Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

The third chapter, “The Voice in Theatres of Presence,” seeks similarities between phenomenological theories of voice and the theorization of the stage voice as expressed in the writing and practices of Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Richard Schechner. The chapter does not claim a direct influence of the phenomenologists on the four practitioners, but it takes note of the resemblances to argue that the practitioners were responding to similar problems, pressures, and desires as the theorists, specifically in regard to linguistic mediation, knowledge, and revelation. The chapter advances a view of one strand of twentieth-century avant-garde practice as aiming to manifest and make present ideality in performance through vocalization.

Chapter four, “Synchronic and Diachronic Voices,” discusses the position of the voice in those human sciences and philosophies that respond to language from textual and empirical perspectives. The title of the chapter draws on the distinction de Saussure observed in relation to a contradictory characteristic of language, that it is at all times fixed, internally rule governed, and impervious to attempts of deliberate change by any one speaker (synchronic) and yet constantly in flux and changing over time (diachronic). Views privileging each side of this distinction support different interpretations of the independence, creativity, and communicative use of the voice. The structuralism attributed to the linguistics and anthropology of de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Whorf tends to foreground synchrony and interprets language as influencing or dominating an individual's and a society's thought processes and expressions. Roman Jakobson's and Sapir's linguistics, Victor Turner's anthropology, Ludwig Wittgenstein's ordinary language philosophy, and J. L. Austin's and John Searle's speech act theories counter structuralism with an examination of vocalized language as a productive tool that grants agency to individual speakers. Although indebted to the structural premises of Russian formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle, the field of theatre semiotics nonetheless recognizes the sonorous aspects of the voice in relation to the semantic. Theatre semioticians offer a useful evaluation of the voice and reconcile synchrony with diachrony by noting the voice's autonomous and informational characteristics.