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Showing impact case studies 1 to 2 of 2
Submitting institution
University of Winchester
Unit of assessment
33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
Summary impact type
Societal
Is this case study continued from a case study submitted in 2014?
No

1. Summary of the impact

Through the creation of new kinds of immersive performance, Yvon Bonenfant’s research has addressed the exclusion of children’s voices, and in particular those with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD). This resulted in transformative experiences for over 700,000 participants across the UK, who acted as co-makers of sophisticated voice art. The artworks provoked changes in attitude in arts programming and innovative uses of the vocal arts in formal and informal educational environments. These changes in practice led to meaningful well-being benefits, with children experiencing brief, and in certain cases, profound and long-lasting changes to behaviour and engagement.

2. Underpinning research

This body of work was developed by immersive practice researcher Yvon Bonenfant at Winchester University between 2005 and September 2018. It contributes significant practice as research to the emerging field of interdisciplinary voice studies. All the work was premiered between January 2012 and 31 July 2020.

The research comprises two multi-component outputs or projects and stems from the article ‘Queered Listening to Queered Vocal Timbres’ ( Performance Research 15:3, 2010). This article postulates a theory of how, through queered voicing, human bodies reach out, call toward, and find, other queered voices, and through so doing, participate in queered vocal relations of inter-corporeal attraction that actively queer and re-shape auditory, haptic and performative space.

From this starting point, a significant body of practice-led research funded by the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England was developed to put these principles into artistic practice and test their ability to realise the goals of celebrating queered vocal relations. The body of work articulates distinct strategies, processes, and analytical frameworks to:

  • Develop performative artworks through which problematic questions are raised about the social and biological politics of the production and perception of vocal ‘difference’ – the ‘queered’ or ‘extra-normal’ voice;

  • Use the resulting artworks to invite different demographics of audience and community to play with, enjoy, and co-create sophisticated artworks that celebrate their own queered, vocal gestures;

  • Collaborate with varied artistic, psycholinguistic and biomedical researchers to inform, challenge, and underpin such work with a range of relevant knowledges;

  • Discover new things about the production and perception of unusual voicing in culture – by either ‘typically’ or ‘non-normatively’ voicing bodies.

Three categories of insights evolved from this trajectory of work, linked to the two multi-component outputs that form the thematic portfolios of work. These include:

  • Insights into how to involve children aged 6-11 and their adults in celebrations of queered vocality, and in how to involve them in these celebrations as co-artists ( Your Vivacious Voice)

  • Insights into how we invite children with complex, mixed disability to become vocal artists, and how we might celebrate their unique improvisatory virtuosities ( Resonant Tails: PMLD Youth as Voice Artists)

  • Insights into how we might invite audiences understand how they style their vocal selves ( Your Vivacious Voice)

Transversal sub-categories of insights revealed include:

  • Insights into how audiences constructed as having marginalized voice qualities might be invited inside performative art-making processes and products as co-makers;

  • The rich seams of discovery that can be explored through collaboration with voice and speech scientists, engineers and educationalists within such work;

  • The power dynamics that underpin audience relations in such work;

  • The creative dynamics of inviting general publics to experience their queered voices from within such performative art works;

  • The future of the potential to involve queered vocalities in such work;

  • The aesthetic boundaries that the results of such processes challenge, advance, or problematize.

3. References to the research

The research is generated from two multi-component outputs.

3.1 **Multi-component output 1: Your Vivacious Voice: Extra-normal vocalisation, participation, and projects for children and youth. Premiered January, 2012.: Submitted in REF2.

‘Queered Listening to Queered Vocal Timbres’ Performance Research 15:3, 2010. DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2010.527210

‘Grappling with the Vivacious Voices: Uluzuzulalia, Somatic Experience, Plundering and the Research Paradigm’. [Keynote Speaker], Art and Knowledge: Making Sense of the Sensible, University of Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy, 2013.

