Kine-Phonesis: The Sonic Dancer in Relay

The sounds that emanate from the dancers as they begin to crumble toward the floor spews from their bodies in loud painful moans; they reach upwards only to fall back to the ground. A unified group gesture—the initial formulaic but also functional gesture of French baroque declamation¹—disintegrates into disjointed formations and chaotic noise. Sounds echo off the small performance space, amplifying and confusing the tumultuous din. I do not know how or when the moans become words, but the words resist my understanding because they are being uttered in at least six different languages. Breath. Movement. Sound. Every relay between them starts out in a delicate gesture that is then vocalized, as it appears to fragment. I hear whispers and words out of context. Soon all of the dancers are in vocal spasm. I keep waiting for the music to begin to play.

Figure 1.

M.A. students at Freie Universiteit Berlin performing Relay (2008). Photo by Alessandro Rumié.

It is the final showing of a voice and movement class in the dance M.A. program at Freie Universiteit, Berlin. Students are working with choreographer Mark Franko and his assistant Alessandro Rumié on the sonic elements of their own bodies to create a sound score in place of music. The fragments of sound found in Relay (2008) are artifacts. The dancers excavated text from various sources and in a variety of languages. Rumié offered insight into how they developed the dramatic text:

They were given all this freedom to find these texts, it could be how to bake a cake, it could be the Schlegel translation of Hamlet's monologue "To be or not to be." One of the texts that is in the performance is how to use a Macintosh computer, taken from the instruction booklet. One group—what they did was so brilliant—chose a jazz song. It was broken up into three parts: one dancer hummed the melody, another spoke the actual text of the song, and the third was bent over a book saying how the performance was supposed to look.²

In developing their own text, the dancers literally reassembled text to create a script, which in its turn was intended to establish the dancer's agency in space. In the absence of a proposed narrative, either through words or music, the dancer set the tragedy or comedy of the moment: they were not restricted to one dominating musical or textual aesthetic. The fragmented nature of the texts in Relay resists being used by spectators as a clear and linear narrative. The voice emerges as a distorted transmission of the phonic. By creating a new space in which the body experiments with the presentness of the voice, an endless series of assemblages of movement begin; their impetus being to navigate the multifarious relationship between bodies and their voices. As a dance, Relay uses specific protocols of declamation in assemblages of movement, sound, and words that give birth to a choreography of the sonorous body. I catch pieces of English spoken in fragmented sentences, and sounds that carry currents of emotion that give me a moment of déjà-vu. I have felt this before, heard this before, but I can't quite name what I am hearing now because a new wave of sound comes from the dancers.

I want to articulate the function of memory in Relay as it relates to the sonorous body moving and sounding the voice into space. My aim is to illuminate how voice and sound are remembered or relayed to spectators through movement functioning as memory by conceptualizing how Franko and Rumié are writing sound into the choreographic process, or making sound spatial. By utilizing the chaotic and ephemeral nature of the sonic, Relay proposes a radical relationship between the functions of memory, vocal agency, and dance. By looking at the physiological and auditory production and reception of sound in Relay, a theater of the memory of sound presents itself.

In "Choreography as Cenotaph" Gabriele Brandstetter proposes that "[C]horeography is a form of writing along...