How to teach a puppet to sing: exploring posthuman perspectives on the ‘natural’ voice alongside The Walk (2021)

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore the construct of the ‘natural’ voice within the context of the natural voice movement, before invoking perspectives on voice from the posthumanities and D/deaf studies in discussion of The Walk, a performance between a puppet, a natural voice choir, a refugee choir and a large audience that occurred in London in October 2021. Methodologically, this paper is an attempt at ‘thinking with theory’ (Jackson, Alecia Youngblood, and Lisa A. Mazzei. 2017. “Thinking with Theory: A New Analytic for Qualitative Inquiry.” In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. K. Denzin, and Y. Lincoln, 717–737. Sage) – specifically thinking voice alongside theoretical stimuli from the posthumanities through the doing of ethnography – in the hope of provoking useful flights of thought in relation to the practice and study of music education and community music. I conclude by considering my personal rationale for engaging with the posthumanities as a means of researching community singing within the natural voice movement. A protean version of this article was presented as a paper-presentation at the Grieg Research School in Bergen, Norway in 2022.

KEYWORDS:

• Community singing
• natural voice
• posthumanism
• puppetry
• voice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article is the result of a CDA PhD project funded by the London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP).

Notes on contributors

Florence Brady

Florence Brady is a PhD researcher at the Royal College of Music. She is a white, Anglo-Irish cis woman and a first-generation university student. Her PhD is a LAHP-funded CDA project in collaboration with the Natural Voice Network (NVN), and focuses on mechanisms of worlding in the UK-based natural voice movement. She makes music with folk-electronic collective Remorae, and is currently a company artist with SCRUM, a theatre charity and performance collective which focuses on resourcing freelance artists with community and continuing professional development.