Field Notes: Voice, Breath, Texture
Live performance excerpt (video)
Her Voice
As golden winter light settles over Houston, I’m sharing this three-minute live performance cut from the voice-and-dancer duet: Her Voice. This piece is a wordless song and a kind of embodied (re)membering before and beyond language.
Voice before language
Sonority as meaning
Her Voice is part of Testimony, an evening-length collaborative music-dance work that premiered this past fall, spearheaded by artistic director and choreographer Toni Leago Valle. The performance themes centered on the silencing of women’s voices, our refusal to be silent, and the vandalism of Shahzia Sikander sculpture Witness when it was on view at the University of Houston.
In Testimony, I embody this sculpture: as an archetype, as a character, and as myself. The sculpture-in-performance becomes an avatar of reclamation and a figure that is part Eve and part Every Woman.
We created the duet, Her Voice, from improvisational processes in the studio: setting the conditions for the piece to emerge through my voice and movement and dancer Shelby Craze’s intuitive and sensitive dance response.
This vocal terrain:
voice that isn’t quite song,
isn’t quite speech,
but emerges as something unrestricted and primal—
has settled and integrated into my body-voice world.
This work feels like a creative spiral returning to familiar ground. I now see a new horizon where ideas reveal themselves and song forms with my poetry may re-enter, but in a new way.
If you’d like to linger, here is a link to the full duet at the project page on my site.
As an echo of this powerful work, explore my other writings on the performance process here: A Sculpture Brought to Life, Reflections from the Stage, and Lens of the Muse.
Thank you for reading and witnessing this work with me.
Onward and inward as the creative current shifts and flows 💫 —
M
And many thanks to Toni, the creative force behind Testimony.
“In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.”
― Robert Fripp