{"id":163,"date":"2021-10-26T08:49:58","date_gmt":"2021-10-26T08:49:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/?p=163"},"modified":"2026-06-19T10:16:42","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T10:16:42","slug":"like-a-whisper-rethinking-the-politics-of-voice-and-performance-with-tania-bruguera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/like-a-whisper-rethinking-the-politics-of-voice-and-performance-with-tania-bruguera\/","title":{"rendered":"Like a Whisper: Rethinking the Politics of Voice and Performance with Tania Bruguera"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Anika Marschall<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This article analyses Tania Bruguera\u2019s Tatlin\u2019s Whisper #6<\/font> (2009), which creatively rewrites the widely distributed image of Fidel Castro\u2019s victory speech in Havana (1959). By drawing on Xinghua Li, Brandon LaBelle and John Mowitt, the article discusses how the performance connects the whisper and frustrated revolutionary hopes, whilst contesting Western epistemologies. The article demonstrates how the whisper as a speaking from and to the margins is crucial for rethinking the politics of performance, and how to be in common otherwise.

Keywords<\/strong>: Whisper, political performance, voice, revolution, Latin America\/Abya Yala<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction: Shifting from Voiced to Non-voiced<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Performance scholarship has examined a wide range of creative practices, companies and theatre institutions, which aim to \u201cgive voice\u201d to diverse communities, marginalised people(s) and vulnerable persons. There is also a well-established body of research, which critiques the distribution of representational voice and power on stage, and further, which critiques the institution of theatre itself as oppressively hierarchical form. When attending to the question of possible resistance, of re-distribution and social justice, the emphasis is often on vocalising<\/em> the issue, on employing and developing strategies to speak up, to talk back, to tell different stories with diverse voices and languages. Building on feminist and postcolonial readings of voice and listening (Cavarero, Dreher, Campt, Quashie), in this article, I suggest that a shift from this emphasis on the voiced as resistant act, towards an emphasis on whispering (or non-voiced) enables us to rethink the possibilities of political performances in a world challenged by oppressive social and hegemonic structures. I ask how the whisper as an otherworldly speaking from the margins, decentres loud, hetero-patriarchal white voices, and in doing so, confounds a hegemonic desire and myth to be able to \u201caddress a universal audience?\u201d (Li 29)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to sound theorist R. Murray Schafer, raising the voice in public has become a question of power (76): in personal encounters with other people as well as in forms of censorship, policing and law. Voicing one\u2019s concerns loudly<\/em> in public is often understood as an index of power. Xinghua Li notes that this \u201cvolume politics\u201d today \u201cstill sometimes dominates the leftist imagination of a revolution (see the cover of Foucault\u2019s Fearless Speech<\/em>, which portrays him shouting into a loudspeaker)\u201d (31). When issues of power and representation are concerned, I still see a tendency in the arts, on stage and in scholarship, to attend to the notion of \u201cgiving a voice\u201d or \u201cspeaking for\u201d marginalised and vulnerable people. Voice here seems to be already constructed within a symbolic system of individual agency: voice is cast as something possessed, expressed, something efficient, rather than as interrelational phenomenon, as shared bodily resonance. Performance, I believe, can serve as a means to problematise and subvert such notions of voice and representation, by attending toward practices of listening and by providing a shared public forum in which to attend to the entanglement of our stories (Marschall).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Tania Bruguera. Photo: Wikipedia<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

My exploration of the whisper therefore starts with Tania Bruguera\u2019s performance Tatlin\u2019s Whisper #6<\/em>, which tackles issues of censorship and free speech in contemporary Cuba\u2014while also, I argue, exploring the politics of the whisper. I take my aforementioned entanglement of stories serious and not for granted; I am writing from a cis-female, white, powerful position of geographic distance in Northern Europe, while feeling deeply implicated in marginalised struggles for being heard on one\u2019s own terms. Therefore, my perspective on the whisper from the Global North is limited and only a fraction of pluriversal perspectives on the whisper and whispering practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first part of the article, I examine Tatlin\u2019s Whisper #6<\/em> and how it connects the failure of the socialist state with the whisper as voiceless address. With the title \u201cTatlin\u2019s Whisper #6\u201d Bruguera imagines a nodal point, at which the whisper intersects with the Monument to the Third International <\/em>or Tatlin\u2019s Tower<\/em>\u2014a symbolic reference to the 1917 socialist revolution and its failure. Vladimir Tatlin\u2019s monument was never realised and instead exists only as \u201ccontrapuntal discourse\u201d (Boym 83). In a contrapuntal fashion, the whisper constricts the vocal mechanism and shadows \u201cthe mouth\u2019s capacity to support free and open speech, as the very emblem of democratic society, of full communication\u201d (LaBelle 155). In doing so, the whisper speaks quietly (but not silently) of histories against which and together with which dominating voices act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the