CPR Workshops archive
Giving Voice festival: Myths of the Voice [April 2006]
9th edition of the international festival celebrating the voice in performance.
 
THE GIVING VOICE FESTIVAL 2006
‘MYTHS OF THE VOICE’
Aberystwyth, 4 - 9 April
Over the past 15 years GIVING VOICE has gathered together a wonderful array of some of the world’s finest performers and voice teachers in a unique celebration of the voice. Over 1,600 performers, directors, teachers, therapists, and a growing number of members of the public and non-professional voice-users have taken part in the project.
Giving Voice springs from a strong belief in the voice’s ability to communicate beyond language and cultural difference, and that working with the voice can allow people, from wherever they come, to enjoy and value the riches of difference as well as the recognition and celebration of a common humanity.
Giving Voice is an established international event which has the aim of advancing the appreciation and understanding of the voice in performance through practical research and a celebration of its many and varied manifestations throughout time and culture. It brings together those who have an interest in the voice but who will not necessarily meet in the course of their practice: academics and practitioners; performers from a variety of disciplines; teachers of spoken voice and singing teachers; those with an experimental interest and those who favour traditional methodology; those from the world of medical knowledge of the vocal mechanism and those interested in the spiritual dimensions and healing properties of voice work. Giving Voice explores the voice through a series of themed meetings during which there are workshops, lecture demonstrations, discussions and performances and a symposium. These take place in April biennially and attract a wide range of participants from the performing arts but also from voice therapy, laryngology, teaching, linguistics, communication studies etc. as well as the general public.
There have been eight sessions of GIVING VOICE since 1990:
• 1990 First explorations Cardiff
• 1994 A Geography of the Voice 1 Cardiff
• 1995 A Geography of the Voice 2 Cardiff
• 1996 An Archaeology of the Voice 1 Cardiff
• 1997 An Archaeology of the Voice 2 Aberystwyth
• 1999 A Divinity of the Voice Aberystwyth
• 2002 The Voice Politic Aberystwyth & Cardiff
• 2004 Towards a Philosophy and Psychology of the Voice Aberystwyth & Cardiff
The ninth edition to be held in Aberystwyth in April 2006 is conceived in collaboration with Enrique Pardo and Pantheatre, Paris and will focus on the theme: Myths of the Voice.
GIVING VOICE 9: Myths of the Voice, 4 – 9 April 2006
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 festival: Myths of the Voice can be found at
www.pantheatre.com,
Additional documentation on Giving Voice festival: Myths of the Voice is available:
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 )
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