The voice as a limb : discovering pedagogy and politics : through the bridge of voice and movement

Abstract

This work analyses what the concept of voice means and how to deal with its unconventional use in a dance context, through a radical pedagogy approach. The radicality of the pedagogy in this process is based on guidelines determined by me in order to set up a horizontal teaching style while working with a neurodivergent group of people. The principles of the pedagogical approach are around the temporalization of teaching and the tone of the encounter with the participants. The concept of micropolitics, taken from Felix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, is present in this work as a method to understand the relationality between the person’s experience of their voice and what are micro and macro political implications of these explorations. The micropolitical analysis that this event reveals is firstly the importance of enabling an extraordinary experience where the body-mind is testing fringe zones, in this case the improvised flow of movement with a vocalization that deviates from a quotidian use of voice. Secondly, it involves raising critical awareness of what sensations, thoughts, emotions emerged. And thirdly, organizing this information for oneself and at a later stage sharing it with the working group and engaging in discussions with them. "The Voice as a Limb: Sounding Dance Laboratory" is a space where the exploration of the phonatory possibilities of voice are combined with movement improvisation to create an extraordinary experience to enable awareness and discussion. In this practice, the voice is perceived as part of the body that grows within the depths of the torso, moves and composes in this space in relation to oneself and the others. The sounding limb is encouraged to drift away from the use of the semantics of spoken language or music. By enhancing the embodied perception of the voice and welcoming it to the movement, this work aims to raise awareness about the relationship with one’s voice, give different input for the creation of movement and experiment with possibilities for a unity of expression that holds the body-breath-voice in what I have started to call sonomovements. "All you can do is breathe and hope" is the performance resulting from the process that Maia Nowack and I held with the students of Vocational Qualification in Dance at Vocational College Live. Through this process we facilitated a workshop for the students, where we were able to test our approach to pedagogy, develop our practices and share a creative process. A detailed description of the practical work is presented accompanied by reflections on how the challenges that emerged were resolved. This performance was the crystallization of the exploration of those phonatory possibilities that "The Voice as a Limb" enabled, in coordination with the creative methods we used to involve students in the dramaturgy of the choreographic worlds that we created with them. This thesis work follows Robin Nelson’s approach of Practice as Research in Arts and is deeply inspired by Erin Manning’s propositions for Research-Creation. In Nelson’s multimodal method there are three modes of knowledge intertwined: the theoretical, the practical and the outcome of the juxtaposition of both. The reaserch inquiry is the following: what has the practice of "The Voice as a Limb: Sounding Dance Laboratory" during the work with Vocational College Live’s dance students taught me about micropolitics and radical pedagogy? What does it mean to put the voice in the centre of the dance practice? How do my guidelines on radical pedagogy affect the process of the workshop? What is the relationship between radical pedagogy and micropolitics in this project? And what are the pedagogical tools needed to pass the threshold towards the voice-movement exploration?