Voice, body and the transmission of the real in documentary theatre

This article analyses how listening is used to develop performances in Alecky Blythe’s verbatim theatre. Listening includes Blythe’s use of recorded oral interviews for devising performances, and also the actors’ creation of performance by precisely imitating an interviewee’s voice. The article focuses on listening, speaking and embodiment in London Road, Blythe’s recent musical play at London’s National Theatre, which adopted and modified theatre strategies used in her other plays, especially The Girlfriend Experience and Do We look Like Refugees. The article draws on interviews with performers and with Blythe herself, in its critical analysis of how voice legitimates claims to authenticity in performance. The work on Blythe is contextualised by brief comparative analyses. One is Clio Barnard’s film The Arbor, a ‘quasi-documentary’ on the playwright, Andrea Dunbar which makes use of an oral script to which the actors lip-sync. The other comparator is the Wooster Group’s Poor Theater, which attempts to recreate Grotowski's Akropolis via vocal impersonation. The article argues that voice in London Road both claims and defers authenticity and authority, inasmuch as voice signifies presence and embodied identity but the reworking of speech into song signals the absence of the real. The translation of voice into written surtitles works similarly in Do We Look Like Refugees. Blythe’s theatre, Barnard’s film and The Wooster Group’s performances are a useful framework for addressing questions of voice and identity, and authenticity and replication in documentary theatre. The article concludes by placing Blythe’s oral texts amid current debates around theatre’s textual practices.

“The suffering black male body and the threatened white female body": ambiguous bodies in Candyman

This article explores the roles of monster and victim as experienced through the body, and considers how the relationship between violence and the body affects the presentation of these roles through close analysis of performance in Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992). I aim to demonstrate that commitment to such a detailed approach, offers a more intricate and rewarding critical interaction, reflecting the complexity of narrative film. Consideration of the particulars of performance is crucial, in its affect on our engagement with the performer and their physical presence. Through this attention I intend to demonstrate how the seemingly fixed role of monster is in fact more fluid than first apparent, that monster and victim can co-exist in the same body. Candyman’s physicality and the way it is presented foregrounds the oscillations between violence and suffering, the relationship between the body and the violence inflicted on and by it, ambiguities which are also found in the heroine’s development, thus enhancing the film’s striking preoccupation with the shifting parallels between monster and victim.

Finding the 'first voice' in rural England: the challenges of safeguarding intangible heritage in a national museum

This paper is an attempt to explore the challenges of defining intangible heritage and ‘community’ in England. It uses as its case study the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading: an urban museum with a rural theme. The paper examines current theoretical discourse around the concept of the ‘first voice’ and debate about the role of museums in the preservation of intangible heritage. It then examines the relevance of these concepts to the identification of ‘rural’ intangible heritage stake holders in England. In this way, it shows the potential for concepts of intangible heritage to influence national museums. However, by applying theory and practice which is designed to support work with well-defined ‘originating communities’ to a national museum, it also highlights the challenges of initiating community engagement in a multicultural society.

Institutions, unionization and voice: the relative impact of context and actors on firm level practice

Trade unions provide a voice in the way firms are run, an input into reward systems and increased security of employment. But these vary with national context. Using transnational survey evidence, this article explores the relative impact of setting, and of unions and collective bargaining, on these issues. It is found that, irrespective of context, organizations are significantly more likely to make use of compulsory redundancies in the absence of unions and collective bargaining. However, in other areas, the impact of unions appeared less pronounced than that of the wider context. The article explores the reasons behind this, and the broader policy implications thereof.

