Staging Voice

Staging Voice is a unique approach to the aesthetics of voice and its staging in performance. This study reflects on what it would mean to take opera’s decisive attribute—voice—as the foundation of its staged performance. The book thinks of staging through the medium of voice. It is a nuances exploration, which brings together scholarly and directorial interpretations, and engages in detail with less frequently performed works of major and influential 20th-century artists—Erik Satie, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill—as well as exposes readers to an innovative experimental work of Evelyn Ficarra and Valerie Whittington. The study is intertwined throughout with the author’s staging of the works accessible online. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in voice studies, opera, music theatre, musicology, directing, performance studies, practice-based research, theatre, visual art, stage design, and cultural studies.

In Staging Creolization, Emily Sahakian examines seven plays by Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart that premiered in the French Caribbean or in France in the 1980s and 1990s and soon thereafter traveled to the United States. Sahakian argues that these late-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization—the process of cultural transformation through mixing and conflict that occurred in the context of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Sahakian here theorizes creolization as a performance-based process, dramatized by French Caribbean women’s plays and enacted through their international production and reception histories. The author contends that the syncretism of the plays is not a static, fixed creole aesthetics but rather a dynamic process of creolization in motion, informed by history and based in the African-derived principle that performance is a space of creativity and transformation that connects past, present, and future.

Although there are many studies on linguistic variation as it relates to both "traditional" and "new" media such as film, TV, newspapers, and online behavior, little has been written about spoken performance in overt but face-to-face conversations. This book bridges that gap, and focuses on an "in between" zone between casual face-to-face conversations and the type of heavily scripted language of most traditional spoken media. The book draws upon a substantial amount of empirical data in its investigation of the role played by performance texts in creating, maintaining and challenging imagined communities and focuses upon the ways in which performance contributes to people's sense of the kinds of use for which dialect/variational use is appropriate and those for which it is not. It sheds light on how such stylization intersects with multiple social indexes and how performers and other creative artists challenge and mock hegemonic practices through enregistering a defined set of linguistic variables in the context of their performance and other associated written texts.

This book argues that the voice is a crucial link between bodies, thought, and mortal identity in the tragedies of Aeschylus. It first presents conceptions of the voice in Greek poetry and philosophy and then shows how Aeschylus' tragedies gain meaning from the rubric and performance of voice.

Voice in Motion explores the human voice as a literary, historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as struggling, even failing, to work. In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts—including anatomy books, acoustic science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even translations of Ovid—Bloom maintains that cultural representations and theatrical enactments of the voice as "unruly matter" undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage reshape their world. Bringing together performance theory, theater history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body, and self.

Through an examination of a range of performance works ranging from Jean Cocteau's ballet The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party (1921) to Julie Taymor's monumental production of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark (2010) and Mexican playwright Isaac Gomez's La Ruta(2018), Staging Technology asks what becomes visible when we encounter plays, operas, and musicals that are themselves about fraught human/machine interfaces. What can theatrical production tell us about the way technology functions as an element of ideology and power in narrative drama? About the limits of the human? Staging Technology bridges the divide between the technical practices of theatre production and critical, theoretical approaches to interpreting drama to examine the way dramatic theatre's technologies are shaped by larger historical, ideological, and economic forces. At the same time, it examines how those technologies themselves have influenced 20th and 21st-century playwrights', composers', and librettists' choice of subject matter for staged representation. Examining performance works from the modernist and post-modern European and American canon of drama, opera, and performance art including works by Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, Sophie Treadwell, Harold Pinter, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, Arthur Miller, Robert Pinsky, John Adams and Alice Goodman, Staging Technology transforms how we think about the interrelationship between theatre practice, performance, narrative drama, and text. In it Craig N. Owens synthesizes approaches to interpretation and practice from disparate realms, offering insights into over-arching ways of making meaning that are illustrated through focused and innovative readings of individual works for the dramatic stage. Staging Technology provides a new and transformative paradigm for thinking about dramatic literature, the practices of representational theatre production, and the historical and social contexts they inhabit.

To date, there are 300 disorders associated with voice, but until now there has never been a published reference manual that classifies these disorders. Borrowing from the successful organization schema of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM), the Classification Manual for Voice Disorders-I provides the framework for classifying voice disorders using the following criteria for each disorder: essential and associated features; vocal impairment; clinical history and demographic profile; course and complications; medical and voice differential diagnosis; and severity criteria. Classification Manual for Voice Disorders-I is a project of ASHA’s Special Interest Division 3, Voice and Voice Disorders (DIV 3), originally directed by contributing authors Moya Andrews, Diane Bless, Daniel Boone, Janina Casper, Leslie Glaze, Mike Karnell, Christy Ludlow, and Joe Stemple. The text was edited over a period of several years by the authoritative group of voice disorders professionals, including Katherine Verdolini, Clark Rosen, and Ryan Branski. This version represents the fields of speech-language pathology, voice science, and otolaryngology. CMVD-I lists most conditions that may negatively affect the ability to produce voice, based on the most current knowledge. These conditions comprise 30 structural pathologies, 25 neurological disorders, 20 aerodigestive conditions, 13 psychological disturbances, 15 systemic diseases, four inflammatory processes, four traumatic conditions, and five miscellaneous voice disorders. CMVD-I is a must-have resource for professionals who specialize in voice disorders, especially speech-language pathologists and otolaryngologists. The handy organization of this reference makes it a convenient and accessible resource for voice coaches and teachers of singing. It will also be invaluable as a textbook in master’s-level communication sciences programs throughout the world. Proceeds received by Division 3 will be used to support the mission of Special Interest Division 3, which provides continuing education and networking opportunities to promote leadership and advocacy for voice issues from professional, clinical, educational, and scientific perspectives.