I have struggled in bringing myself to respond to these two books, but I am compelled to send something in to our blog. I struggle, and I think this struggle may be rooted in the dichotomy of our panel’s title. Some of the following may be meanderings:
I wish to point out for the record that Patsy Rodenburg’s book was written in 1993 and Cavarero’s in 2005. We are looking at one text which is 18 years old and the other six. One is primarily a practical working book or textbook, the other a philosophical treatise.
I worked with Patsy Rodenburg daily at the National Theatre in London for 3 weeks in 1995 and for a week at a time in NYC twice-- in 1995 and 1996. I have interacted with her in several other practical situations--both in groups and in private settings. I have used the Right to Speak in my Beginning Voice classes--as well as Acting I classes when teaching at schools that did not have voice classes as part of their curriculum--since 2000. I find that actors need to claim the basic rights she discusses in the first paragraph of the book: “The right to breathe, the right to be physically unashamed, to fully vocalize, to need, choose and make contact with a word, to release a word into space—the right to speak.” This is crucial before teaching them to “act.” But non-actors can also benefit greatly from her book; I often get “general” students in the Beginning Voice class as well as theatre majors. I use Rodenburg’s The Actor Speaks in my Intermediate Voice classes.
Rodenburg has honed her work over many years, continuing to clarify a subject with many complex layers to it. She has developed these methods to work quickly and practically with professional actors; as well, she has worked with a variety of other people--young school children, corporate CEO’s, doctors, professors and teachers, lawyers, and prisoners among many others. She has taught around the world in places like India, South Africa, and Japan. In many of the places she has taught, she has taught underserved or disadvantaged communities, even victims of torture in South Africa. She has sought to give voice to people and to cultures that for one reason or another have had their voices silenced. These silencings may have to do with political environments, with other life circumstances, or with one’s personal habits that interfere with an open voice that is capable of clarity, emotional and musical range, and expressivity. She has honed a highly nuanced way to work with the voice, sometimes in very sensitive situations, to get results over time. She has continued to develop these ideas and methods practicing them in dynamic environments.
I would say at the root of all her work lies the invitation that people may claim these rights to speak as individuals. She equally committed to revealing what physical, dynamic presence can allows us to do relationally and politically. She refers to this presence as Second Circle energy which she references in The Right to Speak where she addresses “Bluff” (Third Circle energy) and “Denial” (First Circle Energy.)
Both of these books emphasize embodying sound as a necessity for realizing the uniqueness of the speaker. Perhaps this embodiment needs to be addressed more as philosophy of voice studies move forward. We seem focused on the acts of speaking and voicing, yet the physical component is more and more a crucial part of voice training as well as major contributors to actor training overall. Many colleges, universities, and conservatories include such actor training methods as Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, Sensory Awareness, Authentic Movement, Laban, and other psychophysical reeducation techniques. These interweave with voice training. Many of these methodologies address habits of the performer; they might incur some of the same criticisms thrown at voice training. I haven’t heard any of these systems or methodologies, for example, referred to as “essentialist,” “primitivist,” “Freudian,” or “naturalist.”
Additionally, both Cavarero and Rodenburg champion in different ways the political ramifications of being able to speak as a unique “persona”—literally meaning “through the sound.”
I have referred in an earlier writing to Cavarero’s book—a fascinating investigation into the development of Western philosophical thought with its primacy in the visual as opposed to the auditory and into Plato’s insistence that thinking lies in the head and that historically in the philosophical tradition the “semantic” is superior to the “phonic,” I was most engaged with her writing in the chapters “When Thinking was Done with the Lungs…,” “The Rhapsodic Voice,”and “The Maternal Chora.”
In “When Thinking was Done with the Lungs,” I was drawn to her explanation of the idea of thumos—an aeriform substance in the lungs that sometimes is explained as “spirit” which “evokes not only the emotions, but also the intellectual functions, or thought.” The affinity between thought and speech—or better, the derivation of the first from the second situates the mind and intellectual activities in the respiratory apparatus and in the organs of phonation. It is so to speak, the phone that decides the physiology of thought. By the same token, beating one’s breast, the deep chest of breath from which the voice emerges, is “a direct gesture of the conscious I.’” This is an interesting idea as it relates to what I think many of us in voice practice are seeking to encourage—allowing the integration of the thinking, feeling self and in the case of actors, training them to recognize an impulse to which they can act on and give voice to. Cavarero sites how the insistence on logos has silenced voices. In speaking of thumos and “beating the breast” she says that many “archaic cultures are in agreement on the matter of finding consciousness and thought in the natural essence of the breast, in the blood and vapor that it exhales; name, breath.” (63)
“The Rhapsodic Voice”: “….In the language of literary criticism, voice, is today a technical term that indicates the peculiarity of the style of a poet, or more generally, of an author. This use is interesting above all for the way in which it recalls a vocal uniqueness that is implicitly understood to be removed from the acoustic sphere.”(89) The “chora” she speaks calls to mind Barthes’ term in speaking of the mysterious, individual “grain” of the voice. Much in this chapter resonates with ideas of Kristin Linklater, Cicely Berry, and Rodenburg in speaking of the sounds of the language in poetic texts. I said what I most wanted to say about Cavarero in my first posting.
I feel that the exercise we are called upon to do in writing these responses is reflective of the root of what Cavarero is discussing—that there is ultimately a preferencing of our written, semantic responses to her work and to Rodenburg’s which invites attempts at description that may or may not reflect the highly nuanced thoughts and intentions in each. I want to discuss both of these works “phonically,” “on voice” in the presence of other bodies and thinkers. My previous response to Barthes and to Knight was in some ways purposely “chatty” in style because my own preference is that with which I am at home. And within that lies my struggle. I said I “read aloud” the Barthes article because it made a different kind of sense when the molecules of meaning carried on pitch, tone, rhythm, in a space to another--breathed from one to another-- allows for a different meaning to arise out of Barthes’s text. Clearer? More nuanced? Reflecting an individual point of view, uniqueness? Perhaps in conversation at our panel?
