SOMATICS OF VOICE - Call for Papers 2024.1

Voz e Cena, an electronic journal in Performing Arts with free access and peer-review, with no submission or publication fees, will receive articles for the Thematic Dossier "Somatics of Voice" until April 15, 2024 to compose its first volume of 2024 (January-June). The journal publishes texts in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian and French.

Editors: Ciane Fernandes, Diego Pizarro, Sulian Vieira Pacheco.

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The word Somatics is a neologism created by Thomas Hanna in the early 1970s to designate unconventional body practices concerned with the integration of multiple dimensions of existence: physical, mental, emotional, energetic and spiritual. Hanna's endeavor aimed to name a possible new field of knowledge by grouping different systems, methods and techniques concerned with health and expression, modulated by the transformation of harmful habits, repatterning and postural and expressive reconfiguration, as well as the experiential holistic notion of body as totality.

Somatics today can be understood as a contemporary field of knowledge that is concerned with a paradigm of its own, which comes from experiences of living bodies in interrelationship with biological, psychological, social, environmental and countercolonial factors. Its movements and praxis have been developing in academic research for at least 50 years. Due to its transdisciplinary inclination - embraced by complexity, diversity and multidimensionality - Somatics goes beyond the methods, systems and techniques established in the European world starting from the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. While recognizing its white and European origin, there is a displacement of Somatics today, contrary to closed, dualistic, homogeneous, univocal, ableist, racializing and classist models in a countercolonial path. In fact, this has been the movement of various research initiatives in the global south, for instance.

One of the problems of the uses and abuses of the word Somatics is currently its indiscriminate appropriation to name any types of body practices, even if they are not connected with the pedagogies, methodologies and somatic techniques. The word came to be used in body arts and alternative health practices to name everything that refers to the body, usually the physical body. This, if observed only from this univocal dimension, removes Somatics of its total action terrain, which considers the integration of the different levels of bodies for new events in action for the world.

Voice is one potential event of human somas and has been the subject of debates and argument in performing arts research, with more emphasis on the last two decades involving somatic practices. People who have developed somatic systems in the last century, such as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Moshé Feldenkrais and Frederick Matthias Alexander, for example, expanded vocal practices from their somatic proposals, integrating art, health, philosophy and education. And the ancestral experience of total holistic integration of movement and voice has been an inspiration for several somatic practitioners and performing artists. Also, Native peoples and their ways of life, in confluence, have been articulating research and artistic creation to establish the existence of other ways of being in the world standing from the countercolonial knowledge stance.

Considering the urgency of the somatic perspectives of voice in the current context of research, pedagogies and practices, this special issue is open to receive submissions involving, but not limited, to the following subjects.

• The presence of voice in pedagogies, methodologies and somatic techniques;
• Voice and Somatics in performing arts processes;
• Danced voice, and vocal dance;
• Countercolonial practices of vocal and somatic experiences;
• Somatic systems and vocal practices;
• Performance and performativity in association with Somatics and Voice;
• Practice as Research with techniques and vocal somatic explorations;
• Creation, choreography and composition in integration with Somatics and Voice;
• Transcultural vocal approaches in dialogue with somatic practices.