Somatic Voices in Performance Research and Beyond

Christina Kapadocha, Christina Kapadocha

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429780776
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoría: Arti performative

Somatic Voices in Performance Research and Beyond brings together a community of international practitioner-researchers who explore voice through soma or soma through voice. Somatic methodologies offer research processes within a new area of vocal, somatic and performance praxis. Voice work and theoretical ideas emerge from dance, acting and performance training while they also move beyond commonly recognized somatics and performance processes. From philosophies and pedagogies to ethnic-racial and queer studies, this collection advances embodied aspects of voices, the multidisciplinary potentialities of somatic studies, vocal diversity and inclusion, somatic modes of sounding, listening and writing voice.

Methodologies that can be found in this collection draw on:

• eastern traditions
• body psychotherapy-somatic psychology
• Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method
• Authentic Movement, Body-Mind Centering, Continuum Movement, Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy
• Fitzmaurice Voicework, Linklater Technique, Roy Hart Method
• post-Stanislavski and post-Grotowski actor-training traditions
• somaesthetics

The volume also includes contributions by the founders of:

• 
  
  

• Shin Somatics, Body and Earth, Voice Movement Integration
• SOMart, Somatic Acting Process

This book is a polyphonic and multimodal compilation of experiential invitations to each reader's own somatic voice. It culminates with the "voices" of contributing participants to a praxical symposium at East 15 Acting School in London (July 19–20, 2019). It fills a significant gap for scholars in the fields of voice studies, theatre studies, somatic studies, artistic research and pedagogy. It is also a vital read for graduate students, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers.

Part I
Vocalities in somatic studies

1 Three somatic processes to voice through movement

Breath, exploration, imagery

Barbara Sellers-Young

I am in a dance rehearsal for the Voices of the Disappeared and the choreographer Gail B. hands me my script for the performance that describes a Guatemalan woman’s experience of losing her eldest child.¹ The goal is to combine the words of the script with the previously choreographed gestures. I am initially confused but begin to try to integrate the choreography with my limited knowledge of breath-based vocal support and the images in the script. The final performance was only minimally successful in integrating movement and voice but it helped me to realize that in the performance style of dance theatre, the vocal life of the dancer was as significant as their movement technique.

As someone interested in pedagogical approaches to dance training, the question I asked myself was: What is the process of training that integrates sound and movement? This essay is developed theoretically and practically upon my discoveries over a thirty-year period through a review of the research on neuroscience and diverse approaches of somatic practitioners. In each area – neuroscience research and somatic practices – the historical binary of mind-body or voice-body is exchanged for a conception of the self as an integrated soma. Thus, an underlying paradigm of the essay is that movement and voice are interconnected experiences.

The suggested movement-voice interrelation is not an original concept per se and has been already present in the newly shaped field of critical voice studies.² Nevertheless, this essay integrates research on neuroscience with its specific reference to embodied cognition and an overview of somatic methods to evolve an approach to physical-vocal training based on three interactive processes – breath, exploration and imagery. The somatic basis of each process is described followed by a movement-sound exercise. This narrative provides an opportunity to separately focus on each process from both theoretical and practical perspectives. As the processes are interactive, the final exercise integrates all three.

Neuroscience and somatics: a mind-body paradigm shift

Research of neuroscientists Anthony Damasio (2000, 2005, 2010), Joseph LeDoux (2003), Shaun Gallagher (2005), Michael Gazzaniga (2008) and others has shifted Descartes’ “body versus mind” paradigm with research that indicates that the development of our neural structures is the result of input from the body’s sensory systems; and, in fact, that the interaction of the entire self or soma with the environment structures our neural system, a process referred to as embodied cognition. As developmental psychologist Esther Thelen phrases it:

To say that cognition is embodied means that it arises from bodily interactions with the world. From this point of view, cognition depends on the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with particular perceptual and motor capacities that are inseparably linked and that together form the matrix within which memory, emotion, language, and all other aspects of life are meshed.

(2001, xx)

Reviewing the research, Margaret Wilson (2002) concurs with Thelen and argues that cognition and its relationship to embodiment are situated in a cultural and environmental moment which is related to an individual acting in that context and that action occurs within a specific time frame. Consciousness is therefore a real-world activity that is the result of the integration of how individuals perceive the world and the actions they undertake based on that perception. In neuroscience terms, enaction is not a mind or a body in action but the totality of an integrated being as soma in responsive action.

Somatic specialists have embraced the research in neuroscience as providing evidence of the integrative states they advocate. Batson and Wilson state that “embodiment is not about the body, but rather about the generative power of movement” (2014, 75). Batson and Wilson further suggest that individuals are a sensory rich field which “[b]y sensitizing and discrimination among sensory phenomena, one learns to distinguish degrees of effort” (2014, 107). Philosopher and practitioner Shusterman states that “[t]he cultivation of skills of enhanced awareness is a central task of somaesthetics” (2012, 30). Somatic practitioners from dance and theatre – Minton and Faber (2016), Kemp (2012) and Lutterbie (2006) – agree that neuroscience’s conception of embodied cognition adds to our understanding of the performer’s process and the performer’s enactment as an embodiment of that process.