Atypical processing of voice sounds in infants at risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder

Adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show a reduced sensitivity (degree of selective response) to social stimuli such as human voices. In order to determine whether this reduced sensitivity is a consequence of years of poor social interaction and communication or is present prior to significant experience, we used functional MRI to examine cortical sensitivity to auditory stimuli in infants at high familial risk for later emerging ASD (HR group, N = 15), and compared this to infants with no family history of ASD (LR group, N = 18). The infants (aged between 4 and 7 months) were presented with voice and environmental sounds while asleep in the scanner and their behaviour was also examined in the context of observed parent-infant interaction. Whereas LR infants showed early specialisation for human voice processing in right temporal and medial frontal regions, the HR infants did not. Similarly, LR infants showed stronger sensitivity than HR infants to sad vocalisations in the right fusiform gyrus and left hippocampus. Also, in the HR group only, there was an association between each infant's degree of engagement during social interaction and the degree of voice sensitivity in key cortical regions. These results suggest that at least some infants at high-risk for ASD have atypical neural responses to human voice with and without emotional valence. Further exploration of the relationship between behaviour during social interaction and voice processing may help better understand the mechanisms that lead to different outcomes in at risk populations.

Aberrant brain responses to emotionally valent words is normalised after cognitive behavioural therapy in female depressed adolescents

AbstractBackground Depression in adolescence is debilitating with high recurrence in adulthood, yet its pathophysiological mechanism remains enigmatic. To examine the interaction between emotion, cognition and treatment, functional brain responses to sad and happy distractors in an affective go/no-go task were explored before and after Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in depressed female adolescents, and healthy participants. Methods Eighty-two Depressed and 24 healthy female adolescents, aged 12 to 17 years, performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) affective go/no-go task at baseline. Participants were instructed to withhold their responses upon seeing happy or sad words. Among these participants, 13 patients had CBT over approximately 30 weeks. These participants and 20 matched controls then repeated the task. Results At baseline, increased activation in response to happy relative to neutral distractors was observed in the orbitofrontal cortex in depressed patients which was normalized after CBT. No significant group differences were found behaviourally or in brain activation in response to sad distractors. Improvements in symptoms (mean: 9.31, 95% CI: 5.35-13.27) were related at trend-level to activation changes in orbitofrontal cortex. Limitations In the follow-up section, a limited number of post-CBT patients were recruited. Conclusions To our knowledge, this is the first fMRI study addressing the effect of CBT in adolescent depression. Although a bias toward negative information is widely accepted as a hallmark of depression, aberrant brain hyperactivity to positive distractors was found and normalised after CBT. Research, assessment and treatment focused on positive stimuli could be a future consideration. Moreover, a pathophysiological mechanism distinct from adult depression may be suggested and awaits further exploration.

Beyond difference: female participation in the Brazilian film revival of the 1990s

In this chapter, I will focus on the female participation in what became known as ‘The Retomada do Cinema Brasileiro’, or the Brazilian Film Revival, by thinking beyond differences of gender, class, age and ethnicity. I will first re-consider the Retomada phenomenon against the backdrop of its historical time, so as to evaluate whether the production boom of the period translated into a creative peak, and, if so, how much of this carried onto the present day. I will then look at the female participation in this phenomenon not just in terms of numerical growth of women film directors, admittedly impressive, but only partially reflective of the drastic changes in the modes of production and address effected by the neoliberal policies introduced in the country in the mid 1990s. I will argue that the most decisive contribution brought about by the rise of women in Brazilian filmmaking has been the spread of team work and shared authorship, as opposed to a mere aspiration to the auteur pantheon, as determined by a notoriously male-oriented tradition. Granted, films focusing on female victimisation were rife during the Retomada period and persist to this day, and they have been, and continue to be, invaluable for the understanding of women’s struggles in the country. However, rather than resorting to feminist readings of representational strategies in these films, I will draw attention to other, presentational aesthetic experiments, open to the documentary contingent and the unpredictable real, which, I argue, suspend the pedagogical character of representational narratives. In order to demonstrate that new theoretical tools are needed to understand the gender powers at play in contemporary world cinema, I will, to conclude, analyse an excerpt of the film, Delicate Crime (Crime delicado, Beto Brant, 2006), where team work comes out as a particularly effective female, and feminist, procedure.