A voice and so much more (or when bodies say things that words cannot)

This article explores and challenges two philosophical perspectives on the voice in performance, seen in Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (2006). Through a consideration of two songs from the 2005 musical The Light in the Piazza, I explore the relationship of the voice to language, and the voice to the body. Examining the effect of the foreign tongue in Piazza, and the prevalence of vocalize as a dramatic device, I conclude that our essential experience of voice is an embodied one, and not paradoxical as Dolar’s theories often suggest. Drawing on neuroscientific and biological perspectives, along with performance theory and musicology, I offer a concept of ‘corporeal vocality’, for understanding the voice as the paradoxical keeper of both linguistic utterance, and the bodily presence of the speaker/singer.