‘Vivacious Voice in Action: Problems, Processes and Potentials’. [Invited Seminars/Guest Lectures], Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Invited Research Seminar, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow, 2014.

‘Extending the Vivacious Voice’. [Invited Seminars/Guest Lecturers], Impossible Constellation Event, University of Lincoln, 2014.

‘Votre voix vive: pléthore, plénitude, pouvoir et les enjeux de la recherche-création’. [Invited Lectures (Conference)], Symposium Le Processus Creatif, University of Paris 1 Panthéon – Sorbonne, 2014.

‘They Make Noise : Plethora, Plenitude, Power and Performance as Research’. [Invited Lectures (Conference)], International Federation for Theatre Research Main Conference, Coventry, 2014.

‘Contact, Mirrors and Gymnastics: What Science, Art and the Voice Can Do Together’. [Invited Oral Presentation], 11th International Conference on Advances in Quantitative Laryngology, Voice and Speech Research, University College London, 2015.

‘Unruly and Vivacious: Children as Voice Artists and the Celebration of Difference’. [Keynote Speaker], Imaginate Children’s Theatre Festival and Showcase, Edinburgh, 2017.

Touring performance Uluzuzulalia at 10 UK venues over two years.

Voice Bubbles iPad app

The Voice Trunk (public engagement artwork, 2014)

Grants awarded to support this project:

Wellcome Trust Small Grants in the Creative and Performing Arts, £29 912, R+D funding for this project, 2010-11

Wellcome Trust Large Arts Award, £ 116 818, 2012-2015

Wellcome Trust Large Arts Follow-On Funding, £30 000, 2012-2015

Arts Council England Grants for the Arts, £51 958, 2012-2015

**3.2 Multi-component output 2: Resonant Tails: PMLD Youth as Voice Artists

Resonant Tails: PMLD Youth as Voice Artists Artwork premiere November 2016.

‘PAR Produces Plethroa, Extended Voices are Plethoric, and Why Plethora Matters’ In:

Arlander, A. Barton, B., Dreyer-Lude, M. and Spatz, B. (eds). Performance as Research:

+Knowledge, Methods, Impact. New York: Routledge, 2018.

4. Details of the impact

  • Wellcome Trust and Arts Council funding helped Bonenfant synthesise methods for enticing children (and their adults) to make non-normative sound within interactive performance, leading to improved participation, enhanced quality of life and changed practitioner attitudes and methods.

  • New forms of cultural expression and changes in audience perception and behaviour

Your Vivacious Voice (YVV) comprises three works: 1) Uluzuzulalia, a digitally inclusive interactive performance for children aged 6-11 that toured to 29 locations (1038 attendees **(5.9)**) and paved the way for 2) an installation called The Voice Trunk (VT) and 3) Voice Bubbles for iPad. The VT launched in August 2015 at the Winchester Science Centre (WSC) (5.1, 5.9). Voice Bubbles was in the app store from February 2014 until late 2015 (4,500 downloads) (5.1). The works were the first of their kind and challenged preconceptions about voice and about working with children, who ‘tended to use it... creatively, excitedly, and making increasingly unusual sounds’ ( 5.2, p. 20). The Point noted that ‘The way this performance took shape and its results opened up new possibilities and opportunities for us to challenge artists to expand how they considered and developed performance for children’ (5.4), while WSC noted that the VT’s ‘artistic focus and its unusual interactive audiovisual and tactile technology opened up some possibilities for us to think about other ways we could use interactive and performative coding inside the Science Centre’ (5.1). Complimentary education packages linked to the National Curriculum are accessed via third party websites. Five venues commented that the packs were crucial for sales, while WSC prints the pack for KS1&2 teachers – about a third of its visitors are from primary schools. It is estimated, based on downloads and average class sizes, that 4000+ students have used the teaching materials (5.2).

