Colloquium48 "Creative Shared Spaces" Dr Francesca Placanica

Live performance represents an enriching encounter, yet only accessed by those in attendance. Instead, experimentality occurs in rehearsals, and the processes and practices that feed in the work-in-progress generate a wealth of models and methods that can be consolidated as training tools for the next practitioner. As a professionally trained opera singer, my artistic research dives in the world of actor training and voicework to find common grounds with their experimental premises, and especially addresses both in theory and practice the concept of “laboratoriality.” The exploration is carried through the Dynamic Configurations with Transversal Video method (DCTV, Spatz, 2020), a form of post-Grotowskian audiovisual embodied laboratory, which eschews the teleological premises of performance as spectacle to focus on the generative potential of practice captured through audiovisual languages. This approach defines a shared creative zone where the intercorporeal transmission of experiences feeds horizontally across all participants, determining lines of agency idiomatic to their mutual practices, subverting conventional directorial hierarchies, and impacting in creative ways their reciprocal embodied research.

This paper, along with a substantial audiovisual output (15-20 minutes) documents embodied research in relation to voice and vocal performance as a practice shared by different training lineages; it contextualises classical vocality within a wider network of practices and, ultimately, appraises the possibilities disclosed by such “democratic” setting both in practice and in performance in music-theatre, especially emphasising the creative potential of the laboratory, where experimentation declines voice as scenic space per se,
inscribed yet not limited by the body.

Francesca Placanica is a classical singer and artist-researcher with international performance experience in opera and music theatre. She is currently Assistant Professor in Music and Director of Performance at Maynooth University (MU), and has just terminated a MSCA Senior Research Fellowship at the University of Huddersfield, where she led her practice-based project NePraMusT (Networks of Practice in New Music Theatre). Within the framework of her IRC-funded project “En-Gendering Monodrama: Artistic Research and Experimental Production” (MU, 2015-17) she presented and performed her original productions of monodramas. A twentieth-century vocality and performance scholar, she has authored articles and essays in international journals and books, and is co-editor of Cathy Berberian Pioneer of Contemporary Vocalities (Ashgate, 2014).