Voicing Difference and the Listening Act: Mutuality as a Framework for Ethical Audience Engagement6/12/2025 EMBODIED VOICES CONFERENCE - Warwick university april 2025Abstract Voicing Difference and the Listening Act: Mutuality as a Framework for Ethical Audience Engagement Contemporary performance is undergoing an ethical reckoning. This research emerges at the intersection of contemporary feminist theory, embodied practice, and personal experience to ask: how might we reimagine listening - not as passive reception, but as an active, ethical, and mutual act? Grounded in doctoral research at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, the study interrogates a legacy of hierarchical training inherited from the Polish laboratory theatre tradition. My early work with Gardzienice revealed how performance lineages can obscure dynamics of power, gender, and voice. Revisiting this training through a feminist critical lens, the research reimagines Mutuality (a lab method rooted in the Polish word wzajemność, or ‘togetherness’) as a critically reimagined framework for repositioning the performer in practice and performance. Developed over six years and across six performance-based case studies—with Black, trans, and neurodiverse artists - the project disrupts conventional reception norms, foregrounding listening as an embodied, situated, and politicised act. A narrative thread in the research is Virginia Woolf - not only a literary icon of early white feminism - but also a dramaturgical device for locating the self in practice. In one core project, A Voice Lesson, I was deliberately cast as a contemporary Woolf (renamed Orla). This casting both enabled and unsettled the research, confronting me with questions of complicity and responsibility as a teacher, director, and listener. The echo of Orlando - Woolf’s gender-shifting time-traveller - offered a dramaturgical structure through which to explore transformation, fluid identity, and systems change from early 20th-century lab theatre, through #MeToo, to now. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, and Virginie Magnat, the research foregrounds four interdependent modalities of ethical listening: Intentionality, Presence, Embodied Listening, and Transdisciplinary Fluency. These are not linear steps but onto-epistemological dispositions - ethical tools for cultivating mutual encounters between performer and audience. Together, they underpin the development of the Integrated Physiovocality (IPV) Toolkit: a six-stage resource for actors, offering practical, critically-informed strategies for ethical engagement in contemporary performance-making in the UK. This 20-minute presentation shares key findings from the thesis, drawing on performance fragments and inviting the audience into a live dialogue around voice, reception, and responsibility. Keywords: Mutuality, Embodied Listening, Practice Research, Theatre Voice and Performance, Audience Ethics, Response-Abled Acting An accessible print version of this talk and accompanying slides are available in advance or on request. Please email [email protected] or speak to me at the conference to receive it in your preferred format. 
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