second part of the article, I focus on the whisper and reflect on the politics of the whisper as one which contests hegemonic modern knowledge that necessitates and values voicing. I argue that the whisper requires a practice of attuning oneself to lower and affective frequencies, which refuse \u201cthe intensity, credibility and exaltation of socialist revolutions\u201d (Bruguera). For Bruguera, the political potential lies in the laborious effort that goes into whispering; an effort which, I contend, is often overhead by dominant groups and oppressors, and receives little to no hegemonic acknowledgement. It is here where I ultimately aim to throw into relief that the whisper\u2019s allegorical function sheds light on the fraught disciplinary relationship between power and knowledge. The whisper\u2019s form as voiceless address confounds institutionalised power and knowledge relations, and consequently, the whisper prompts me asking about \u2018our\u2019 disciplinary attachments in performance studies\u2019 knowledge production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A whisper is non-voiced vocalisation. Physically, the whisperer pulls back her vocal cords\u2019 extension, so they cannot vibrate freely, while releasing a flow of breath. From a linguistic perspective, John Mowitt describes the whisper as being part of the voice \u201cthat is not the voice and not used phonemically in any known language. The whisper is in that sense a signifier that although capable of bearing a signified fails to. This complicates the whisper\u2019s very indexicality\u201d (60) The whisper makes it indeed difficult, if not impossible, to find out about the speaker\u2019s political identity and to specifically locate her; her gender, race, age. A whisper unsettles assumptions about identity and self, about the information perceived as obvious, clear or binary in voiced speech. Therefore, the non-voiced whisper paradoxically \u201cbroaden[s]e voice capacity for contact, communication and influence\u201d (LaBelle 147). Crucially, as in all other communication acts and registers too, the whisper depends on entering an interrelational space with other resonating beings in vibrant proximity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to physically constricting the vocal cord muscles, the whisper demands our labour in multiple ways: socially, sensory, affective, moving, emotional, observing. If I were to associate a movement with the whisper, it would be one of being drawn into, of pushing the head forward, perhaps tilting it slightly to the side for one ear to reach closer. Likewise, whispers might not reach a listener\u2019s attention right away; it takes a certain proximity, attention and carefully choreographed mimicry between the two, before a listener becomes a listener and knows she is being addressed. Picture such a scene: it takes the listener time to look around the space, to identify where the hushed sounds come from, to look whether it\u2019s her who is meant. Are the whispered sounds just the wind or are they perhaps meant for another addressee? Likewise, the whisperer must reassure the listener through physical approaching, turning towards. If a whisperer misses the right frequencies to reach a listener, she might become more persistent in pressing the air through the lungs, over the tongue and out the mouth, before communication rapport can be established between whisperer and addressee. It is not simply the voice, or respectively the vocal cord muscles that do the whisper\u2019s labour; the whisper demands our labour in multiple ways, including the double-edged and potentially uncomfortable sociality to \u2018lean in\u2019 and get close with strangers in public. In so doing, it confounds the relationship among voice, body, space and power (Li 2011, 20). The physicality of the whisper weakens aural spatial perception and can create disorientating effects, making impossible to identify its origins. Paradoxically, the whisper oscillates between \u2018extreme intimacy <\/em>to extreme disembodiment\u2019<\/em> (Li 2011, 22, original emphasis) in its physiological qualities, but also in its symbolic, cultural and social implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is not simply the voice or respectively the vocal cord muscles that do the whisper\u2019s labour; the whisper demands our labour in multiple ways, including the double-edged and potentially uncomfortable sociality to \u201clean in\u201d and get close with strangers in public. In so doing, it confounds the relationship among voice, body, space and power (Li 20), as the physicality of the whisper weakens aural spatial perception and can create disorientating effects, making impossible to identify its origins. Paradoxically, the whisper oscillates between \u201cextreme intimacy <\/em>to extreme disembodiment<\/em>\u201d (Li 22) in its physiological qualities, but also symbolic, cultural and social implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will turn to those symbolic, cultural and social implications of the whisper\u2019s allegorical function in the following, by attending to the performance Tatlin\u2019s Whisper #6. <\/em>While Bruguera did not literally ask the performance participants to whisper, I will show how the performance enfolds dynamic qualities of resistance by intervening into repressed freedom of expression in Cuba and by creating a radical sensitivity toward the potential of commons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tatlin\u2019s Whisper #6<\/em><\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

