'Singing Together': Enchantment and Transrational Voice in Community Circus

‘Theorising the relationship between learning and voice in arts-based, collaborative and co-produced research’.

This talk will report on a project exploring the production of voice for children participating in community circus classes. Reflecting on the conceptual and methodological challenges of researching this non-verbal, non-narrative medium, I will consider how we might listen to how voice is produced through children's engagements with the objects of circus practice—juggling balls, aerial silks, unicycles, to name but a few. Drawing on the concept of enchantment and its Latin root cantare - to sing (Beaman 2021), I will consider how voice might be conceptualised as a posthuman, transrational process of 'singing together', enabling researchers to listen to unsayable forms of knowledge which do not speak for themselves.