Voice (as and in) touch

Abstract

What can touch, as operational metaphor and physical method, offer to voice work for an intersectional performer in an intercultural context? This analysis considers 3 voice practices I have researched within the frame of experimental deviser training with diverse student groups, grounded in my work at the Norwegian Theatre Academy (NTA). The exercises work with different touch interfaces; (1) Vocal Wrestling (touching each other), inspired by contact improvisation and Grotowski diaspora trainings, (2) Follow the bubbles (self-touch) derived from anatomical voice methods, and (3) The Voices in My Voices (touching our communities/cosmologies) inspired by decolonial and New Materialist (NM) thought. The work proposes touch as generative in the process of world making via voice. Strategies include: decentring the teacher, empowering student world building, polyvocality, brave spaces, vocal risk and queer use via hybrid experience. It puts forth principle-based and practical starting points for models of touch in training which ‘meet’ today’s climate of care and carefulness proactively and with lightness. Theoretically, this work is grounded in McAllister-Viel, Thomaidis, Oram, Eidsheim, Object Oriented Feminism, aurality studies, critical whiteness and decolonial theory.