This article explores and challenges two philosophical perspectives on the voice in performance, seen in Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (2006). Through a consideration of two songs from the 2005 musical The Light in the Piazza, I explore the relationship of the voice
to language, and the voice to the body. Examining the effect of the foreign tongue in Piazza, and the prevalence of vocalize as a dramatic device, I conclude that our essential experience of voice is an embodied one, and not paradoxical as Dolar’s theories often suggest. Drawing on neuroscientific
and biological perspectives, along with performance theory and musicology, I offer a concept of ‘corporeal vocality’, for understanding the voice as the paradoxical keeper of both linguistic utterance, and the bodily presence of the speaker/singer.
This article considers the performance of English cultural identity through a reading of Sting’s semi-autobiographical musical, The Last Ship, seen on Broadway in 2014. Drawing on historical concepts of English identity and studies of regional social identity in Wallsend – the north-east English town where The Last Ship is set, I suggest that the musical presents an English identity that is uneasy with its present, and a songwriter uneasy with his past. Specifically, I consider the three iterations of the title song, considering the intrinsic relationship between myth and material environment. First, in a sermon by the local parish priest, Jim O’Brien, ‘the last ship’ offers a metaphor that locates the northern shipbuilding industry as a global bastion of British heritage. In a version by shipyard foreman Jackie White, the display of quixotism evidences a parochialism and localism that configures a specific version of ‘home’ and community—one which did not find resonance with a Broadway audience. Finally, the third iteration is read as a performance of heredity and familial reconciliation, the song of a writer – and a nation – at sea, struggling to find harbour.
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