nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

central to the workshop. As we explored in other workshops on the voicetoo, the resonance created between the vocal chords tells us a lot about howwe are, filtering and vibrating throughout the body and its different tissuesand the resonance chambers of the diaphragm, chest, head, pelvis. Where noresonance is possible, there is blockage, and one has to tune into that to findways of bringing circulation and life into stuck tissues. As Anne Carson says:‘reality is a sound, you have to tune into it not just keep yelling’. 10I do not remember everything we did but I do remember two exercises inparticular.The first one was an exercise where we had to start on the floor and slowlygo to a standing position moving in whatever way we wanted. As we weredoing this, Hagit asked us to sing a song we knew from our childhood, starton the floor singing in our lowest voice and, as we slowly stood up, to increasethe pitch of our voice. Some people noticed that when asked to sing, they feltreally challenged: not only singing per se, but also singing a childhood nurseryrhyme, that wasn’t so easy, whether this was because of possible associationsof childhood memories, or because we found the nursery rhyme troubling(in its sexist, racist or otherwise politically regressive content). I noticedwhen I heard my friends speaking that they change the pitch of their voice accordingto what they want to express or whether they’re talking to their matesor to their boss. I also read in a study about gender that people consciouslyor unconsciously alter their voice according to their gender. Women tendto speak with a higher-pitched voice when they could actually speak with alower voice and men tend to speak with a lower-pitched voice even when theycould speak with a higher voice. In this exercise people identified as both boysand girls seemed to be able to go from a very low voice to a very high one.The second exercise I remember completely blew my mind! It was thelast exercise that we did, so you need to keep in mind that we were “warmedup” and already in a state of excitement. Hagit gave us some structure but itbecame very quickly, without us actually realizing it, some sort of self-organisedexercise in a very strange and crazy way. Each of us found a partner sothat the group was divided in pairs. Our instructions were that one person ofthe pair was to produce voice and movements in any way she wanted and theother one was to mirror them. It all started with everybody being sort of selfconsciousand hesitant but very soon people became absorbed in this game.You could be as creative as you wanted to.After I got over my self-consciousness I started to shout and make noisesI had never made before, as if going deep into some sort of animal primal me.It’s like everything that my body wanted to externalise, whether in soundsor movement, just came out. I felt free to move and be oral as I wanted to in155