Yvon Bonenfant
I like voices that do what voices don’t usually do and bodies that don’t do what bodies usually do. I make art starting from these sounds and movements.The tactile qualities of the human voice are central to the way I imagine my work. The voice that touches is a central and key metaphor.
My work has strong political qualities, insofar as it works to question the structuring, indeed, the disciplining and punishing of non-normative vocal gesture within our cultures. It often confuses audiences in the way that it marries very different registers of address and combines aesthetic codes that usually aren’t experienced in proximity to one another. There is a strong element of virtuosic technique embedded in my pieces and this is often used to do non-virtuosic things with great skill and finesse. Musicians rarely think it’s music. Theatre makers rarely think it’s theatre.
The live art circuit doesn’t think it’s live art. I love this. And in this sense, my work is very queer. I am currently making work for children and families that involve their voices as raw aesthetic material. I want to create environments in which audience voices expand, and move beyond the ‘charm factor’ and/or ‘shock factor’ that a lot of interactive work relies on. I also have become militant about countering the writing off of sophisticated art for children by mainstream production values. The presentation explores the three resulting art products of this process and the ways they and culture interrogate each other.
Biography
Yvon Bonenfant is Reader in Performing Arts at the University of Winchester. His unusual, intermedia works have been produced in 10 countries in the last 10 years, and his writing published in journals like Performance Research, Choreographic Practices, and Studies in Theatre and Performance. He currently holds a Large Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust and funding from Arts Council England to collaborate with speech scientists on the development of a series of participatory, extra-normal voice artworks for children and families; see www.yourvivaciousvoice.com. Despite his air of Lenin, he does frighteningly accurate vocal imitations of both Axl Rose and Jon Bon Jovi.