Extending Voice Work

Abstract

“Extending Voice Work” documents a 2018 transdisciplinary research project (with an actor, director, musician, and philosopher), which explored the rehearsal space as feminist praxis and culminated in a production of the one-woman show Sabina’s Splendid Brain, by Canadian playwright Carol Sinclair. The rehearsal process included an extended or expanded voice workshop by Fides Krucker. The article traces a first-person, first-time experience of undergoing a voice workshop. It draws on a thick description of this experience to argue that voice work revolutionizes an understanding of key feminist philosophies of embodiment. In allowing a person to unearth and tangibly connect to preverbal bodily memories, voice work enables an experience of aspects of these feminist theories in practice. However, the article claims voice work also illuminates the limitations of these feminist concepts in their overall theorization of embodiment and the voice. An attentiveness to the practice of voice work demonstrates the inadequacy and undesirability of any one or any final theorization of embodiment. Instead, the article claims, voice work opens up a space for an ongoing rethinking of the intertwining of meaning and embodiment. It concludes that voice work can be a practice that allows us to connect with, write, resist, and rewrite the ever-emerging stories of our own, always embodied experience.