11:00 AM, 24 Jan 2019 - , 11am, O'Riada Hall

Lecture - Yvon Bonenfent [UCC, Theatre] - Voice, Identity, Contact

When your voice resounds, are you styling it? When you listen to someone else sound, are you interpreting their voice as fashioned or ‘fashionable’? If voices are more than sound … and indeed, they must be, made as they are of vibration coursing through matter, caressing and touching us, are they not just like… hair?… which also is produced by the body, moves away from it, and evokes contact, caress, and touch quality? How closely is touch quality linked to voice quality? These are some of the questions explored by artist-researcher Yvon Bonenfant, with particular reference to art project Curious Replicas and identity-art concepts We Wink, We Wink, Our Voices Blink, and Five Installations to Touch the Voice Inside Out, and Resonant Tails. He also draws from theatre theory, musicology, voice studies, sound studies, philosophy of the voice, and a wide range of other concepts to explore this assertion. In the end, our voices are both of us and not of us, material for art making… and publics can be brought inside this way of challenging standard conceptions of the voice and vocal beauty. 

Yvon Bonenfant, PhD is an artist-researcher whose work begins from the extra-normal qualities of the voice, and becomes a range of other things: performances, installations, light-artworks, theorisations, and social interventions. Since 2012, he has largely focused on developing new models of participatory art-making where audiences become unusual vocal performers; and he has worked closely with researchers from the speech and language sciences. His work has been supported by the Wellcome Trust Large Arts Award, the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, Arts Council England, the Canada Council, the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, and a wide range of commissioners, supporters and partners. He has been artist in residence at EMPAC, artist-researcher associate of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, and has published and presented widely. He is Head of the Department of Theatre and Performative Practices at UCC and visiting professor of research at the University of Winchester. 

Free. Organised by FUAIM

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