A goal of somatic practices, including Asian physical disciplines such as Yoga and T’ai Chi, Alexander, Feldenkrais, Body-Mind Centering, Authentic Movement, Hakomi, Rolfing and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, to name a few, is that expanded awareness is a pathway to increased self-understanding and expressiveness.³ Each somatic methodology has a distinct relation to the somatic experience of their founder. For example, Moshe Feldenkrais’ introduction to an integrated body was Asian martial arts, more specifically jujitsu and judo. The Hakomi Method created by psychotherapist Ron Kurtz (1990) combined material derived from Taoist and Buddhist philosophy with Bioenergetics, Feldenkrais and psychotherapy. Whether they are specifically related to dance therapy such as Authentic Movement or to body therapies that draw their conceptual framework from Asian physical disciplines, such as Feldenkrais, the theory behind each form is that attention to inner states can transform an individual’s neural structures that are the result of past experience and as a consequence open an individual to new possibilities.

Although somatic approaches share some similar exercises incorporated into acting and dance classes, the goal is self-cultivation and not training in a specific aesthetic ideal such as ballet, other technical dance style and the styles of theatre from Realism to Grotowski. The underlying assumption of including somatic methods in dance and theatre courses is that enhanced awareness will increase the student’s ability to engage with different styles of performance. A related goal of somatics is an integration of an experience of the sensory systems that counteracts the reliance on the visual that is common in a milieu that relies on screens, from computers to cell phones.⁴ To accomplish the latter, each somatic practice involves some combination of three interactive somatic processes – breath, exploration and imagery. Integrating research in neuroscience and somatics, this essay provides theoretical and practical frameworks for these three processes.

Three somatic processes: breath, exploration, imagery

There is an interaction between two aspects of a soma – the structural self, or actual physical system, and the imaginal/social self, or the images of the world that have been stored in memory. The integration of the structural and imaginal systems through interaction with an environment creates our somatic state and related vocal life. Educational psychologist Howard Gardner (1983) suggests:

In fact, voluntary movements require perpetual comparison of intended actions with the effects actually achieved: there is a continuous feedback of signals from the performance of movements, and this feedback is compared with the visual or linguistic image that is directing the activity. By the same token, the individual’s perception of the world is itself affected by the status of his motor activities: information concerning the position and status of the body itself regulates the way in which the subsequent perception of the world takes place. In fact, in the absence of such feedback from motor activity, perception cannot develop in a normal way.

(1983, 211)

By modeling the behavior of others, for example, we learn to walk, talk and practise situationally appropriate behavior. Whether individually or in a group, awareness is generally limited to the momentary joy or frustration felt at the success or failure of some social interaction. If it was successful, there is a repetition of physical and vocal gestures that brought success; if it was not successful, there is a search to discover a new vocal-physical gesture. The new vocal-gestural language creates a new self-image and related attitude. This replication of experience creates a generalized self-image that is adjusted as necessary to accommodate different social situations.

This generalized self-image is the self a performer initially animates. The goal of performance training, whether dance or acting, is twofold. The first goal is to bring self-image to a level of conscious awareness; and second, to expand awareness so that the performer can engage with a variety of voice and movement styles. Breath provides a point of concentration for expanded somatic awareness. An attitude of exploration participates in the discovery process of new modes of integrative awareness. Imagery engages the imagination to provide a depth of experience to somatic awareness that was gained through an attitude of exploration. The integration of breath, exploration and imagery evolves new neurological pathways that open the performer to new experiential conceptions of what is possible.⁵

Somatic awareness begins with breath

Breath is the basis for life and, as Kristin Linklater points out, “[b]reath is the source of your vocal sound” (2006, 43). Greeks considered the act of breathing to be connected to psyche and pneuma that suggests a combination of soul, air and spirit. Romans used anima spiritus to refer to breath and soul. Somatic practitioner Joseph Heller connects breath with spirit, creativity and inspiration:

But the simple act of breathing requires no special effort, and similarly no effort is required to become connected with spirit. The body is already an inspired organism, and every moment, from your first breath to your last, is an opportunity to breathe in life’s joy and fullness. Inspiration not only includes both breath and spirit, then, but is actually the meeting point at which the two merge; and the unification that takes place in you takes place automatically, unconsciously, effortlessly, and inevitably.

(1986, 118)

The placement of the breath can focus and calm your mind, relax muscles, release tension and increase awareness of subtle somatic states.⁶

From the perspective of somatics, a focus on the breath and an individual’s ability to attend to the somatic state of breathing is the precursor to increasing the quality of attention to other actions. The distinctiveness of a neuro-somatic method is the focus on attentive awareness. The degree and quality of attention influences the level and depth of somatic awareness or, as Linklater states, “perception must eventually be refined to extreme subtlety in order to observe the minutiae of neuromuscular behavior” (2006, 31). Breath is therefore the beginning of the majority of somatic practices towards voicing as it subtly expands kinesthetic awareness on a micro level and provides a specific point of concentration. The following exploration concentrates on the subtle sensations of the breath and the quality of attention to sensation. As with the rest of the practice that complements this chapter, it is in italics and it addresses to you, the reader, to filter through your own identity and experience.

Within the narrative of the exercise, feel, fuse and follow are verbs that describe the active process of integrating the breath as a point of focus, awareness and action. Feel is becoming aware of the kinesthetic connective state of breath. Fuse allows you to focus on the breath. Follow provides an opportunity to ...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of online material
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Series foreword
• Foreword: a phonotechnics of vocal somaticity: an autobiophonic note
• Introduction: somatic voice studies
• Part I Vocalities in somatic studies
• Part II Voice work, somatics and the diverse self
• Part III Vocal and somatic listening in training
• Part IV Beyond the somatic in performance research
• Part V Beyond this book
• Index