Living Pedagogy of Embodied Voice by Lorna Ramsay

Living Pedagogy of Embodied Voice by Lorna Ramsay, Ph. D Candidate, Arts Education, SFU I seek to be ‘present’ with my sound. When I teach, I perform a narrative. When I perform as a musician, I teach narrative. When I live narrative in all arts, I am a researcher. Photographs: Lorna Ramsay

Narrative research in music and education is an acceptance of the multi-tonal texts within all of us: the educator, the learner, the researcher. When I am in the classroom with my five-year-olds, I invite a dialogue that begins with acceptance that every person responds to their corporeal history and their understanding of spaces between sound and words, silence and melodic pulse. The following is a fictional narrative based on my experiences as a teacher/musician/researcher. I am a musician narrating physical space.

Kacey is tall and awkward for a five year old. She is vibrant, moving within the residual restraints of a physical reconstruction, a foot that refused to share an equal space with her leg. Now, Kacey attempts a child’s skip towards friends and I consider her understanding of her place in relationship to other’s spaces. She jostles between chairs and tables, knocks against children and falls in triumph somewhere. Look around you, Kacey, I say. What do you see? My friends, she answers. Yes, Kacey, and tell me about their sitting. Oh, she responds, knowing something is out of place. She has nowhere to go with that thought. I ease her gently through words and she smiles with dark eyes , very unrevealing but eager to please. Her broad, dark cheek bones become prominent features as she leans closer to my face, searching. I ease her, gently explaining and physically guiding her body, to the place she belongs, to her position in a circle time at the carpet. I will repeat this the next time we move to another space. I am an artist/educator un-silencing temporal place where senses move in a timbre

Kacey holds the blocks and stares perhaps at the colors, perhaps at the shapes. I ask her to count each block and write the number down. She smiles and counts. There is no connection for Kacey within spaces between her body and the blocks, between my body and my words. Once again, there is an invisible thread connecting Kacey to her spaces between people, objects and thoughts and I probe in the darkness to grasp hold. There is no sense to the concept of sums, the idea of quantity, the need to record. Some responses seem to be ideas Kacey has heard before like a distant melodic memory. So, when the Jamaican music spreads over her space, Kacey begins to dance. She looks at me hesitantly because she knows something is out of place but I do not intrude on her space. Something is making sense to Kacey and I feel a strong pull on the life-thread, the vibration within a pulse

And she sings reconnections and reconstructions that embody who she has been, who she will be in a moment’s breath into history. She is a Jamaican transported to England, a child born with a deformity that has been readjusted, a child born in sounds and melodies of another language. Now, she must make sense of the silent spaces between words, rhythms, movements and expectations. This is the story of Kacey who cannot work with numbers and sounds in words in ways that we expect. This is a story of a child’s mind in confusion with a deeply layered corporeal history. I seek to be ‘present’ with my sound.

Through movement and song I respect Kacey’s self-revealing corporeal resonances, how she understands her expression through the knowledge she lives through her body. I provoke self-expression that reveals Kacey’s aesthetic voice and opens communication through embodied knowing through arts and into spatial areas of comfort. Counting is more understandable when moving in a beat she feels and combining sounds in Caribbean chant is more reasonable to a five year old child with generations of history with/in and with/out a voice that attempts to express and share. Searching and re-searching formless, voiceless borders between knowing and un-knowing surrendering dailyness of body expression

I work with transformation and reflection in the first possible connective thread , an awareness from within the body and the body pulse. a tease of texture and color in sentient fields of potent receptors prodding gently through shoulders to arms as I live and re-live corporeal, polyphonic choruses

Kacey surrenders to her body’s knowing as I do to mine and we exchange understanding of being in a visceral pace and space. in a distortion that can only be a representation a choice a gesturing an oscillating prism of my resilient re-silent voice

My inquiry into musical narrative challenges tensions within “opening of spaces (in the emotional landscape)… where we are awash with language”. [1] Abram writes about the ‘bodying-forth’ of emotion through bodily gesture, gesture that speaks directly to the body. [2] This living pedagogy is rooted in the empowering embodiment of felt experience of sound, pulse, rhythm and timbre. My inquiry is like that of Abram who writes about Merleau-Ponty’s embodied philosophy of language and “. . the felt experience induced by specific sounds and sound-shapes as they echo and contrast with one another, each language a kind of song, a particular way of ‘singing the world’. ””[3] Carl Leggo is quoted from a lecture at Simon Fraser University, June 15, 2006. Abram, D. (1996) The spell of the sensuous (page 74). New York: Random House. [3] Abram (1996), page 76. [1] [2]