By: Michael Stablein, Jr.

Catherine Fitzmaurice with Voicework student

One of the leading teachers of the speaking voice, Catherine Fitzmaurice, is known best for her development of the Fitzmaurice Voicework: a vocal training discipline for the actor. Drawing from and altering an array of somatic disciplines ranging from Reichian bioenergetics, to the yogic pose, to shiatsu bodywork, Fitzmaurice builds off of and departs from a long lineage of Western speech and voice technique. This lineage traces and includes the 17th c. art of elocution, Francois Delsarte’s oratory trinity of language, thought, and gesture, Michel Saint-Denis’ “voice beautiful”, and early 20th c. standardizations of voice and speech such as the Mid-Atlantic Standard and an American emphasis of “intellect over emotion” (Morgan, 4).

But Fitzmaurice’s departure, and that of her contemporaries, develops at a decisive moment post-’68 toward what is now generally understood as a “psycho-physical approach” to the body and voice. Master Fitzmaurice Teacher, Michael Keith Morgan, writes: “Synthesis is at the very core of the work, from its proposal to heal the mind/body split through efficiently reconnecting the autonomic nervous system with the central nervous system” (16). I have much to say on this front and am hoping to dig much deeper on this in my research paper for this course but with the little time I have here I would like to jump ahead to a specific aspect of the Voicework called Destructuring and its central exercise, tremoring.

Tremoring in Fitzmaurice Voicework.

In a rare essay on this specific work, Fitzmaurice writes:

The Destructuring work consists of a deep exploration into the autonomic nervous system functions: the spontaneous, organic impulses which every actor aspires to incorporate into the acting process. The tendency of the body to vibrate involuntarily as a healing response to a perceived stimulus in the autonomic “fight or flight” mode (as in shivering with cold or fear, trembling with grief, anger, fatigue, or excitement) is replicated by applying induced tremor initially through hyper-extension of the body’s extremities only, thus leaving the torso muscles free to respond with a heightened breathing pattern […] The introduction of sound into these positions allows the ensuing physical freedom to be reflected in the voice too, not just the body. (Fitzmaurice, 2).

Destructuring work here follows from somatic psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s writing on “armoring”—”the replacement of a phobia by a definite kind of armoring against the outer world and against anxiety, an armoring dictated by the structure of the instinct” (Reich, 198). Deploying alterations of yogic poses, tremors of the body are induced at crossroads in the nervous system that work to (con)fuse autonomic response with central response and find an encounter with “a surrender to flow […] allowing the tremor to flow through the body, and the medium for that flow is the breath” (Morgan, 34). This flow of breath leads to involuntary eruptions of uninhibited vocal emission and through this work, Destructuring is meant “to dissolve, via tremoring, the body armor that limits access to the actor’s inner resources for creativity” (35).

Fitzmaurice and Morgan both note that tremoring is significantly distinct (in fact, directly opposed) to a spasm which “operates to hold the body in a state of denial from the experience of flow […] a battlefield of conflicting impulses and directives. The tremor, as employed by Fitzmaurice, is conceived as a means of deconstructing tensions and bringing the body into harmonious flow” (38).

Many years ago, while in a classical actor training program, the work of Catherine Fitzmaurice and Kristin Linklater (a contemporary working in a similar vein) was central to my disciplinary training. The project I’m hoping to embark on here asks after these post-’68 actor training techniques and disciplines and their suggestion of a liberatory ethic. I can’t help but consider Foucault’s writings regarding the “technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Foucault, Technologies, 18). Too often such technologies operate within a dominating structure or a structure with dominating demands that Foucault comes to call governmentality.  In the same breath, these practices could just as soon be read through the ethical shift in Foucault’s work regarding a concomitant “care of the self” in which an “aesthetics of existence” or “poetics of the self” might offer a potential resistance to biopolitical normalization (Foucault, Ethics).

On a separate but related note, I’m thinking of some of the recent reading we’ve done in the realm of radical black study regarding wholeness, loss, and multiplicity. In much of the voice work of Fitzmaurice, Linklater, and others, an original and unadulterated voice emerges as the objective and essential truth covered by “armor” or altered by social and moral norms. I’m thinking of Ashon Crawley when he writes: “This is important because to speak of ‘loss’ would presuppose an oppositional coherence at the core, an operational architecture” (Crawley, 81).

What do we make of a technology of vulnerability—of yielding—as a form of resistance to a technology of social normalization, of armoring, of denial of flow? This begs a question of the desirability and unacknowledged aspect of “flow”—I’m thinking here of Lauren Berlant and her suggestion that we “jam the machinery that makes the ordinary appear as flow.” How do we theorize a codified technique as a liberatory discipline? What essentialisms of the self remain at the core of breath and voice work even in the task of an unbridled relation to others and to the world?

 

Works Cited

Crawley, Ashon. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017.

Fitzmaurice, Catherine. “Voice and Speech Trainers Association Newsletter,” 2003.

Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self: a Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Luther H. Martin and Huck Gutmann. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Foucault, Michel. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” In P. Rabinow (ed.). Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 1. New York: New Press, 1997.

Hampton, Marion, Barbara Acker, and Catherine Fitzmaurice. “Breathing Is Meaning.” Essay. In The Vocal Vision: Views on Voice by 24 Leading Teachers, Coaches & Directors. New York, NY: Applause, 1998.

Morgan, Michael Keith. Constructing the Holistic Actor: Fitzmaurice Voicework. Lexington, KY: Michael Keith Morgan, 2012.

Reich, Wilhelm. Character Analysis. Trans. Vincent R. Carfagno, 1945. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972