At the heart of each of the three artworks is the principle of the ‘voice-expanding mirror’. When hearing themselves echoed by a digital array, a person (especially children), will copy their own sound back and modify it. The works used digital technologies and live performance to encourage children to make adventurous sounds – profiting from their neurological tendency (as outlined by collaborating psycholinguist Best) that ‘understanding of the phases of phonetic play as infants and children acquire phonemes was absolutely crucial’ and allowed the participants to ‘see what their voices can do’ (5.2). Meanwhile, the schools that participated in the pilot project at The Point reported ‘dynamic and enthusiastic responses to the work’ (5.4).

  • The VT was hosted by Winchester Science Centre (WSC) between 2015 and 2019 (140,000 annual visitors, 99% visiting all exhibits) (5.1). Evaluations show that users’ perception of their voice transforms and that they celebrate non-normative voicing. According to the WSC the VT ‘Is now consistently the favourite exhibit. Users [...] dwell on it for very, very long periods, and create quite sophisticated soundscapes with the Trunk…. [There is a] tendency for 5 or 6 children per group to stay obsessively [with] the Trunk for up to 45 mins.’ (5.2). WSC have created a ‘sound trail’ around the exhibit for school groups and report that The VT encourages teachers to take a more ‘creative’ approach to STEM subjects (5.2). The VT radically contrasts with WSC’s more traditional exhibits, transforms the spatial experience and is one of their most accessible activities for disabled youth (5.1). Interestingly, WSC has programmed a follow up exhibition on sound and acoustics using artistic concepts (noted in the Unit’s Research Environment Statement).

Enhanced wellbeing for children with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD)

Children with PMLD have few chances to be creative with their voices; their complex needs make it difficult for them to visit cultural venues. However, children with PMLD demonstrated enormous enthusiasm for YVV, made incredibly sophisticated vocal sounds, and showed very strong interest in improvisation (5.1, 5.2). In response to YVV’s success with this under-engaged audience, Bonenfant was invited to work with Rosewood Free School (5.2, 5.7). The resultant Resonant Tails (RT) enabled a whole new application of the voice-expanding mirror: a stand-alone ‘art machine’ as a facility with which the children could spend extended time celebrating their unique vocal virtuosities (5.10). A senior representative of the school notes that vocal expression ‘is very significant for our learners, many of whom have restricted opportunities to take power over the world that surrounds them’ (5.7), and that the project helped ‘our teachers and teaching assistants to engage with vocal intensive interaction in new ways’ (5.7).

Benefitting from the experience, and supported by introductions from Rosewood School (5.7), RT was rolled out to three more UK schools (in mixed disability groups), where it is used daily and students benefit from sustained educational gains (5.6, 5.10). According to the Independent Evaluation (for the funders), schools feel RT is deeply transformative, enhancing pupil engagement, giving students a creative outlet, and improving well-being (5.10). Teachers report that vocalization and communication have improved – students now know that if they say something, they will be listened to (due to the mirroring effect). This was especially compelling for blind students who experienced ‘tactile feedback’ (5.10). Parents relate that young people showed improved mood, wellbeing, and concentration with ongoing use of RT (5.10). Representative examples of positive pupil outcomes include: 1) a child making sound for one of the only times in their relationship with their teacher; 2) a child using eye contact for the first time; 3) a tactile defensive student reaching out for a musical instrument; 4) another using RT’s orbs, and 5) ‘turn taking, sharing, listening and being comfortable in proximity to each other’ (5.10). In each case, these successes were directly attributed to RT (5.6, 5.10).

New curatorial, artistic and educational practices

  • The VT and Uluzuzulalia stretched the aesthetic and participatory boundaries of children in theatrical and museum settings, allowing for new forms of artistic expression. The artworks informed practitioner strategies and innovative venue programming (5.1, 5.4). For the organisations and producers with whom Bonenfant collaborated, it was typically the first time they had developed a project of this nature (5.2), that encouraged children ‘to explore the voice in exciting new directions’ ‘without making them feel they had to “sing” or “sound beautiful’ (5.4).

