Envoicing the Future: Victoria Hanna’s Exterior Voice

This essay examines theatrical dimensions of the future in Signals, a performance by the Israeli vocalist Victoria Hanna. An examination of four scenes from this performance, Iargue, shows that the sounds in Hannaʹs voice act in the symbolic dualities of female-male, human-technological, and embodied-disembodied figures. These dualities amplify the discrepancy between Hannaʹs staged identity (female, human, embodied figure) and an absent exterior other (male, technological, disembodied figure). The notion of ʹenvoicementʹ is developed in order to analyse these dualities and, in particular, to explore the body-voice relationship that they compose. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinasʹs ethical theory in Time and the Other, Iargue that the meaning attributed to the future is never conveyed in its presence but rather in its absence; that is, signifying practices that represent the absent exterior referent stage the future. Through this central claim, I thus assert that Hannaʹs disembodied voice ʹenvoicesʹ the future