Dance, voice, speech, sound

Abstract

This text is part of a research collection of examples that we selected for the workshop On Voice and Dance for the European Dancehouse Network at the international contemporary dance festival CoFestival 2020 together with Irena Z. Tomažin, a dancer, experimental musician and choreo-vocalist, who has given the contemporary dance community in Ljubljana some excellent performances in this field, in which the body and the voice posed a series of puzzling problems for us. The text is a selective outline of the topics at hand, it goes into the history of contemporary dance, cites some fundamental reference articles and books, to which many others could certainly be added. It focuses on selected aspects of choreo-vocalistics, the sound of the body and choreographies, and aims to use this material to inform further research with the help of considerably more ambitious thinkers. Last but not least, it is a product of last year’s CoFestival curatorial topic, The Amplifiers of Voices, with which we wanted to give some attention to the silenced voice of contemporary dance in a pandemic situation with empty stages. This article has no illusions that it could capture and address the topic in its immense complexity and comprehensiveness, and we apologize to the dancers we have unintentionally omitted in our treatment.