Chapter One opens in Canada, where the reader meets my research collaborators for the project “Honoring Cultural Diversity through Collective Vocal Practice,” a series of cross-cultural and intergenerational community gatherings/singing circles and workshops co-facilitated by myself, four graduate students, and the seven members of the Indigenous Advisory Committee with whom we worked in close consultation.

I share selected fragments of a co-authored text braiding our twelve voices together as a way of searching for echoes and resonances while leaving space for dissonances. This collaborative testimony of our experience of resonance as a practice of ritual engagement reflects the challenges of working toward reconciliation, pointing to something other than unanimity, unison or perfect harmony. I then introduce the teachings of Zygmunt Molik, the voice specialist in Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre, focused on the body-voice connection, organicity, vibration, and resonance, notions that are central to my training as a performance practitioner and to my embodied research on vocality.

These examples of vocal practice prompt a discussion about the paradoxical lack of attention to vocality in performance studies, and the necessity to develop an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach that eschews what Dwight Conquergood boldly categorizes as Western textual fundamentalism, or scriptocentrism, and that Diana Taylor characterizes as a privileging of the archive over the repertoire. We are then called to bear witness to the decolonial space of Indigenous epistemologies that promote embodied sovereignty beyond essentialism/constructionism binaries, a space where traditional singing pertains to ceremonial art and transformative cultural practices that associate vocality with breath, spirit, living energy, and mystery.