ray langenbach : gesture, stutter, state |
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Herbert Blau speaks of the voice as an actor's liability rather than gift.
The appearance of words in the theatre is at the same
time less mediated and more strained, if not estranged,
never so blissful, though words issue from a voice in a palpable
body. But there's the rub, they may stick in the throat.
Even the recurring technical problems of the voice - the actor's
major liability on the stage- suggest we're never entirely
sure what the issuing involves, except that in the theatre the voice
itself is at issue.[1982:97]
The voice itself is of course a mediation of the nervous system: the site where nerves collide with the present as a sounding or as a collapse, but always as a bottleneck or an embolism. (Blau, H., 1982. Take up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.)
Blau says :
The voice is an ideograph that is invisible - part of the apparent materiality of theatre by which the eye may be deceived. Even before it appears, it is already sounding. The trouble is we're not really sure where it comes from, no less the words when they issue forth. Even with knowledge of the mechanisms of the voice, its functioning - thoracic cavity, larynx, glottis, the sinusoidal motion of acoustical velocity- all we know is that something comes up through the nervous system which is incommunicable and disjunct, bereft of flesh once it escapes the body, muting the body plaintive as it goes, all the more as it escapes into language or in the annihilatory vision of Artaud, pulverizing words....[98] |
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