The Sound Voice Project @ the Royal Opera House

Sometimes it is hard to make direct eye contact with art. It is hard to meet it on its own terms, for many reasons. 1: I often know what I am going to see before I see it. It is rare that I walk into a gallery, into a room, and feel surprised by what’s in there. If I am surprised, I am surprised that I’m surprised. 2: the thing I have to work out is myself. The work is the work, I have to come correct, I have to figure out what correct is, I have to measure the distance. 3: battering myself into submission before art is a thankless task. 4: I can look and feel nothing. 5: I can look and feel naked. 6: all of this is dealing in an abstract realm that only makes sense to me, I am on the inside, I am a poor judge. 7: I sometimes wonder if I put art on the table to avoid confronting something else. Like, I write about this thing but the thing is a proxy for something else, and the else is difficult to approach, so maybe I am actually writing about the else and projecting the else onto the thing and pretending they are the same, but they’re not and that isn’t very fair to the thing — is it?

I am downstairs at the Royal Opera House, waiting to go down even further into the Lindbury Theatre. It is a cold evening, I am bang on time but no one is in the lobby waiting to go in, so I think I am late. I go through the doors and join a small crowd at the top of the stairs. There are maybe 15 of us? Not including the usher. Everyone is silent, waiting, looking at him. He is in an anonymous suit, holding a walkie talkie. He nods. He waits. We wait. It is silent. I can hear my own heartbeat. We wait for so long, I start to think something has gone wrong. But then I hear something. A voice is speaking down in the theatre. It is saying ‘this is my voice’ and it sounds small and far away. The usher nods, turns and we are walking down many stairs, very softly. The theatre floor is dark, we are in a corridor made of enormous dark curtains. We walk around, the curtain curls a circle. We stop. We wait. It isn’t silent. Different voices are saying ‘this is my voice. This is my voice, this is my voice’. We wait for so long, I think about what is going on on the other side of the curtains. Then silence. Then the curtains open. The curtains part very suddenly and I am shocked. And inside the curtained circle there are spotlights on one row of chairs, lined up along the edge of the circle. When the crowd sits, the spotlights dim and turn off. And we are all sitting in the pitch black. It isn’t scary, but it is dark for so long. I forget the edges of my body. I forget my body itself.

Words flicker up on a screen in front of us. It is actually three screens, three projections are stacked on top of each other, I can see each one through the other. The words tell me that this is a digital installation with three performances, it’s called the Sound Voice Project. The three performances are made by and with people living with voice loss.

The first is a dual aria, a song sung by two, called Paul. In 2017 Paul Jameson was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, he has progressivley lost his speech. After hours of interviews about what Paul’s voice means to him, a composer (Hannah Conway) and writer (Hazel Gould) wrote this aria. The aria is sung by Paul and Roderick Williams. On the libretto they are both called Paul (Paul 1 & Paul 2). The aria sings out two different versions of Paul, from two different bodies. They slip back and forth from each other across the screens, voices singing in and out, across each other and over too, echoing, expanding. The lyrics speak about the way a voice carries a body along with it, a person, a self. About what is lost when that relationship between voice and body, person, self, when that comes unlinked. When it changes, and when the body, person, self is surprised by what it has changed into. It is one song sung by two performers, they are singing to each other I think. They are one voice singing between two bodies. The screen between them is a veil, sparkling and wet.

The second is a performance by two choirs, called I Left My Voice Behind. One choir is live, made up of people who have had laryngectomies, a surgery to remove their voice box. The second choir is digital, constructed from recordings of people before their surgeries. Their faces appear large on screen, fading away into the distance until they are tiny dots that come together in the shape of a digital face, uncanny because it is someone and no one and everyone all at the same time. The two choirs feel similar. The voices shrink into the crowd, become one that sings with the other, making two. It is strange and beautiful to listen to two choirs with such distinct and different sounds, tones, qualities, textures. The digital choir sounds heavy with autotune, even though I suspect it isn’t. But it is reacting to the live choir, changing in response, becoming more stark or more smooth. I can see qualities in the sound that I am surprised by.

