With its attention turned towards experimental and innovative works of performing arts, Atalante offers a space for the artistic works, a discourse surrounding those works, and the field at large. During the fall of 2024 we will delve deeper into the various universes of the artists presenting work and make space for a dialogue between the artists, the spectators and the venue. After engaging in dialogue with Viva Vocal Ensemble’s artistic director Casey Moir, fascinating lines of thought were set in motion which touch upon the ensemble’s ideas about how they stage the voice and the body as inseparable spatial entities. Presented below is a reflective text by Josephine Gray where she places their discussion within an expanded field of thought and highlights Casey Moir’s ideas regarding their working methods and staging.
The elements are an all encompassing experiential reality of life as we know it. Wheresoever we turn the elements confront us in their various forms. Indeed, the very texture of our bodily manifestation is dependent upon their existence; water, air, fire and earth. The modern world we inhabit with its technological advances were themselves born out of the contemplation upon the elemental forces. Think only of Empedocles’ defence of the elements as the building blocks of the world as a way of refuting Parmenides’ eternal circle without change. He saw that the cyclical nature of our world, the birth and withering of nature, are all processes we are able to witness through the elements: water as fog/ice/steam, or fire as ember/flame. In doing so the pre-socratic philosopher was one of the first to marry the mythos (story) with the logos (word/principle). The storytelling of mythos present across the ancient and modern worlds are riddled with deities that embody the elemental forces. The necessity of addressing and giving name to the elemental is as ancient and far reaching as the human race itself. The giving name to the elemental stems from the sounding body and taps into the notion that language was at large born out of sounds–in many cases onomatopoeic–as a way of correspondence between the inner life of the human and the outer force of nature.
In the work of Viva Vocal Ensemble we find that the rich and multifaceted source material of the elemental finds its expression through the equally ancient and integral part of humanity: the voice. As the name of the ensemble suggests, the voice is a living aspect of life and one to be celebrated. The voice as a bridge between the inner and the outer lie at the core of the work of the ensemble and thus continues a tradition and craft of manifesting the voice as an agent in and of itself rather than a tool for literal understanding. In doing so they are able to allow space for what might happen in the absence of literary communication. Conceding that the body and its voice is inseparable, and that the body is a mobile agent in space, it logically follows that the voice must be inherently mobile in space as well. Out of these considerations the ensemble maintains an experimental practice whereby they are able to resist the given forms of musical performance. The body as sounding instrument is here treated as a spatial object and through its mobility new ways of staging become possible. In allowing for the voice to guide the work the ensemble withstands the urge for literary communication as a marker for an artistic integrity that proposes that the voice harbours other means of artistic agencies and worth than solely the semantic. By literally placing the voice in space they defy the unwritten standards dictating the idea that visuality is secondary in musical performance.
These considerations informed the necessity of the emergence of a unique working method which founder Casey Moir developed: the choreography of sound. The term choreography as we know it today has only been in use from around the mid 1750’s French world of ballet. A composite of the Greek words khoreia and grafein its literal translation would amount to the “writing down of the (moving) chorus”. Khoros, in its original setting, was of course that of the Attic comedies and tragedies of Athens where the characters not only moved but also used their voice. Deeper still lies the connotation of the root of the word gher which until this day retains its ancient meaning in Arabic as grace. In its ancient sense choreography moves within a field of grace whence the body is inseparable from the voice. It seems then that the idea of the sounding body and its mobility in space is a tradition that throughout the centuries has in many respects been lost. Although the imperative of the ensemble is to perform musical works by composers who are actively engaging with the notion of spatiality in their compositions it has shown itself to the ensemble that to integrate such a perspective is rare among composers. In their performances the ensemble is impelled to move around the stage, much like the ancient singers of the Attic dramas, except that in their work the narrative function has been disbanded in lieu of the primordial force of the voice as carrier of possible meanings that resonate with the listener on a visceral rather than literal level. As such, the method of working with spatiality through a choreography of sound finding the balance between the two is paramount. That the movements in space are interconnected with the voice and as such remain interdependent. This is in part the work of the performer who must remain genuine towards this interdependency and in so doing resist the cop out of simply aesthetic form without content. The other part is that of the composer who must be aware that the ensemble has put their faith in them to create a piece that considers and uses the totality of the performer as an instrument that sounds and moves in space. The traditional set-up of a static harmonising ensemble finds no place here.
It finds no place because the ensemble remains sensitive towards the experiential aspects of our sounding lives, as Moir puts it “life is omnidirectional”. Inundated by sounds we nevertheless are able to perceive the source of sounds or their trajectory through space. These considerations are omnipresent for the performers and they affect both the staging and the listeners/spectators. The presence of the omnidirectional also enables some choices while negating others. The tactility of the sound is nevertheless never tampered with, indeed it is the tactility which makes itself present through the bodies of the performers. The performance is thus created by conscious decisions about where the performers contra the listeners/spectators are. The placement, trajectory, direction and momentum are each essential building blocks that are made real surpassing the realm of theoretical consideration in, for example, music theory. In performance the performers act out these conditions as strategies that facilitate visuality hence elevating the artistic craft over the conceptual.
However, the experiential aspect of their work is not restricted to that of the listener/spectator. The experiential remains present throughout the process of creation. For Moir composing is intimately tied to the physical, the moving body is that which composes. In this respect the composer merges with the dancer. An ideal space for composition would for Moir be in a dance studio where material can be tested out in real time. The ensemble as such testifies against the assumed exclusivity of the established idea that “music should always be strong enough in its own identity to speak for itself”. A composer that finds her music through the body is in itself a defiance of such an attitude towards music as always being an autonomous entity outside of the producer of that music, i.e., the musician. What becomes evident is that the method proposed by the ensemble is not only experimental because of this defiance against established rules of conduct within the music sphere. It is experimental because it relies on the experiential and the physical craft present therein hence placing the analogue over and above the technological and digital from the inception of creation. The use of objects in their work is a further testimony to this as the (musical) objects present on stage must fulfil the brief of exactitude and necessity. The objects on stage must be genuine in their application and intention from the composer and as such become imbued with their own musical agency. In the ELEMENTS series this means that the objects correspond literally and figuratively to the various elements.
The craft of the voice is in their work placed front and centre. This might seem obvious for any singer or vocal ensemble to do. What signifies their practice as other is their emphasis upon the interconnection between the inner and the outer–which in these pieces finds its context within the elemental. Their practice is an engagement with the “knotted mess”, suggested by Moir, within a push-and-pull dynamic of the voice as inner and the elemental as outer. Alas, language fails us precisely here, for there is no clear cut distinction between the inner and outer: what remains is an entanglement. And it is perhaps at this crossroads where language fails us that the voice harbours the hope of seeing us through to the end as a vehicle of understanding and communion that surpasses the purely intellectual.
The interconnectivity between the voice and the elemental, between the body and the voice, between the animate and inanimate objects on stage all point towards the fact that we experience life through all of our senses beyond the descriptive dominance of literary communication. This felt reality is peculiarly one we easily dismiss as lesser than the conceptual reality of language. The reclamation of the voice as an agent in its own right and not simply the servant of language as literary communication finds resonance with its ancient role within the history of humanity. Much like the ever-changing elemental forces Empedocles defended against Parmenides’ eternal harmony of the circle, we find that the voice is ever-changing too if given space. The discovery of these alterations, the possibilities that lie within the vehicle of the voice, open up an exciting voyage whence the elemental merges with the vocal in both its aural and visual form.
Reflection & text: Josephine Gray
Join us for an in-depth discussion on Monday 21/10 at 7 PM with some of the invited guest artists performing at Atalante this autumn!