Presentation at The Theatrical Voice Centre conference 2026

Description of Activity

Abstract: This paper theorises the capacity of a cappella voices to engage in what I here call ‘voicescaping’ in popular musical theatre. It argues that unaccompanied voices recalibrate theatrical listening by reshaping how time and place are constructed in performance. Drawing on voice and sound studies (Mladen Dolar; Steven Connor; Macpherson & Thomaidis) and anthropology (Tim Ingold; Timothy Morton), I examine the ways in which the 2019 musical Islander and the 2024 musical adaptation of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button employ a cappella to shape time and place in new British writing.

In Islander, live looping and vocal layering create a dynamic sonic ecology that replaces conventional orchestration and scenography. Voice functions as environmental proxy: breath, pulse, and harmonic accumulation evoke tides, weather, and communal memory, generating a cyclical temporality aligned with island life. Performers’ bodies become sites of acoustic inscription, remaking place through iterative vocal acts, consistent with Ingold’s (2003) conception of landscape as process.

By contrast, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, relocated to Cornwall, employs ensemble a cappella harmony within an actor-musician framework to stage reverse chronology as collective, folk-inflected narration. The score renders ageing and remembrance through shifting textures and modal inflections, aligning individual biography with communal storytelling. Temporality emerges as relational and cyclical, grounded in shared vocal labour.

Together, these works demonstrate how such voices privilege embodied acoustics over spectacle, positioning voice as narrative agent, environmental medium, and temporal marker. Such practices situate musical theatre voices within wider debates on heritage, memory, immediacy, and belonging.

Period	24 Jun 2026 → 27 Jun 2026
Held at	University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International