In four 2-hour sessions on Fridays from February 9 through March 8, 2024, Scholar-in-Residence Anne Dorothy Harley of Scripps College will lead “The Muscle of the Self: Using the Voice to Map Psyche: Special Voice Workshop” at the CSWR. In a small group setting, the workshop will investigate how the voice and the vibrating body can be employed to reveal to ourselves our constructions of inner self and external world.
CSWR: Your scholarship and your creative practices reveal deep intersections between music, performance, and spirituality. I'm curious how these three threads influenced the origin of “The Muscle of the Self” Workshop?
Anne: At Scripps College, I have been teaching classical voice and voice for musical theater in applied voice performance classes, in which individuals to learn how to sing in socially prescribed performances of ‘beauty’ and ‘skill’, but this HDS workshop takes a very different approach to the voice. The roots of this workshop lie in the theatre voicework of Richard Armstrong, who was a student of Roy Hart and participated in the experimental theatre troupe that bore his name during the late twentieth century. I was fortunate to encounter this work via Armstrong in the 1990s along with approximately 15 other opera singers at the Banff Centre for the Arts, in Alberta, Canada. We were in residence for two and a half months, and almost every day we got together with Richard to do about three hours of what was then termed ‘extended voice.’
‘Extended voice’ is marked with this adjective because the sounds that you make in an extended voice class don't conform to the restrictions of socially acceptable sounds in music or theatre. This is especially true in relationship to classical voice, in which the goal operatic sounds lie in quite narrow slice of the spectrum of possibilities of human sound. As opera singers, we are really focused on making only those sounds narrowly determined to be ‘beautiful’ and never allowing anything else to be expressed in performance, even at the height of dramatic tragedy. Classical voice training, while a valuable form of European cultural heritage, excludes a vast terrain of sounds that are, in fact, a universal and profoundly intimate human legacy. I believe we all should have access to these non-‘beautiful’ sounds as part of our basic education, especially in performance arts training. I believe that those who are not focused on a career in the performing arts have a lot to gain from such training as well. As someone specializing in these narrowly defined ‘beautiful sounds’ for my career, I found the work we did in the Banff program to be extremely personally transformative and have been grateful to be able to pass along these experiences to students at HDS last semester. I learned a tremendous amount from the HDS participants about how religious studies transmits and receives terms such as sound, voice, self, and body, and how these figure in different spiritual traditions. For this iteration of the workshop, one of the goals is to remap a pathway to these rarely experienced sounds for participants in a group context and then ascertain together how these explorations might or might not be of benefit in therapeutic processes connected to psychedelic protocols. Participants will have other goals of course. The workshop is really designed to be a mutually informative laboratory of experimentation and discovery, spanning many disciplines.
This modality of voicework emerged in actor-training, because performers regularly need to be able to inhabit these extreme states without the socialized constraints on our voices that we habitually impose upon ourselves. I know that performance also figures here at HDS: conference presentations and effective preaching often require some extended vocal variability in delivery. But this voicework takes on a particularly spiritual and psychologically inflected identity in this community at HDS because of the way in which voice can act as a tool to pry open psyche. Cries of joy, of sorrow, sobbing sounds of laughter, sounds of terror or curiosity all provoke embarrassment and discomfort in polite society. Some people haven't contacted those sounds since they were young children and the muscles that support these gestures in the body have accordingly atrophied. In fact, sometimes, these sounds have been so thoroughly excluded from what they think of as their voice that if they were confronted with something that was really terrifying or joyful, they wouldn’t be able to make a sound. It's so outside of their ambitus and what their bodies now remember how to do. This work has the potential to recover those sound gestures, and the lost experiences of self, which participants then can inhabit, if they so choose. That seems to me a particularly spiritual and psychological process.
One somatic theory underlying the work supposes that everybody used to know how to make these sounds when they were babies and enjoyed doing so. All of us yelled and screamed for hours at a time as young children, much to our parents chagrin. And, understandably, eventually our parents let us know that we would be much more appreciated and even loved if we made other modulated sounds–or sometimes no sounds at all! In this way, the theory goes, we have all learned how to shape our contributions in order to be loved and integrated into society, just as we also learned to exclude those intense experiences of self that did not fit in and the sounds that accompanied them. From a somatic point of view, using the voice as a lever to pry open psyche, this voicework temporarily pulls back the veil from these fully integrated and forgotten psychophysical experiences, mapping a pathway to parts of our humanity that have become dormant, either voluntarily or involuntarily. It's a kind of restorative remembering–or “re-membering”–so that participants have an opportunity to actually reacquaint with the body and physical gesture that are necessary to healthily produce those sounds. Along with these gestures often come the emotions that often give rise to those sounds. Some of the theory that this is based on comes from the Roy Hart Theatre as well as work from Fitzmaurice Voicework, whose work operates at the intersection between theater, the body, the spirit, and psychology.
You opened the interview with a question about how the voice is related to the body? Well, mostly, I would say, at the very foundation of any vocal sound is the breath. So, a lot of our work is becoming aware of how you are breathing and in that sense it shares a lot with the yogic practices of breathing. Are you moving your ribs? Are you moving your diaphragm? Are you moving your clavicle? Are you feeling tightness in the throat? Are you feeling tightness in the jaw, in the articulators? Can you feel the sound traveling through the inside of your body to different tissues? There is of course a spiritual aspect to the study of the breath. Catherine Fitzmaurice has written in her article “Breathing is mearning” about the pneuma [πνεῦμα], which has a kind of dual meaning of the breath, as well as the soul. When the breath leaves the body permanently, that is when you die, in ancient cultures. There's this extremely tight link between those two concepts of pneuma.
