Rodenburg’s The Right to Speak and Caverero’s For More Than One Voice: Laura Dougherty (Winthrop University)

I approached these two texts with these current projects on my mind: just this week I was given the final (purportedly) edits for a chapter I’ve contributed to the forthcoming book Playing With Theory in Theatre Practice. I was asked to contribute a case study on my work as a voice coach for a production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus. What I try to work through in the chapter is how I used post-colonial theories in my work as a voice coach. I am also considering the Voice and Movement class I currently teach—thinking at this time of syllabus preparation of my teaching methodology, and how and where in my approach I might engage with my material in ways that might be more effective, or how I might add additional perspective. I mention this to open only to acknowledge and articulate my current subject position. As a scholar and a voice and speech practitioner I spend a good amount of time navigating the theory/praxis divide. And this is exactly the space I find between these two works.

Going back to Rodenburg’s text, having had read it before and being familiar with her and her work, I am interested in her how she advocates for access; access to the healthful production of one’s voice, but also in the scope of the work, access to voice work. I appreciate how her work and approach is usable for practitioners of specific methodologies, as well as those who might practice a general mash-up of different practices. One of the most recognizable figures in the practice of voice and speech her project here is to advocate not necessarily for her methodology, but for the voice in general. I had heard her “God doesn’t mind a bum note” anecdote before I had heard of her or her work. I am fueled, for my teaching, to constantly address in my own approach, how to better advocate for the practice of voice and speech as a whole, but also to advocate for each actor and student’s own voice. Revisiting this text serves to reaffirm that advocacy. While her examples might be now outdated (I wonder how that would resonate with my undergrads), the simplicity of her advocacy for access has great staying power.

How is the body considered in Cavarero’s text? I am interest in how this text works to complicate and celebrate the corporeality of voice. “Unlike thinking, speaking does not allow its protagonist to be an abstract subject” (175) as if voice is a somehow grounded theory for its very literalness—there is a body connected to, producing the voice. I am entrenched in opening up to my students the great weight of performativity—suggesting that something happens and is happening because of an utterance and how it is created and connected to their bodies in their moment. So if Cavarero works against a tradition in philosophy which removes or ignores the act of speaking from the idea of speech “[t]he basic strategy, which is the inaugural act of metaphysics, consists in a double gesture whereby speech is separated from speakers and finds its home in thought” (9), the practice of voice and speech necessarily answers that call, because it is, of course, necessarily rooted in the body.