This is the first of what I hope will be a number of posts to come out of me running a workshop during the April 06 meeting of the Lab. I’d decided to run this workshop, one as a means of introducing the process I use in an experiential way to other members of the Lab, but also because I thought we might get to a place where I could also film people doing it and use those films as part of my more general research.
In this post I’m going to give some historical background to the work
Briefly Voic(e)motion is an improvisational process that seeks to unify voice and movement through the medium of emotion - hence the name I gave it. It has many influences and the things I use within it are a hybrid of various exercises, processes and concepts I’ve picked up in different situations over the years, plus a few of I’ve developed myself. It’s highly influenced by the voice work of Richard Roberts (aka Krishnadhyanam) and the Roy Hart Theatre, that I first encountered in the 80’s, which eventually lead to my first forays into performing it both solo and in collaboration with Kate Pyper as the duo Voxall Bridge. It also borrows from the exploration into the Fool and Circus related arts that I undertook with Franki Anderson and at the Fooltime circus school in Bristol in the late 80’s. Fooltime was where I first really started to explore and teach it as a technique and as a process to use with other disciplines. After that came the influence of the ritualistic dance/theatre of Nava Zukerman and Tmu-Na in the early 90’s; the improvisational work of choreographer Julyen Hamilton; my time with director Tom Morris and his work on the Walking Orchestra; and last but not least the many years of collaborative work I’ve been involved in with the members of Improbable, that reaches back long before the company even started in 1997.
However I always site the starting point of my interest in voice and the body as dating back to the late 70’s when I had a terrible back problem. I was in drama college and I’d reached a point where I had to stop doing any movement related, classes because of the pain. It was difficult enough to just be in rehearsal and even sitting down was often excruciating. For two years I had to spend five out of every twenty minutes lying on the floor. I’d tried everything from the traditional medical treatments of sound, heat and traction to more alternative methods such as Osteopathy and Alexander Technique, but nothing helped other than temporarily. Spurred on by my desire to avoid the operation the doctors advised me I needed, which was to have a disc removed in my spine, I started seeing the healer Hilmar Schonauer.
When I first met him I don’t think he’d been practising very long. At that time essentially the process he used was massage, but early on he already started to encourage me to make sounds as I lay on the table. What or how he sensed what he did I don’t know, but what started off as insignificant sounds emanating from my mouth soon grew to emotional tirades that engulfed the whole of my body – it sometimes felt like I was being hit by a hurricane that was coming from somewhere inside me. Whatever it was, the combination of those emotional releases coupled with the way he used to manipulate and/or sooth my body meant that within six weeks my back problem had essentially gone.
Later on, as my interest in healing developed, I started to do massage myself. Like Hilmar I also found myself drawn to asking people to make sounds. It seemed to me, observing and working with them, that sometimes an area of tension or holding in their body, that I was working on, would more easily release itself, if they made a sound rather than if I continued placing my hands upon them. Not only did I find that the physical release often took place, but other things started to filter through them similar to the emotional releases of my own with Hilmar. Eventually I became more interested in this process of helping people to “relax” themselves rather than continue with the massage and though it took a few years to formulate what I was going to do exactly, that’s how I came to begin the development of my voice-movement work.
I mention all this because although I don’t teach Voic(e)motion as a therapeutic process, it certainly has its roots in healing. And it is a fascination to me how it does bring up issues in people around what is performance, what is therapy and what isn’t. For myself I don’t disown the therapeutic aspect of Voic(e)motion and what it offers in itself as a means towards personal growth, but in my workshops I emphasise the performance element of it. I guess for me there is no clear dividing line between performance and therapy, it seems that in each there is simply a shift in emphasis and for myself I am more comfortable working within the performance emphasis. By staying within what I sense performance to be, it feels more meaningful to me and I seem to understand more what I’m doing than I did when, as a massage therapist, I was clearly working within the therapeutic emphasis. Paradoxically emphasising performance I also feel that I am having a more therapeutic effect than I would otherwise.
In a sense the opposite could be said of Hilmar – though his intention was to try and bring about healing (and undoubtedly he succeeded in this) in the process he was helping to expand my artistic language. I was learning things about my voice, my body and self expression on his table that were probably of more use to me in the long run as an artist than anything I was learning at drama college - though in hindsight I appreciate that my grounding in traditional theatre practice helped me later on when I was experimenting in how I could bring this new area of voice-movement work into the performance realm. This is probably why I dropped out of acting and started to explore healing. Acting (art?) now seemed a superficial process to me. I was going through an internal revolution and the sense of liberation that accompanied it was similar to what had drawn me towards acting in the first place. But I couldn’t see how what I was experiencing and acting could come together – I couldn’t see how healing and art could mix. The process involved in one seemed to be miles away from the process involved in the other and as far as I knew there was no model to bring the two together. There was drama/art therapy, but that seemed to be something different than what I was concerned with.
As I started to do my first voice workshops initially with Richard Roberts and then members of the Roy Hart Theatre, like Noah Pikes, Kiki Anderson and Enrique Pardo, the fact that there wasn’t a model (or if there was I didn’t know of one) was useful for a while. Because I concentrated on the notion that what I was learning was purely for my own growth rather than for my growth as a performer, I believe I went deeper into things than I would have done otherwise. But then I realised that not only did I “like” what I was experiencing myself in the workshops, I also “liked” what I saw other people doing. I found it entertaining, moving, harrowing, challenging, inspiring and liberating, as well as obviously quite dull sometimes. I realised that in a non-performance context people were creating fantastic performance work, though they were often unaware of it. The question was could the same happen in a non-workshop context? More specifically for myself, could I continue to do what I was doing in the workshops in front of a paying audience in such a way that I could still “enjoy” myself with my new found means of expression while at the same time it be a meaningful experience them.
I guess I would say I have found mild success in my attempts to bring this about over the years. But its probably true to say from a consumer point of view that my workshops in Voic(e)motion Performance have generally proved more popular than my actual Voic(e)motion performances, with a few notable exceptions. However I think this comes down to the fact that no definable area of discipline, Voic(e)motion included, is in itself interesting to witness for very long. It is its marriage with other areas of expression where it starts to have real meaning, certainly from an audience point of view, I think. Which brings us back to the subject of my research in this Lab – mixing my Voic(e)motion work with video.
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Guy Dartnell, Audio, April 2006 | 
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