From Walking and Talking to Cartwheels and High Cs: An Examination of Practice-Based Laboratory Work into Physio-Vocal Integration.

Following a series of investigative workshops inquiring into the possibilities of the vocal body, artists of Experience Vocal Dance Company trained intensively in an experimental method called the Integrative Performance Practice (IPP), developing an exacting technique that allows the performer the freedom to completely integrate unlimited movement and uncompromised voicing including bel canto singing. This article shares the work of the company through case study, exercises and application to performance propositions examined through the methodology of Transdisciplinarity. The article reflects on how many approaches to voice and movement within the disciplines of acting, singing and dancing can promote disintegration of the physio-vocal instrument. It touches on the implications of integrating the performance instrument through the notion of the psycho-physical and addresses certain inter- and cross-cultural perspectives present in recent discussions about voice and movement. Finally, it lays out exactly how, with the IPP, it was discovered that everything needs to originate from the breath/body; how language and skill sets are best rooted in process-based terms; and that action, be it vocal, physical or emotive, needs to initiate from awareness, reconfiguring the artist as self, working within an active aesthetic. As a key finding, a most precise articulation of centre is described in detail and related to physio-vocal praxis

Decolonizing Listening: Towards an Equitable Approach to Speech Training for the Actor.

This article confirms and deepens an understanding of the negative impact of teaching culturally embedded speech standards to actors who are “othered” by a dominant “somatic norm” within the performing arts. The author analyzes evidence from a three-year longitudinal study of actors within a UK conservatory in relation to the critical frame of the somatic norm and colonized listening practices in the performing arts. The author identifies conscious and unconscious bias within traditional training methods and proposes a decolonizing approach to listening within foundational speech training. The ideological shift outlined follows the “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences and moves away from the culturally embedded listening at the core of “effective” speech methods, which focus solely on clarity and intelligibility. The outcome of this research is a radical performance pedagogy, which values the intersectional identities and linguistic capital of students from pluralistic backgrounds. The revised curriculum offers an approach to affective speaking and listening that assumes an equality of understanding from the outset, and requires actors, actor trainers, and, ultimately, audiences to de-colonize their listening ears

Integrative Performance: Practice and Theory for the Interdisciplinary Performer

Integrative Performance serves a crucial need of 21st-century performers by providing a transdisciplinary approach to training. Its radical new take on performance practice is designed for a climate that increasingly requires fully rounded artists. The book critiques and interrogates key current practices and offers a proven alternative to the idea that rigorous and effective training must separate the disciplines into discrete categories of acting, singing, and dance. Experience Bryon’s Integrative Performance Practice is a way of working that will profoundly shift how performers engage with their training, conditioning and performance disciplines. It synthesizes the various elements of performance work in order to empower the performer as they practice across disciplines within any genre, style or aesthetic. Theory and practice are balanced throughout, using: Regular box-outs, introducing the work's theoretical underpinnings through quotes, case studies and critical interjections. A full program of exercises ranging from training of specific muscle groups, through working with text, to more subtle structures for integrative awareness and presence. This book is the result of over twenty years of practice and research working with interdisciplinary artists across the world to produce a training that fully prepares performers for the demands of contemporary performance and all its somatic, emotive and vocal possibilities

Interdisciplinarity and Embodied Knowledge: Towards an Active Aesthetic Using Integrative Performance Practice

Current discourses in performance theory cast interdisciplinarity into a dilemma that errs in the direction of excluding practice as meaningful. This chapter argues for the possibility of an 'active aesthetic': recognising that meaning happens in the act of performance rather than in the text or in the construction of intertextual relationships. The work of Experience Vocal Dance Company, and the challenges that the company faces in creating original material within a new genre of Vocal Dance, are used to illuminate this 'active aesthetic' and highlight the issues posed by moving beyond current notions of disciplinarily

Transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary exchanges between embodied cognition and performance practice: working across disciplines in a climate of divisive knowledge cultures

Although Embodied Cognition and Performance Practice could be said to have in common that they live in the fields of hermeneutics and epistemology concurrently, and with this are interested in perception, knowledge, experience and agency without privileging any of them or presuming a linear or status relationship among them -- there still remains a divisive disciplinary gulf. This paper provides a critical history of the science/humanities divide, exposing prejudices and practices that often impede productive interdisciplinary relationships between Cognitive Science and Performance, and offers suggestions forward towards a more productive middle field allowing for the possibility of new knowledge(s)