ABSTRACT
The first chapter opens in Canada, where the reader will meet the authors’ research collaborators for the project “Honoring Cultural Diversity through Collective Vocal Practice.” This is a series of cross-cultural and intergenerational community gatherings and workshops, co-facilitated by the author, four graduate students, and the seven members of the Indigenous Advisory Committee. The author then draws from her embodied research to discuss the teachings of Zygmunt Molik, the voice specialist in Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre, whose approach focuses on the body-voice connection, organicity, vibration, and resonance. These examples of vocal practice prompt a discussion about the paradoxical lack of attention to vocality in performance studies, and the necessity to develop an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach that eschews what Dwight Conquergood boldly categorizes as Western textual fundamentalism and what Diana Taylor characterizes as a privileging of the archive over the repertoire. The final section of this chapter addresses the decolonial space of Indigenous epistemologies that promote embodied sovereignty beyond essentialism/constructionism binaries, a space where traditional singing pertains to ceremonial art and transformative cultural practices.
