Voicing bodies, voicing histories: Elaine Mitchener’s experimental vocal performance

Abstract

Vocal artist and composer Elaine Mitchener, MBE, has worked across contemporary music, opera, installation, site-specific performance and movement arts for two decades. Yet, little has been written about her groundbreaking contribution to British performance and its voicescape. This chapter first positions Mitchener’s work against histories and practices of the Black voice in the British theatre of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Then, it offers the first scholarly examination of Mitchener’s Sweet Tooth, a piece about the British sugar plantations in the Caribbean and the transatlantic slave trade. In investigating the piece, the chapters shows how Mitchener’s approach to multi-source devising is in fact a coalitionary tactic against patriarchal-capitalist frameworks. Listening to the work alongside Françoice Vergès’s decolonial feminism, I argue that Mitchener engenders a new approach to contemporary voicing: a Black extended vocalization that invites new ways of listening to the archive and resounds new possibilities for structurally marginalized voices.