CPR Festivals Archive

Giving Voice 9: Myths of the Voice 4-9 April 2006 [April 2006]
9th edition of the international festival celebrating the voice in performance.

You can download a pdf version of the Giving Voice Festival brochure from the NEWS section of the site. Individual workshop information is available from the Workshops section within PROJECTS.

To book see the attached booking and accommodation information files.

A compendium of workshops, lecture-demonstrations, discussions and voice-centred performances aimed at the public and arts practitioners, the festival will explore the ideas and mythologies that ‘figure’ and ‘figure-out’ our conceptions, perceptions and uses of the voice and offer a forum of reflection and practice on the cultural/mythological perspectives of how the voice is conceived of. Listened to, and used – especially in the arts and in therapeutic practices.


“I would venture to say that…the voice calls for theologies and resists the cultural relativisation of mythologies, which is the fundamental (and fundamentalist) problem of religions, that is, their refusal to see them selves as mythologies. Hence the proliferation of religious god terms: “the true voice”, “the voice of self”, “the original voice”, etc. This is not only specific to what was the Roy Hart Theatre, or to those who have followed in its wake. It is a feature of many voice teachers and “inspired” voice theoreticians. Furthermore there is a modernist assumption that the voice, like the unconscious (and hence consciousness) or like the notion of “avant garde” in art, was a discovery of the late 19th early 20th centuries.”
Enrique Pardo, Pantheatre

“Vocalic space signifies the ways in which the voice is held both to operate in, and itself to articulate, different conceptions of space, as well as to enact the different relations between body, community, time and divinity”
Stephen Connor, ‘Dumbstruck’


The voice (here understood broadly, and extending beyond the confines of an acoustic-psychological ‘self’ phenomenon) has been imagined and mythologised in very different ways through the centuries. The relationship of tradition to innovation is key to the explorative trajectory seeking to understand the histories, philosophies and cultural dimensions of these mythologies and imaginings. Through a concavo-convex optic the festival will trace the important transformations of notions of the voice and explore notions of the ‘true’ and ‘original’ concept of voice, teasing out sources, roots and myths, following wayward paths, and visiting along the way the vanishing voices of Central Europe, protestant ecstatic practice, Celtic Shamanism. Sacred Theatre, Soul Music, and their figurations in different mythologies. The festival will also focus on contemporary theatre and musical performances whose images and aspirations seek mythological dimensions.

1. Pagan Mythologies of the Voice – with especial emphasis on the ‘poetics of mantics’ and the questions: “where does the voice come from?” and “who does the voice belong to?”
2. Christian Mythologies of the Voice – the closing of the pagan oracles and the notions of truth, self and individuality.
3. Soul Mythologies of the Voice - addressing the much-used definition, “the voice is the muscle of the soul”, and the differentiation of “soul” and “spirit”. Another more ‘orphic’ definition is: “the voice is the mirror of the soul.”
4. Shamanic Mythologies of the Voice – including the the relationship between imagination and healing (the question of therapy)
5. Modernist Mythologies of the Voice – from Nietzsche’s singer-dancer and the importance of the myth of Orpheus in late German Romanticiism and early modernism, to an artist like Marcel Duchamp who disenchanted gestures are contemporary of Wolfsohn’s philosophy of singing.
6. Post-modern Mythologies of the Voice – the status of the voice in contemporary post-modern philosophy, in particular after the late Jacques Derrida’s book “La Voix et le Phenomene” (translated into English as “Speech and Phenomena”).

More information on Giving Voice 9: Myths of the Voice 4-9 April 2006 is available online at:
www.pantheatre.com
http://tourism.ceredigion.gov.uk/llety/aberystwyth_all_s.htm

Additional documentation on Giving Voice 9: Myths of the Voice 4-9 April 2006 can be downloaded at:
giving_voice_booking_form_2006.doc
Giving_Voice_Accomodation_Pack_2006.doc

(To read an Adobe PDF file you will need to have a copy of Adobe Acrobat on your computer. Download a free copy of this programme from Adobe at www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html )