Remediating the female voice in extremis(m): The Human Voice (1966) in The Female Voice in the Twentieth Century: Material, Symbolic and Aesthetic Dimensions.

The notion of an artwork that is in the process of becoming, through duress, is metaphoric of a number of experimental genres synonymous with the twentieth century. From the beginning of European avant-garde art movements in the early 1900s (and the unstable gendering of vocality-as-other implicated there) to the feminisation of performance art that took a corporeal turn towards the end of the last century, women and women’s voices have been the material reality, and also the cultural agency, that has shaped the terrain of vocality when it has come to experimentation (Dunn and Jones). It can become too tempting for commentators to approach vocal experimentation, including notions of ‘extended vocal technique’ with the effecting of an abject, identity ascribed to woman as animal/hysterical/other/extremist in ways that are not politically progressive (Cavarero, Dolar). Rather, the persona of the experimentalist, as woman, is one that breaks the divide between composer and interpreter and disrupts notions of authorship by making the vocal utterance performative. This chapter intends to address a 20th-century-specific response to vocality via a chain of remediations of Jean Cocteau’s play La Voix Humaine (1930), with a case study of the overlooked but exemplary vocal performance of Ingrid Bergman in The Human Voice (1966).