On January 8, 1959, the 32-year-old revolutionary Fidel Castro Ruz held a lengthy victory speech in Havana, recounting the years of the armed conflict between the 26July Movement and the Cuban Government, and he outlined a course of action for the months to come. As Achy Obejas narrates in her novel Days of Awe<\/em>,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[s]ometime shortly after he began, a white dove perched on his left shoulder, leaving everyone breathless [and then bursting into applause]. He gets that bird to pose with him, whether through strategy or sorcery it doesn\u2019t matter. In one case, it\u2019s divine intervention, in the other, a stroke of theatrical genius; in both, he wins. (Obejas 127)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Black and white photographs, taken from below by, for example, Alberto D\u00edaz Korda, Jos\u00e9 Pepe Agraz and Tor Eigendal, show the iconic image: Castro, surrounded by uniformed men, triumphantly holding the microphone as sigil of power, a dove sitting on his right shoulder and two others on the lectern (S\u00f6llner). For some, the white dove presents a symbol of Obtal\u00e1, the chosen one or the son of God (Busto 60). The doves have entered the post-revolutionary Cuban myth as ambiguous symbol of peace, of \u201cdivine intervention,\u201d as described by the Cuban writer Ernesto Hern\u00e1ndez Busto (60), as well as a rehearsed and planned performance indexing the propaganda machine at work. Likely not despite but because of their ambiguity, the iconic images of Castro and the doves have since been a pillar of \u201ccross-national memory discourse\u201d of Cuba and its diaspora, being \u201csituated between the global and the local\u201d (Quiroga 2).<\/p>\n\n\n

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The Centro Wifredo Lam where Bruguera first performed Tatlin\u2019s Whisper #6<\/em> (2009). Photo: Web<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Tania Bruguera\u2019s performance Tatlin\u2019s Whisper #6 <\/em>(2009)creatively rewrites and contests the politics inscribed into the image of Fidel Castro\u2019s victory speech from 1959 (see also S\u00f6llner). On March 29, 2009, Bruguera first performed Tatlin\u2019s Whisper #6<\/em> in the central courtyard of the Centro Wifredo Lam during the 10th Havana Biennial. On one end of the courtyard, a large golden curtain was hung as backdrop for a raised podium. Next to either side stood a person upright and dressed in military uniform, one of them holding a white dove in their hands. On the podium stood a lectern with an amplifier, connecting to two speakers, one placed at the building\u2019s entrance and pointing to the street outside. Bruguera handed out two hundred disposable cameras to a crowd of fifty to sixty spectators to document the event. She declared that during the hour-long performance, they would have freedom of expression, inviting willing individual audience members up onto the podium to speak for one minute each. As Claire Bishop recounts, \u201c[t]he atmosphere was utterly electric. . . . A long pause ensued,\u201d people and \u201cthe media thronged in anticipation. Would anyone speak their mind and face the consequences?\u201d (122).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I envision the audience to have experienced mixed emotions: Bruguera\u2019s invitation to take a literally loud part in this performance certainly engendered different reactions, hesitations, questions, feelings of fear, excitement, and awe. Drawing on Bishop\u2019s eyewitness account and contextual information, the audience was made up of international visitors, curators, art collectors and local artists, writers, students. Therefore, they had very different positions, stakes and capacities to enact political agency vis-\u00e0-vis Cuba\u2019s inner repression of non-confirming political views and the weighing threat of censorship, with potentially perilous socio-economic consequences for Cubans. The Havana Biennial placed (and has been placing) post-colonial theory and Southern-Hemispheric relations at the forefront of its curated artistic activities, consciously eschewing the mediation of Western centres (Bishop 122). Thus, not only the question of censorship, but also the question of privilege and voice certainly must have lingered among the audience. Who deemed themselves in a position to take up the microphone and space on the podium, speaking their mind or on behalf of others?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bishop writes that \u201c[a] woman was the first to mount the podium, where she simply wept, her hands shaking as she clutched the microphone\u201d (122). A man and woman in uniform stepped on the podium and flanked her on both sides, placing the white dove on the woman\u2019s shoulder. After the woman\u2019s minute was over, the persons in uniform ushered her off the stage. Thirty-eight more people made their way to the podium, critically engaging with the Cuban political system, speaking their mind, or saying nothing and simply crying. The blogger Yoani S\u00e1nchez \u201ctook advantage of the unprecedented opportunity to publicly critique the regime\u201d (Schwartz 230). Since 2007, S\u00e1nchez has been writing the blog Generaci\u00f3n Y, <\/em>which is sponsored by the Huffington Post<\/em>, by gaining email access to computers at hotels in Cuba. She has been growing an international community, which helps to download, translate and post her entries online. Because S\u00e1nchez was invited to participate in the event beforehand, she came prepared with a written speech, raising her voice against the government\u2019s crackdown on new technologies and her own blog, insisting, \u201cNow is the time for us to jump the wall of control\u201d (230). Bruguera\u2019s invitation to S\u00e1nchez for Tatlin\u2019s Whisper #6<\/em> signals how the artists sought to address also an international media to shed light on the role of the press and media in Cuban society (231). In the event, impromptu spoken words and silence merged with carefully prepared speeches. This merging offers a multi-layered insight into the regimes of both, emotional and critical labour at work for, in and beyond any live performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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