The third is Tanja. In 2020 Tanja Bage was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that was growing behind her vocal cords. A week later, she had a laryngectomy to remove her voice box. Tanja is a performance sung by a recording of Tanja before her surgery, Tanja after her surgery and a third professional soprano. The recording Tanja is speaking to her two children, explaining what has happened, what is going to happen, describing how she feels and what she’s expecting, what she hopes for. It looks like it is shot on her phone camera, she is speaking to her children, directly addressing them. Her recorded face fades into her stage face, and her entire physicality has changed. Her recorded face is posed in a comforting smile, her stage face is completely neutral. I feel closer to this second face, like something has been lowered and there is nothing between us. I have stopped thinking about the fact there are three projected screens, I am only looking into her eyes. Between Tanja and the soprano, they describe the pain of losing her voice, the fear that she has been completely altered beyond recognition to her children, that she can no longer comfort them or calm them — these things that are so important to her, changed and lost, her voice is a vital tether that has been taken. I am so close to her pain, this is so intimate, I almost flinch. I don’t have any right to flinch. I feel like it is important to hear this thing as this thing, not as the else, to bear witness, to hear.

When the performances are over, we return to darkness and silence. It is so dark for so long, I forget the lights will come back up eventually. When they do, I look around the curtained circle at everyone else. We are all blinking and dazed, looking at each other. We leave slowly, without the usher. Back up at street level, I walk to the tube station and I start to cry. It’s so cold, my face is so numb, it takes me a while to realise that I am actually genuinely crying. I don’t actually know how to process the work I saw. Saying ‘I was there to bear witness to it’ doesn’t quite cover it. I feel like it has stuck with me, I can’t stop thinking about what it might mean, how I might relate to it or find some way to close the distance between me and it.

For a long time I’ve said that I don’t know what I think until I write it. That doesn’t do a perfect job of describing the dynamic in place between me, my thoughts and my writing. Sometimes I am surprised by what comes out, writing is a process of discovery and novelty. More often than not, I know what I think. Writing is just the way I am most likely to express it in a way I am happy with. It is more likely to be perfect in writing. I cannot trust my mouth. I cannot trust my head. My thoughts come out of my fingertips. I know where the keys are without looking. I reach for them and they are there, where I expect them to be and as I expect them to be. I type so fast, sometimes my laptop is too slow and the lag is frustrating because I don’t like the feeling that there is something getting in the way. I am attached to this. My fingertips, my hands, they are a productive expressive tool. If I lost this in any way, I fear I would never be able to think ever again. Without this, without the ability to write through them, my thoughts would hang floating in the air in front of me. I write to catch them. Sometimes it is trying my chances and taking a lucky shot. Other times I am looking through the scope of a long range sniper. Trawling through the open ocean with a big net to see what I find. I know where it is and I am hunting it down in the dark, moving silent and deadly. I cannot trust my mouth, I cannot trust my head, I can forget my body in the dark. My voice is at my fingertips. As I am writing this I am very aware that I will record myself reading it aloud, I am very aware that you might be listening to me read it right now. You might be listening to my voice, not seeing my voice. I feel like there is no space to floss between them. Hearing or reading, there is no difference it is the same thing. The thing is the words, or the act of finding them.

This week I am obsessed with writing one particular thing. I have this drive to write it, this hyperfocus. It is all I can think about. I cannot pull myself away from my laptop, I stay at my desk until 11pm. It is just me and the rats in this basement underneath the ridiculous palace I work in. If I was dramatic, if I was sentimental, I would say ‘I am exorcising something, I have to express it! I have to get it out!’ But that’s not quite it. It is like scratching an itch. It is instinct. I am barely trying to do it. I have written 23,000 words in 3 days. I don’t have a choice about keeping it in because when I am not writing, typing, I am thinking about it. The words are forming and I am stuck until they come out. I have to find somewhere to decant them, somewhere to spill them. Otherwise they’ll rot inside me, something might go sour. I will reabsorb them and they’ll come back up, but this time like heartburn. The way I am writing feels like I am possessed. It also feels like that thing Stevie Nicks said: Fleetwood Mac made their best music when they were in the worst shape, or something like that. Rumours came out of their collective pain, anger, all of it, everything, that’s why it’s so good. They held it all up like a sacrificial offering, to make something beautiful. This has been said in so many ways by so many people, it has lost all sense of its own meaning. It has become an aphorism, a truism, it is now trite. All the same. I think that the worst cannot come in, come out, pass by like a shooting star. Pain transforms you. Energy never dies, it only transforms. Good work exists everywhere, it is very attainable. It’s just a question of how and when we are driven to it — when we have something to prove to ourselves, at an extreme, at the edge, when we just want to stop thinking, itching to scratch, when the inside of our mind is like a snowglobe liquid, shifting and turning and shimmering. Yes, that is when we have no other option but to turn it all out. Something like that.