Times to be confirmed

Thursday 23 May - Friday 24 May 2024

The Theatrical Voice: Performing Class, Gender, Race and Identity

Department of Music and Media
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey
GU2 7XH

This event has passed

Event details

The theatrical voice has received increasing scholarly attention in the last thirty years, as a result of the musicological shift from texts (the musical score) to performance. At the same time, theatre historians and scholars in literary, sound and media studies have also increasingly focused on the voice of stage artists and the power of the theatrical voice in shaping ideas of gender, race, class, citizenship and cultural identities. After all, the use of the human voice is absolutely central in theatrical settings, from spoken theatre through popular music genres to opera.

Recognising the relevance of the theatrical voice to the wider socio-cultural contexts it inhabits and shapes, our conference provides a platform for early-career researchers, postgraduate students and established experts who currently work on this subject from a vast array of disciplinary areas.

Programme

23 May 2024

Registration, coffees and teas (10-10:20am)

Welcome (10:20 - 10:30am)

Gendering the voice (10:30am – 12pm)

Charlotte Purkis (University of Winchester), ‘Pioneering experiential vocal acts on stage in the 1950s: a re-evaluation of Joyce Grenfell and Anna Russell’s innovative envoicings of female experience’.
Jessica Edgar (University of Oxford), ‘A Clear Voice: sonic materiality and vocal technique within English choral ensemble’.
Peter Graff (Denison University, Granville, OH, USA), ‘“Oh, About that Voice of Yours”: La Cage aux Folles and the Politics of Staging Queerness’.

Small break (12 - 12:10pm)

Keynote address (12:10 - 1:10pm)

Freya Jarman (University of Liverpool), ‘High voices and the always-alreadiness of intersectionality’

Lunch (1:10 - 3pm)

Practice-based research and theatre practice (3 - 4:30pm)

Chinasa Vivian Ezugha (University of Exeter), ‘Exploring Glossolalia in Theatrical Performance: Unveiling Socio-Cultural Significance’.
Francesca Placanica (Maynooth University), ‘Operatic in the flesh: notes from an audiovisual theatre laboratory’.
Chris Palmer (Guildford School of Acting), ‘Exploring the Historical and Contemporary Pedagogies of the Theatrical Voice’.

Coffee break (16.30 - 5pm)

Singers’ case studies (5 - 6pm)

Daniel Martínez Babibloni (University of La Rioja), ‘Esperanza Abad: pioneer of vocal experimentation in Spanish theatre and music between 1968 and 2002’.
Johanna Talasniemi (University of the Arts Helsinki), ‘A promising career in opera and the end of it: Aulikki Rautawaara and the turmoil of the 1940s’ .

24 May 2024

Historical vocality (10 - 11:30am)

Fatima Volkoviskii (Independent Scholar), ‘Performance practices in early recordings of popular songs by Spanish lyrical singers’.
Sarah Hibberd (University of Bristol), ‘The Dynamics of the Puritani Quartet: Tamburini in the Limelight (1836)’.
Richard Strivens (University of Bristol), ‘“The secrets of the soul”: Karl Scheidemantel, the male falsetto and singing German’.

Coffee break (11:30am - 12pm)

Technologies and the voice (12-1pm)

Louisa Léo (Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris), ‘The theatricality of radio voices through the form of the interview’.
Racheal Owens (Guildford School of Acting), ‘Singing and the Personal Body Mic: The Invention that Changed the Way we Write and Sing Musical Theatre’.

Lunch (1 - 2pm)

Gendering and racialising the voice (2 - 3:30pm)

Christie Finn (Independent Scholar), ‘Gendering the Theatrical Voice through Extended Vocal Technique’.
Kristen Turner (North Carolina State University), ‘Respectability and the Operatic Vocal Timbre in Early Twentieth-Century Black American Musical Comedies’.
Emmanuela Wroth (University of Toronto), ‘The Aural and Visual Racialization of Caroline Branchu in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris’.

Small break (3:30 - 3:45pm)

Final roundtable (3:45 - 5pm)