The Roy Hart Voice Technique

1/14/07

For those of you who haven’t already heard this from me ad nauseum, here’s a brief synopsis of what I’m doing here—what the certification program will be teaching me.

Roy Hart was a London-based actor who studied singing in the 1960’s with Alfred Wolfsohn, a German emigrant to London who was making waves with a new voice training that produced singers with five to six octave ranges. (For those un-musical, most people can’t sing the Star Spangled Banner because it has a range of around two octaves.) Wolfsohn was shell-shocked after 20 hours of lying in a trench with dying men during World War I, and after the war was traumatized by the recurring memory of the men’s screams. He tried psychoanalysis, and it failed him. He finally cured himself of his “flashbacks” by physically recreating the sounds that he was hearing in his head. He created a singing/psychoanalytic practice that enabled his students to explore Jungian archetypes through vocalization. It was his belief that this process enabled his students to be more whole human beings, by exploring their “anima, animus, shadow side,” and various gendered identities through vocalization.

Roy Hart picked up these teachings and created a group of 30 or so internationals in London (many of whom were not actors) that signed on to explore how to find Jungian “individuation” through the exploration of archetypes and sound. He himself had a six-octave range, and completely overwhelmed the critics when he performed song cycles that were written for his abilities. Because this was the 60’s, this group was also investigation many of the things that the Living Theater in the US and Peter Brook in the UK were: exploring relationships through “encounter groups” and analyzing/expressing their sexuality and gender-identification in their life and art. Hart’s theater, labeled by the French as the “theater of the cry” explored communication through pre-language non-verbal means, (as well as verbal words) experimented with sounds that are more animalistic in origin, and often performed their pieces in three languages.

This group of people lived together and rehearsed together in London, pooling their resources to keep the group going. It wasn’t quite a “commune,” but it ran under some of the same principles, with Hart as the “father figure” and leader. By the time they left London, there were approximately 50 people in the Roy Hart theater group.

You can imagine that Hart was a charismatic leader. He was accused of being a guru and creating a “school for fascists.” For various reasons, Hart was not accepted by the London artistic establishment, so the group bought an abandoned, run-down chateau in the Cevennes mountains in the south of France to create their new artistic home in 1973. They quite literally re-modeled it themselves, and created new artistic works while there. Hart, his wife, and one other company member died in an auto accident in 1975 (they are buried on the property), but many of the group’s members continued to work and practice theater here. Now the chateau is home to their artistique centre, which not only teaches the Roy Hart technique, but also rents their studio spaces to other artists and workshops.

When I take a private coaching session, the session begins with warm-up exercises to help me release my body and my breath and strengthen my diaphragm. Then we go to the piano, where I am instructed to use my imagination to embody a series of archetypes, on specific spectrums of pitch and qualities of sound. Some of these sounds do not entail movement of the vocal cords. Some can sound like growls, yodels, cries or “peeps.” It is possible to sound two and three notes at once in a “chord.” The sounds are centered and resonated from very deep in the body, between the belly and the pelvic floor. My job is while here is to a) experience this and learn how to do it and b) learn how to teach it.

The sessions are exhilarating, releasing, and exhausting. Most private sessions are two hours long. When I take workshops with others, I assume we’ll be working all day long for the length of the workshop. In today’s session with Noah Pikes (an original company member) exploring the “Prince” archetype, I found a bracing, loud “metallic” volume and clarity of pitch in my mid-range on ‘ah’ without engaging my larynx; I know this is Greek to some of you, but it’s quite an amazing thing to do!