Roy Hart
[2] In 1959 Roy Hart, having been a long-standing attendant of the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre, began teaching acting classes to actors and drama students at various venues across London.
Alfred Wolfsohn was a Jewish German who suffered auditory hallucinations of screaming soldiers, whom he had witnessed dying whilst serving as a stretcher bearer in the trenches of World War I.
He was subsequently diagnosed with shell shock, and after failing to benefit from psychiatry, hypnosis, and medication, cured himself by vocalizing the extreme sounds he had heard and later hallucinated, before developing an approach to singing lessons intended to be therapeutic for his students.
Newham subsequently collaborated with Leslie Sheppard in analysing the written, phonographic, and photographic documentation that the archivist had curated at the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre.
At the time of Wolfsohn's, Hart's and Newham's work, there was scant scientific research into the clinical use of singing, whist today there is some evidence to indicate the possible rehabilitative and therapeutic application of nonverbal musical vocalization with some populations.
[46][47][48][49][50][51] Nonetheless, this field of inquiry is in its infancy even now, and in the face of little opportunity to further Wolfsohn's original vision of 'singing as therapy', Hart steered the group towards artistic application of extended vocal technique.
When Hart began teaching acting classes in London, he appropriated adaptations of Wolfsohn's extended vocal technique and also introduced and developed his own physical exercises that involved extensive bodily movement.
In a review of Eight Songs for a Mad King in the newspaper Die Welt, Heinz Joachim said: Roy Hart is an artist who commands not only all the voices of the human register – ranging from the deepest bass to the highest soprano, but also (incredibly enough) the ability to produce several sounds simultaneously; added to which he gives an acting performance which stretches from the most tender allusiveness to the most macabre realism.
It was so deeply stamped by immediate experience; it was the art of presentation which, at every moment, uses the means available in a conscious way, and yet never transgresses the borderline that leads to trash...the solo part is specifically written for Roy Hart.
[54]Between 1969 and 1974, Roy Hart presented the world premier of a work composed especially for him by Hans Werner Henze entitled Versuch über Schweine, performed with the English Chamber Orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.
Inside the building about two dozen dedicated and mostly very young people celebrate and explore and bend the human voice…Watching this is like chancing upon a group therapy session in full cry.
[4][9] In Lettres Françaises under the title of "Voice and Madness – Echo of the Origin of Man", Catherine Clément described her experience of witnessing a performance by the Roy Hart Theatre as like being in the presence of the unconscious.
