This article considers the limits, layers and potential of vocal mimesis in the creation and performance of a new musical theatre work. Reflecting on the process and production of All That's Left-a musical that performed imagined conversations between pop-culture icons from 'The 27 Club'-I conceptualize voice as a plural space that connects imitation and originality by exposing, negotiating and re-siting the boundaries of mimetic vocality. Specifically, using Hillel Schwartz's The Culture of the Copy (2013) as a basis for discourse, I offer three readings of vocal mimesis as an act that constructs a space of plural and paradoxical possibilities. First, I consider the fidelity of timbral imitation or accent in 'singing like the celebrity', and use Frith (2008) in dialogue with Barthes's concept of the 'grain' (1977) to explore the paradox of vocal bewilderment in performing original versions of celebrities. Second, I reflect on the use of recorded voice, and draw on Chion (1999) and Sterne (2003) to suggest that acoumastic voice unveils the limits of mimesis while allowing a sonic (re)authoring in the process. Third, I consider the audience as transgressors (Connor 2004), and suggest that in listening-in to the ethereal and imagined thoughts of a longdeceased rock star, they themselves perform the very (re)authoring the mimetic voice itself offers.
This chapter reassesses the work of Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop from the 1950s to the 1970s. It finds that, in many instances, Littlewood’s visionary approach to collaborative devising and her innovative borrowing from a breadth of theatrical traditions broadened the scope of the British musical as a vehicle for social engagement, with a legacy that is both tangible and vital as part of the history of twentieth-century musical theatre. Yet, the chapter argues that in many ways, at the root of Littlewood’s approach was an often contradictory world view: at once critical of the Establishment and simultaneously embedded within it. The chapter concludes by arguing that this paradoxical approach is what makes Littlewood’s work so innovative and, ultimately, so typically British.
Love can do strange things, especially to those of a poetic persuasion. Unrequited or otherwise, it can invoke emotional turmoil, obsessiveness and an overactive imagination on the part of the lover concerning the object of their affection. Such a depth of romantic feeling led a lovelorn Thomas Hardy to experience a series of aural apparitions, which he mistakenly understood to be his estranged wife Emma, in his poem 'The Voice' (1914). Echoing an idealized past and reverberating with a guilt-ridden and bittersweet present, this autobiographical work concerns Hardy's remembrance of that 'woman much missed', as he imagines her calling to him. In the first half of the poem, Hardy (2005 [1914]: 1160) hallucinates: 'how you call to me, call to me, / […] Can it be you that I hear?' The imagined voice of Emmapromising the romance of their early days together in Boscastledoes not last for long. In a bitter moment of self-awareness, Hardy (2005 [1914]: 1160) asks: 'Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness[?]' It might have sounded like Emma, but the rustling of the trees proved empty, listless. This temporal shift between the past and the presentwistful nostalgia and bitter disappointmentinvokes two different voices: an auditory ghost of Emma drawn from a psychological and emotional yearning, and an ecological voicethe rushing breeze coursing through the trees. Tellingly, the poem's last lines read: 'Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, norward / And the woman calling' (Hardy 2005 [1914]: 1160). Hardy knows it
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