Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2022

Successful integration of acting, voice and movement has long been desired in theatre-arts training. Existing systems, however, often offer three distinct and separate areas of performance training – at least within US higher-education curricular contexts. But, this article proposes, in team-teaching, we gain an experience of living the integration, of challenging the ways we traditionally teach exercises and of finding new ways to rework concepts and exercises taught to us. Consciously creating bridges across areas of training enables students to grow by experiencing two perspectives in the same classroom. Integration is the aim of a new ‘Introduction to Voice and Movement’ course created and team-taught by the authors of this article, a voice professor and a movement professor. We sought not only to merge voice and movement training within our university theatre department, but to re-evaluate how we approach teaching voice and movement. The experience became more than simply integrating voice and movement into one class. The discovery of pedagogical alignment resulted in the merging of two personal pedagogies. This merging became integration as students carried the physio-vocal training into their lives and artistry beyond the classroom.

This article discusses the authoritative voice in traditional Irish singing, examining voice in negotiation with prevailing and conflicting ideologies of practice in this context. Opening with a discussion on vocal identity and vocality in traditional Irish singing, autoethnography is used to present and critically examine an individual process of learning and voicing a macaronic song from the Irish tradition. Findings contribute to further understand the social, participatory and presentational dimensions of Irish traditional song as it is learned, performed and transmitted. Issues of vocal enculturation, identity and construction are negotiated as authoritative voice and stylistic efficacy are conceptualized in voicing Irish traditional song.

When does musical theatre consider an ageing female voice to be an ‘old(er)’ voice? What is the ‘expected’ voice quality for ageing female performers and what does it take to still be considered for roles after ‘a certain age’? This Voicing stems from a four-year doctoral research project that sought to identify and examine stereotypes, preconceptions and complexities that occur in the dramaturgy and performance of female ageing vocalities in musical theatre. Compiling extracts from research interviews with ageing musical theatre performers, it is composed in the format of a virtual round-table, and it aims to reveal and present, for the first time, the harsh realities of gendered ageing in musical theatre.

Review of: Roy Hart, Kevin Crawford and Bernadette Sweeney (2022)

Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 172 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-36721-834-8, p/bk, £34.99