgresses the boundaries of the body, but it is above all the feminine voice that
resounds at and of the margins, echoing the fantasies of the patriarchal unconscious that
In Footprints/Tapuwae, the shock and terror of losing control over my voice led me to
question everything I had come to know about my voice. I had always believed that the voice
was something to be tamed and moulded and was therefore aligned with rationality and
reason, but in this moment, I lost control and something else took over. In retrospect, I had a
moment of epiphany when my voice found me, from somewhere beyond my conscious
control. This thesis is part of an ongoing process that grows out of an experiential, embodied
desire to explore my voice in relation to avant-garde theatre. The theoretical discourse in this
psychoanalytical and political context, but as I have tried to show in my thesis, the actual
that the avant-garde has become a niche-garde (895), which inhabits the already known,
marketed as fitting into specific categories or brands (897). It is of a high level conceptually
and technically, but it has lost its searching, political urgency, because it is known before it
understand the experimental voice as a liminal medium that alludes being fixed or known,
and therefore a suitable partner from which to reclaim the avant-garde from death or
conservatism. My search for this will continue beyond the conclusion of this thesis.
133
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