Vocal Sports

A Practice / Andrew Hardwidge (an account by Omer)

Andrew tells us about his current primary practice: parenting his younger daughter. He speak about moments of humming and singing for her, and the ways voice and resonance become a vibrant relationality between them – soothing, holding, grounding.

Roaming through the room, we play with vocal resonance. We begin with a comfortable hum, sensing as it reverberates through our personal bodies. Eventually, shifting to a higher and a lower tone (still with a closed-mouth hum), and enacting a resonant body scan. We explore how vocal resonance can become a way to relate to other bodies, exploring this relation as touch, as object, and as environment * – attending to voice as relation, as I remember it, intensified the studio through spatial and vocal compositions. We continue our exploration by allowing the mouth to open and the resonance to form into sound, playing with tone, timbre, volume, and even melody.

We work in pairs. One practitioner is laying on the ground with their eyes closed. The other practitioner uses vocal resonance to relate with the laying body, the voice touching, grounding, stimulating, mobilizing – mattering that body. The one who started laying down can find their way into movement; the one who is vocalizing can find their way into song. As I remember it, the sound healing / meditation vibes were quite delectable, even in their subversion; so much so that most practitioners stayed with ‘the little dance’ (small shifts of weight) and modest melodies.

* ‘Object’ led to some confusion. In relation to a conversation Andrew and I had a few days prior, I understand it as generating an object-relation through voice; a quote he brought up from Winnicott’s Playing and Reality: “The baby creates the object, but the object was there waiting to be created and to become a cathected object.” In that regard, ‘environment’ can be understood as the resonance creating a holding environment for another body.)

Unfoldings / Omer Keinan

After the break, we quickly find ourselves sharing reflections. To guide this discussion towards the next part, I propose we play with ways to activate what else this practice can do. This practice Andrew shared did something, it generated a common material: a body, form, environment, object, relationality, touch, soundscape – an experience we’ve tuned to together. I’d like us to structure 2-3 experiments with this in mind.

Session #1

Practitioners: Anna Biczok, Anna Fransson, Andrew Hardwidge, Girts Dubults, Israel Aloni, Julia Kristiansen, Kseniia Salikhova, Leah Landau, Lilian Steiner, Omer Keinan, Salka Ardal Rosengren

Videographer: Robin Haghi

Leah had a vision: we would set up a sort of voice-based sport. There will be two teams standing opposite one another in lines; one team will vocalize, creating more-or-less a song, until a member of the other team will choose to, or feel compelled to, leave their team and join the song. The group tinkered with this form: for example, proposing that perhaps a clap could indicate when to switch roles. Honestly, I think no one really understood the score, rules of the sport, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they weren’t quite decided on by the time we started. Either way, after some confusion a sort-of-game emerged. (Perhaps it would’ve been useful to have someone take directorship / stewardship of the experiment.)

Afterwards, we spoke of the questions of belonging that this experiment evoked: Am I a part of this group? Do I want to be a part, or would I rather join the other? What happens when I make this choice? We also discussed some possible tunings: to bring the groups closer together, to have each group in a huddle rather than a line, to encourage more transitions between the groups, and a few others.

Session #2

Practitioners: Anna Fransson, Andrew Hardwidge, Girts Dubults, Israel Aloni, Julia Kristiansen, Kseniia Salikhova, Leah Landau, Lilian Steiner, Omer Keinan, Robin Haghi, Salka Ardal Rosengren

Videographer: Anna Biczok

Salka suggested we create a sort of sound bath: the group will form a circle and resonate together, while one of us will be in the center. Andrew mentioned how he had, prior to this session, imagined working with a vocalizing ‘cipher’: we’ll stand in a circle and one of us will enter it; they will begin to resonate, and eventually someone else will join them and take over; as the resonance passes from body to body, it will transform. People seemed to vibe with the sound bath (as with the delectability of the sound healing), and some ideas floated for how to structure the switches – an integration of the cipher. I eventually suggested having the one in the center shift around until they contact another body à la pendulum divination.