Vol. 59 No. 2 (2014): Mind, Body, Voice: Ways of Theatricality
In Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century (2011), Andrew Kimbrough notes that the voice has not received very much attention from the part of theatre critics and theorists of the past century, despite the famous linguistic turn of the social and human sciences after Saussure; instead, their interest focused more on the visual side of the performance (the body, the staging) and the dramatic text. Is this observation still valid? How does the actor’s voice relate to the body, to its plasticity, to the physical and visual elements of a performance on the contemporary stage and to the recent theories on theatre? Do contemporary drama and theatre practices encourage the "return of the voice" at the heart of the theatre professionals’ interest?
This issue focuses on topics such as: the voice on stage: the issue of vocal technique; literary language versus everyday language on stage; the different instances of the actor’s voice: inarticulate and articulate speech, recitative, song; the persistence of orality within theatre (in terms of style, but also in terms of cognitive organization): the orality of rehearsals, oral reminiscences within drama (e.g. the influence of rhetoric on Shakespearean drama); the voice and radio drama; the issue of dubbing (movies, animation); the influence of media on the actor’s voice; sound design: sound systems (theatre and film).