The above image, titled “Master Class,” concluded my masters research and thesis “Destruction Etc." at the Zurich Hochschule Der Kunste investigating the psychological theories of Sabina Spielrein— a student and contemporary of Jung and Freud— applying her thesis "Destruction as a Cause of Coming in Being" to creative practice, and specifically to voice performance.
I have shared some of my writing about the mask, and the connection between the voice, the mask, and the personality. I have also written about how, in the Hart/Wolfsohn traditions of Voice Work, the mask falls apart ...
The mask of fully formed words and melody are to the voice like the ego, to the personality. The voice both provides the content and is the vehicle whereby the self can be heard and potentially communicated. Working with voice, the Wolfson/Hart tradition claimed as early as the 1940’s that men and women are able to cross gendered lines, their work lead to the development of extended range vocal technique striving for the ideal now known as the ‘Eight Octave Voice’. Embracing unformed and ‘Broken Sounds’—an invitation to the audible process of transformation—is what the Hart /Wolfsohn Voice Work tradition calls, ‘the singing process’, and is described in the title of Alfred Wolfson’s unpublished theories, as “Orpheus, the Way to a Mask.”
Voice and sound in my final performance of "Destruction Etc." — practice based research in scenography and spatial design, at the ZHdK— were treated with and against the acoustic and the musical. From performed speech, scream and song to random, produced or incidental noises and ‘real’ city sound, inside and outside, mutually discordant and harmonious, sound and its absence figured prominently to create the atmosphere of interruptive disquietude.
Whether a voice, a telephone, a piano or a passing tram, each sound, when acknowledged, presses in on the ear… It was the transformed soundscape of the modern city that changed the way we hear irrevocably. In order to bring experience into the audible world, and to withstand the pervasiveness of sound (which unlike sight cannot be as easily voluntarily blocked), we need to recognize how we not only see but also hear modernity’s perceived negativity of being as dissonance and discord.
In the later stages of the expressionist gesture, artists who were engaged in the struggle for the discovery of a new, dynamic and vital subjectivity, more suited to the demands of the new age. Expressionism belonged to artists destined to live in an era where human nature was subjected to such radical changes, they came to see that it (human nature), “changes by recognizing that it is already and inevitably changed by living discovery” (Harrison, 1910, p. 16).
Bound by the constant re-configurations demanded by being and becoming, artists looking inward came to realize—as I did through my previous work on nostalgia—that self-expression’s new struggle to not recede into nostalgic fantasy, required a participation in the imminent transformation of the constraints that define it. Spinning through shifts and re-negotiations, thus, the transformative process unravels and redraws itself...
As with theatre (and all forms of representation), it is only by remaining inside the constrictions of representation that one finds a means to loosen the stranglehold of its contradictions. The distanciation prescribed by Brecht was not a call for the rejection of representation; as much as Castelucci’s iconoclasm is also not defined by the absolute eradication of the icon. Both ask, instead, for a comment on, and visibility of, the apparatus of representation... the mask through which we sound ourselves out.
Without distance representation would be invariably bound to reproduce mimetically the established conditions of the socio-symbolic order—which, like the notion of self, or ego, is as much sustaining as oppressive. Neither actor nor performer can pretend to escape the determining structures and strictures of representation. Accepting the shifting that occurs in the act/action between identity and identification (in crisis) allows the idea of an essential self to die, that is — to momentarily become a stranger even to oneself.