CSWR: I love how you described that element of the workshop: engaging with agency in reclaiming the full spectrum, or a larger spectrum, of expression through voice. Bodies, voices, psyches: I’d like to know more about your understanding of the relationship between these three elements, or what you would even call them?
Anne: Well, just as William [Robert] was mentioning yesterday in his revelatory 4-day theatre workshop, there is some knowledge that you can only come to, or come to most efficiently, through the body. I'm a big believer that you can know something in terms of the book sense of it by, for example, reading this interview. But in order to feel what that is like to reclaim the physical gesture that supports a sound of profound emotion, you have to actually try it out. That is really terrifying for most of us to do in front of other people, and this workshop provides a safe container in which to explore this. I think William [Robert]’s work is also getting at this, giving a kind of courage to people to experiment by providing a structured and safe environment in which to ‘come undone’ and then be restored in a fuller more profoundly human form.
CSWR: Like a recalibration of a system?
Anne: At its most successful, perhaps it could be described as a recalibration for people who don’t have the opportunity to participate in this kind of play of sound in their professional lives. This workshop is not primarily for singers or actors; it’s designed for people who mostly speak in an everyday register. It's for people who are just going about their lives and whose body has forgotten what those sounds feel like to make. We, together as a group, will make all kinds of sounds and map a sort of territory of the voice in terms of pitch, dynamics, harmonic content in the sound, together. There is a security and a courage made possible by the workshop structure.
Most participants–when they finish–feel like they have really reclaimed territories that they previously had forgotten: not just of sound, but also in their psyche. Because the voice and the self are so fused in terms of how they're constellated for most people, working the voice can affect the self, just as working the self can affect the voice. The voice is this remarkably detailed indicator of what is going on in the resonating container of your body, and depending on your state of mind, or how comfortable you are with these things that you're expressing, or how you're feeling that day we usually can hear those things in the voice. All these revelations of self are sounded out in the grain of voice, which in speech, richly ornaments a spoken text with all sorts of subtexts of qualifications, possibilities, and emotions. While people have been trained very well in how to compose their face the voice tends to express those things more often, whether you like it or not.
CSWR: [laughter] I can personally understand how difficult it is to control emotion in the voice, or in the face.
Anne: Ah yes! It’s so revealing. Most people are better at composing themselves visually, than composing their sound. And we are used to the voice being used in a communicative function, but what if it was just for yourself? Can you feel the vibrations of your own voice throughout your body, even in your fingertips or your toes? People have those experiences, but they're not really talked about very often. Whenever you make a sound it is moving through your entire body. All your cells are ‘bathed’ in sound every time we say anything and I don’t think we think about that very much. That's also part of what we'll be doing: just enjoying sending sound through different parts of our body and becoming more sensorily aware of the sound filling our body and other people's bodies. In the last iteration of the workshop we actually listened to other people's bodies resonating as well, close up. This time, I brought a stethoscope in order to listen more closely.
CSWR: Two things I find fascinating about your work: one is muscle and tissues–all of the different kinds of tissues in the body–and how in a physical sense they influence the voice that emanates and the experience of the voice within the body, and the second is, metaphorically, what affordances thinking with muscle offers, including the different kinds of muscles in the body, both the voluntary and the involuntary. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this and how this connects to Roy Hart and Fitzmaurice Voicework, looking at their precedents including Feldenkrais, Barbara Brennan, and yoga.
Anne: Your breath is involuntary for the most part, run by the autonomic nervous system. You go to sleep at night and you continue to breathe deeply even without intending to. At the same time, if you decide to speak or sing, you have a little window where you can stop the breath or elongate the breath. You have a little bit of decision that you can make. You can't go on forever making a sound. Your body will just refuse: “Nope. You're not doing that. It’s time to inhale.” The breath is this amazing tool that operates at the cusp between the motor nervous system and the autonomic system, and, because of that, everything you do with the breath affects your autonomic system as well as your motor system. You can actually have an impact on both of those systems by doing certain breathing practices, or by singing. Pranayama makes specialized use of this to affect meditative states of mind.
Specifically, in Catherine Fitzmaurice’s work, we try to enliven the reflexive, automatic, autonomic system by instantiating a tremor in parts of the body. Those sorts of tremors are involuntary muscular waves, like fluctuating spasms. Most of us have felt them at some point: you get cold, you shiver; or you eat something bad, you throw up. The digestive system, the circulatory system, post-traumatic shivering: there are so many systems in the body that produce waves of involuntary contractions when they are healthy, and typically we do not like to show this involuntary pulsation in front of other people. In my opinion, this is because we're socialized to hide our lack of control over the body, when in actuality, the thinking, rational mind is not in control of most systems that make our life in this body possible. Showing this lack of control is perceived as a weakness, and can provoke shame and disgust.
CSWR: I’m glad that you brought up power and weakness, because I feel like it ties back into the sense of expanding awareness of oneself and having agency in accessing those memories, that “re-membered” felt sense. What are your hopes for participants in the workshop and as they go back to their daily lives, in terms of that conversation between power and agency, and perceptions of weakness?
Anne: Well, each participant will have their own goals, but I think all of these fall under the rubric of some sort of increased self-awareness. Cultivating increased awareness involves leading students to experience a new way of seeing themselves in the world. If that can happen, it is an amazing result: I will be very happy. That kind of self-revelation is so rare, even in educational institutions. Or if people in the workshop have a greater appreciation and acceptance of their own humanity and the humanity of others; I would love for that to happen.
Article by Tristan Angieri, MDiv '26