Staging Voices

Abstract

The article highlights the vocal and auditory dimension of (contemporary) theater. Numerous innovations and transformations of the theater and of performance art in the last decades have been based on a host of different vocal utterances and experiments as well as playful adaptations of acoustic material, such as exploring the physicality of voice and speech, dissociating body and voice, unfolding technical voices as a material in its own right, presenting solo as well as choral voices. The article first develops a concept of the vocality of theater by referring to the notion of embodied language and, second, discusses the implications and effects of vocality in contemporary theater: the responsive nature of perception, the performativity of vocal experience, the intensity and affectivity of hearing, the spatial quality of sound, and the social nature of listening.