As concluded in the independent report for funders, RT’s project outcomes were strongly met at each school, with ‘teachers and parents eager to tell me about the effectiveness of RT(5.10). Staff found it helped with inclusivity, integration, attention and relationships (5.10). As one teacher at Victoria School said to the evaluator, “We [teachers] are the most valuable resource. Resonant Tails enhances that value” (5.10). It has provided a whole new model for art-making with children in high-needs environments that needs no prior training. Teachers use RT at every opportunity, including to complement learning targets, curriculum activities and teaching core skills (turn taking, proximity to others, cause and effect, touching, sensing, listening), and has been included in individual pupil learning targets – becoming completely embedded (5.7, 5.10).

5. Sources to corroborate the impact

5.1: Representative of Winchester Science Centre

5.2: Wellcome Trust funder report

5.3: http://yourvivaciousvoice.com/learning/

5.4: Senior representative of The Point, Eastleigh

5.5: https://www.tractandtouch.com/resonant-tails

5.6: [Redacted] Evaluation report for Resonant Tails.

5.7: Letter from senior representative of Rosewood Free School

5.8: Headline Findings of Resonant Tails, Report for funders

5.9: Audience figures for Uluzuzulalia and Voice Trunk

5.10: Independent Report for funders

Submitting institution
University of Winchester
Unit of assessment
33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
Summary impact type
Cultural
Is this case study continued from a case study submitted in 2014?
No

1. Summary of the impact

Gordon Murray’s work on the theatricalisation of testimony has impacted on three institutions representing those affected by exposure to nuclear bomb blasts between 1952 and 1958. In doing so it has aided the formation of a wider ‘nuclear community’.

  • The British Nuclear Test Veterans Association (BNTVA), that had lost all claims for compensation and recognition from the Ministry of Defence (MOD), altered their campaign strategy by using testimony as artistic practice and achieved significant funding.

  • The Nuclear Community Charity Fund (NCCF) rearranged their project portfolio in response to Murray’s research into theatricalisation and digitisation of testimony, as well as expanding its community reach.

  • The Fallout community of nuclear children (descendants) has become established, catalysed by Murray’s work from 2015.

2. Underpinning research

Personal testimony is a useful tool for campaigning organisations, but the benefits are limited. This case study describes a research project that utilises theatre techniques with a campaigning charity, and then evolves these techniques to increase audience/community reach and engagement.

Between 1952-1958, the British Government tested nuclear bombs at various locations. Conscripted personnel worked at the sites and witnessed the bomb blasts. Men flew through the mushroom clouds after detonation or swam unprotected into the sea fishing out radioactive materials and handing them to scientists who were wearing lead-protected aprons. The chilling intergenerational legacy of these events is a narrative of terrifying apocalyptic traumas, sudden deaths, slow pedestrian declines, cancers, skeleto-muscular disintegration, dreadful birth defects, paranoia, conspiracy theories, and chronic pain, all undercut with a strange intangible relationship with change that may or may not be taking place in the body at chromosomal level.

BNTVA struggled for many years for recognition and compensation from the MOD, losing their final appeal in 2012. They lobbied government and tried to persuade journalists to listen, but there were several difficulties: most veterans had signed the Official Secrets Act; the MOD refused to accept any causal link between the veterans’ radiation exposure and their subsequent ill health; the medical profession was largely ignorant of the tests and their legacy of physical and emotional disease; there was no register of sufferers among the descendants of the veterans.

Community theatre practices often include personal stories that can be performed live to an audience. An extension of this practice is verbatim theatre in which testimony is performed by actors. Murray worked with the BNTVA in 2005 to look at ways in which verbatim theatre could overcome the limitations of their campaign methods. He discovered that speaking to actors rather than journalists alleviated worries around contravening the Official Secrets Act, and that maintaining the power and authenticity of the original testimony whilst widening audience reach and journalistic interest was of paramount importance. Murray introduced a methodology in which actors interviewed veterans, allowing intricate details to be related in confidence, passionately and emotionally. The testimonies were performed back to veteran communities, allowing further stories to emerge and leading to nuanced representations of the veterans’ experiences. The play Half a Life, presented at Leeds Festival for Peace in 2006, was created using this methodology.

