The Embodied Monologues
Research Series

Voice cannot be imagined as separated from any bodily act or matter. It intoxicates all along without an end. Voice emerges out of No Thing (Calcagno 2003). It would not claim to be in a specific relation to gender, class, ethnicity or other classification, yet this voice can be identified as “an imaginary figure of any thing”; a paradoxical voice performed and presented out of unexpected encounters with whatever meaning there might be. Voice can – among many possibilities – be traced to 17^th century Venetian music drama stages – and considered to be a symbol for Nothingness as specifically performed in operatic mad scenes. This EXPO presents research  on ‘how to perform vocal nothingness’ (Belgrano 2011)  and  letting VOICE diffract through a Baradian (feminist new materialist) methodology (Barad 2007, 2012) allowing for vocal practice to intra-act continuously with any matter or meaning encountered along the road, by “re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings)” (Barad 2014). Through this performative approach VOICE argues that vocal identity can be viewed as an entangled dance – where sound, thoughts, judgements, senses, madness, matter, chaos, vibrations and so on cannot be separated from one another – “endlessly opening itself up to a variety of possible and impossible reconfigurings” (Hinton 2013). The result that emerges from this trans-spatiotemporal study is a sensuous queering of vocality that allows individuals to experience a monstrous voice as Any Thing or No Thing, following a discourse on Nothingness that had a fundamental impact on 17^th century operatic vocality and on the birth of music drama.