Welcome to Cara Tolmie’s 80% seminar "Listening to the Disordered Vocal Body".
Discussant: Brandon LaBelle
Supervisors: Mat Gregory, Katja Grillner and Malin Arnell
Language: English
NOTE: Please register in advance by emailing mathew.gregory@konstfack.se
This seminar explores the specific point that Cara currently finds herself within the research. Having recently finished a large scale project titled Cascade Bend Chamber at Mint in Stockholm that included an exhibition and a series of workshops and performances, Cara has since began the process of organising both the works made throughout this project and the preceding work of the research towards her final thesis presentation as she enters the final year of her PhD.
Both at the end of one process of production and at the start of another process of collation, this seminar will take the time both to reflect on the explorations made thus far and discuss what has been learnt through the making of the works and how they have produced the themes and questions most central to the research.
The research project Listening to the Disordered Vocal Body explores vocal and performative techniques that disrupt the perceived continuity and/or stability between a voice and the body that produces that voice in a way that might disorient or reorganise practices of listening to or through this vocal body.
The primary method within this expanded exploration has been a voice-body practice called Internal Singing that, as well as a live performance, also manifests itself as a series of workshops, sound, textile, text and sculptural works.
Many of the works that will be discussed in the seminar have been made and realised in collaboration with artists, musicians and curators including: Susanna Jablonski, Julia Giertz, Em Silén, Stine Janvin, Rian Treanor, Moa Franzén, Emily Fahlén, Alice Söderqvist, Frida Sandström, Danae Valenza, Felix Eriksson Ahlberg and Theodor Ander.
Internal Singing
Internal Singing is a vocal method that has been developed over the past five years: Cara’s sensitised vocal-body is played as an instrument through exploration of sounding on both the inhale and exhale, improvisation, vocal imaginaries and self-administered touch. As it builds up slowly through acute attention to breath, inclination, pleasure, dissonance and circulation, Internal Singing attempts to prise open a space to gather, improvise and examine what unknown vocality might emerge when acute sensitivity, in this case stemming from injury, is valued as a resource. Internal Singing is a multidimensional, unbalanced-balancing act between inhale-exhale, between two points of touch on the body, between two vocal sounds in constant evolution, between the imagination of a voice and the letting go of a voice. Although this method has been primarily realised through Cara’s own body and particular physical state it has also been shared and practised by many others within workshop, performance and pedagogic settings.
Material for seminar
Video documentation of Cascade Bend Chamber, 2023
Video documentation of Internal Singing at Long Time Listener, First Time Caller, solo exhibition by Susanna Jablonski, Kalmar Konsthall, 2021