The research demonstrated that the live event was valuable for presenting testimony in an authentic and powerful way and could pique journalist interest, but it also illustrated the limited reach of live events for a campaigning organisation. The next iteration of the research (2016-2019) sought methods that transformed theatricalised testimony into digital form. A truly new form emerged utilising theatre, documentary, musical composition, aurality and polyphonic discourse. Murray’s continuing research into new artistic forms which maintain the authenticity of the original voice but can be disseminated beyond the live performance event resulted in Fallout: Portraits of Nuclear Children.

This new artistic documentary form influenced the structure and outreach methods of NCCF. It also uncovered and articulated a previously hidden sense of unease felt by many in this community, particularly the descendants of nuclear veterans. This unease comes from the knowledge that unverifiable changes and mutations may be taking place at chromosomal level in the body.

3. References to the research

3.1 Murray, G. (2018) Fallout: Portraits of Nuclear Children [CD] Available at British Nuclear Community Audio Library https://nucleartest.online/audio-galleries/ (CD versions can be supplied on request).

3.2 Murray, G. (2020) After the Fallout’ Archive on 4. BBC Radio 4: 14 March 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gdtx

3.3 Murray, G. (2018) Where do you put the bomb? Unlikely Journal of Creative Arts 5 . http://unlikely.net.au/issue-05/where-do-you-put-the-bomb

3.4. Murray, G. (2018) ‘Nuclear’: Creative Arts Exposing Humanitarian Impacts of the Atomic Bomb. Powerhouse-Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. Society for Social Studies of Science Conference Sydney International Convention Centre, Australia. 29 August 2018. (contributor to exhibition and joint winner of the Making and Doing award). https://stsinfrastructures.org/sites/default/files/artifacts/media/pdf/4s18_print_program_180812.pdf

3.5 Murray, G. (2018) ‘Fallout’ . Conference Presentation. Society for Social Studies of Science Conference. Sydney International Convention Centre. 29 August – 1 September 2018.

3.6 Murray, G (2019) ‘Speak with a listening voice’ . Listening Across: TAPRA Sound, Voice, Music Working Group. Exeter University, September 2019.

4. Details of the impact

  1. On the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association (BNTVA). From August 2013

Having previously failed to persuade the MOD to recognise the case for compensation, the BNTVA changed its campaigning strategy as a direct result of this extended research project.

The interest and publicity that resulted from the research outcomes gave rise to an understanding that the ‘deep’ gathering and theatrical mediation of testimony could be central to the BNTVA’s campaign moving forward. They began to widen their campaigning methods to include art and film as well as theatre. A senior representative of BNTVA commented that Murray’s research ‘ gave us access to a context and an interest outside our usual sphere. The depth and emotion transmitted through the theatrical form drew in audiences and journalists who engaged and empathized far greater than any had done to the traditional dry soundbite so easily lost in a daily news report’ (5.1). They added that there is a clear line between Murray’s research practice and the subsequent campaign successes: ‘ The success of these new modes of using personal testimony of nuclear veterans as part of our campaign delivery was clearly proven when in November 2014 Prime Minister, David Cameron, gave official recognition to the service of our British Nuclear Test Veterans. Following from this the Chancellor, George Osborne, announced the provision of an initial £25 million to create the ‘Aged Veterans Fund’ (5.1). Osborne mentioned the Nuclear Veterans and the campaign of the BNTVA in his 2015 budget speech (5.2).

The money enabled the establishment of the NCCF.

