Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - 1-2: Listen to Performance, Listen to Voices, Dec 2025

In a context of extreme violence, the voices of women – the biggest victims of Colombia’s domestic armed conflict – are a precious source through which to understand the territorial tangle underlying any war. Taking two documentaries directed by the filmmaker Nicolás Rincón Gille, this article aims to highlight the power of the voices of Colombian women who have borne witness to their experience of violence. As well as armed violence, they talk about violence inside families. The hypothesis of this article is that the characters in Rincón Gille’s documentaries, facing both physical and cultural disappearance, express themselves principally through orality, something inherent to their sociocultural circumstances. In other words, they exist from ‘their place of enunciation’ (or social position) – a concept theorized, from Brazil, by the Afro-feminist philosopher Djamila Ribeiro. This article employs the subversive power of this key concept in thinking about oral expression as practised by Colombian women: as a tool for survival, creative transmission and preserving memory.

This article explores the creation of a theatrical performance from oral archives through a practice-based research project conducted with a French theatre company, Compagnie Babel, in autumn 2023. Known for its work with both ‘everyday experts’ (citizens, residents) and professional experts, the company collaborated with master’s students in artistic creation at Grenoble Alpes University. Together, they developed Conseil municipal (‘City Council’), a short performance interweaving the voices of political representatives and participants in alternative forms of governance, presented on 10 November 2023 at Grenoble’s Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation. The article reflects on the specific methodologies developed through this collaboration, focusing on the aesthetic and political challenges involved in working with others’ voices as primary material. By considering voice as both a physical and symbolic expression of subjectivity, it investigates the complexity of making theatre from real-world testimonies and demonstrates how it influences the writing process, fostering more collaborative authorial practices.

Starting with a common approach, which consists in writing a book with words recorded by the author, this article examines the attempts of two contemporary French female authors at rendering voices and accounts collected from people in socially and psychologically vulnerable situations. In Fragmentation d’un lieu commun (2003), Jane Sautière records her memories of encounters with prisoners during her work as a prison social worker; in Rouge pute (2018), Perrine Le Querrec renders the voices of domestic violence victims she met at a community centre. The aim is both to highlight the listening practices shared by these authors (ways of meeting people, recording what they say, adjusting the author’s position in relation to the collected voices) and to emphasize the uniqueness of the poetic choices made, which depart from a raw transcription of the collected words in favour of fragments for Sautière and poetic rendering in verse for Le Querrec. Comparing these two books of voices allows us to gauge the shifts in a literary approach to listening over the course of two decades, highlighting the different terms of the authors’ commitment.

When a voice guides a movement, whether through incantations, instructions, performative scores or hypnotic suggestions, it takes on the quality of song – revealing a kind of natural order. This intensification, this expansion of the present through a shared attention that transforms the quality of gestures and words, is not a deliberate ritual pantomime. It is the consequence of a total disposition to listening. Through the motif of the oratory, I want to designate two things: a prayerful attitude that formulates a call or desire to connect with the world, and a vocal intensity that stretches into song, triggering dance, both resulting from a procreative movement of our consciousness under the effect of a mnemic trance. Such a prayer is quite different from addressing a deity in the context of worship. And yet, as a technique, a mnemonic device, it encapsulates a disposition necessary for all artistic transmission. Indeed, what is a prayer if not the congruence of a physical attitude and a mental intention, often symbolized by the joining of hands? What is a prayer if not a call for a response in the form of an actual change, both in the world and within ourselves? What is a prayer if not an address to an otherness that calls upon a totality as witness? And when it is articulated, what is a prayer if not the simple intensification of words, brought to the threshold of song by a dynamic sincerity?

This article describes the ways in which the voice of French dancer Stéphanie Pons was animated with the making of a multimodal archive the Bibliothèque corporelle. It was based on the reconstruction of a dance that she had performed over 28 years ago, choreographed by Angélin Prelocaj. This was part of the Gestures and Frequencies study developed within the context of the IDEX-funded Performance Lab from 2019 to 2022 at the University of Grenoble. The notion of frequencies emphasizes the idea of the dancer ‘tuning’ into the repeated action of a movement and identifying its specific gestural quality. It illuminates the ways in which multimodal archiving methods activated the dancer’s agency and perspective of dancing through voicing and sonifying gesture.

Based on practice-led research, this article focuses on aerial practices in the European contemporary circus and more specifically on what lies beyond the aerialists’ apparent silence. This field study includes rehearsals observation and interviews undertaken with contemporary circus artists working in Europe, it explores what can be learned about non-verbal practices from the voices of those who perform them. My approach challenges the apparent silence of the aerialist performance, as well offering a reading of aerial disciplines as practices of risk. Commonly described through a perspective of reception, this article aims at unveiling the lived experience of the aerialists through their own words. For instance, the focus on the dialogue between aerialist and apparatus turns the invisible sound of the equipment into an active collaborator, revealing the need to listen to the sonic expression of non-human materials and agencies. By listening to embodied knowledges of the artists, the aerial practice appears as a place of comfort and a home inhabited by bodies of unique structure and relationship to gravity. Getting closer to the aerialists’ experiences of the air through their words unlocks new and unique understandings of this acrobatic practice, shifting from an outside look of spectacle to an inside perspective of embodied experience.

As part of a larger research-creation project, I investigate the connection between re-enactment and intimacy, two seemingly incompatible areas. Re-enactments usually reproduce major events from the history of a society, a religion or an artistic practice. I instead consider the desacralization of re-enactment by reproducing an event belonging to the private sphere and the seemingly banal daily life of the individual. The first practical exploration took place in September 2024 in the form of a theatre workshop conducted with students The Artistic Creation Masters at Université Grenoble Alpes, which set up different techniques for recreating personal memories whilst reconstructing an intimate sphere onstage. Through using different theatrical configurations, forms of storytelling and interactions between the spectators’ bodies and actors’ bodies, we explored the voice’s capacity to resonate through the bodies and create a connection. This article addresses the idea that intimacy is constructed foremost through a shared sensorial resonance: a space of sonorous relationships where embodied vocality is at the centre of the experience. It seeks to understand how voice, through breath, tone and vibration can constitute a conduit for affects and presences.

The PerformaPhone is a sound installation of the archived voices of the participants of the site-specific participatory choreography Une dance ancienne by Rémy Héritier presented in Grenoble between 2021 and 2024 at the Centre de Développement Chorégraphique (CDCN), Le Pacifique. This Voicings contribution describes the ways in which counter histories of choreographic participatory projects are made with public facing sound installations such as the Ecouter le Terrain project and Performance Lab’s PerformaPhone. The article addresses the underpinning questions and creative process of this research-creation project and includes a video that offers the reader a taste of the contents of the installation.