  1. On the Nuclear Communities Charity Fund (NCCF). From March 2016

The NCCF was set up to allocate a portion of the £25 million ‘Aged Veterans Fund’. Murray’s collection, curation, and theatricalisation of testimony expanded to include voices of the families and descendants of veterans. As a direct result, the NCCF reaches and engages the nuclear community including and beyond the BNTVA. Murray’s later work on digitalised theatricalisation of testimony helped achieve this. A senior representative of the NCCF states that ‘ This work and its development into digital and audio use and its expansion into the experiences of the descendants of nuclear veterans had a significant impact on the way that the NCCF strategised its portfolio’ (5.3).

The NCCF funded eight projects, four of which utilise Murray’s research outputs: (i) The virtual museum is an online resource being developed to allow access to recorded testimonies, the first addition being The Gordon Murray Collection. (ii)The Remembrance Project funds the upkeep of memorials and military arboretums where QR codes will allow access to the Virtual Museum. Researchers on (iii) The Nuclear Family Project benefitted from access to the numerous transcribed interviews that various iterations of the research had yielded over time. The NCCF also set up (iv) the Centre for Health Effects of Radiological and Chemical Agents. The NCCF senior representative states that ‘ The most recent iteration of Gordon’s research has managed to make apparent a level of anxiety felt by the descendants which hitherto they were unable to express or articulate. This has proved incredibly beneficial by allowing the researchers an introduction into the feelings and the concerns of those who have this condition. This has been particularly pertinent to researchers who are involved in the ‘Living with Worry’ research project’ (5.3).

  1. On the Nuclear Descendants. From August 2015

The descendants of nuclear veterans felt themselves to be effaced as part of the ‘nuclear story.’ During the years that Murray has been working with this community, membership of the group has increased from 20 to over 800. Murray’s work was a catalyst to the creating, enlarging, developing and strengthening of this community. The interviews ran parallel with the development (through a closed Facebook group) of a community made up of descendants. As the finished pieces emerged between 2016 and 2019, they were keenly anticipated, shared and discussed. A senior representative of the group has stated that ‘ it soon became evident that he was beginning to articulate a feeling that all of the Fallout members had but were unable to express. I really believe that his emerging work was a significant influence on the growth of our online community(5.4). The audio documentary poems fitted perfectly with this newly forming (virtual) community’s method of communicating, attracting members who had not previously considered themselves to be ‘nuclear children’. They articulated, gave credence to and validated feelings and experiences which hitherto had been side-lined and yet were evidently shared amongst these individuals. Comments from members of the Fallout Community include: ‘ What an amazing piece, literally had me in tears last night. The style of these works is so dystopian that they resonate to that metallic tang that is so often unwritten in our nuclear community’; ‘ the piece was brilliant, I listened to it 4 times’; ‘ it was very touching the way you dealt with it. I’m glad you got to do these audio records of us G, You're a man of integrity and that is a rare thing these days’; ‘ absolutely amazing, very dramatic and brought a smile to my face and a tear in my eye; [it] made me wish I could get back on the stage but unfortunately even though surgery went well I don't think I will ever be able to dance again’; ‘ Absolutely blown away (forgive the pun); It’s a very surreal feeling to hear stuff that has never had an outlet for the last fifty or so years, mine and my dad’s story rolling around in my head all those years, very powerful juju. Thank you(5.5).

Murray’s work enabled the recognition that descendants are a part of the nuclear community. As a result, they were given access to the funding from the Aged Veteran Fund (delivered through the NCCF) to assist with health and wellbeing.

5. Sources to corroborate the impact

5.1 Senior representative of BNTVA. Letter of endorsement for ICS.

5.2 HC Deb (2015) Budget Speech. Available at https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2015-03-18/debates/15031840000001/FinancialStatement?highlight=budget#contribution-15031840000171

5.3 Senior representative of NCCF. Letter of endorsement for ICS.

5.4 Senior representative of Fallout Descendants Group. Letter of endorsement for ICS.

5.5 Comments by nuclear community members collated from Social Media and private correspondence.

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