Decolonial Collaboration Through Voice Work

Sayda Trujillo explores voice through a three-part framework: the voice in the body; the voice in community; and the voice in the world. She is a Guatemalan Canadian American theatremaker, voice practitioner, and assistant professor of voice and acting at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Madeline Sayet is a Mohegan director, playwright, performer, and scholar. In addition to her work as an artistic leader, Sayet recently completed a national tour of her solo play Where We Belong. Performing her own experiences brutally reminded her that commanding her body to “fix” “bad habits” would trigger it to close off further. It wasn’t until Sayet met Trujillo at Directors Lab West in 2024, where Trujillo led a session on Decolonizing Vocal Practice that reframed voice work around invitations to play and connect, that she finally experienced her voice and breath opening up and relaxing for the first time. Excited by Trujillo’s re-framings toward liberatory vocal practice, Sayet brought her on as a vocal coach for the next production she directed, Antikoni. Here, the two discuss what vocal practice could look like in a rehearsal process to open up possibilities, questions, and tools that give more performers access to their widest range of expression.

Madeline: Can you share a little bit about how you got involved in voice work, your education, journey, and training?

Sayda: I first encountered voice training at the Community Arts Partnership (CAP) theatre program at Plaza de la Raza (Plaza), a cultural arts center in Lincoln Heights in East Los Angeles that had a partnership with the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Faculty and students from CalArts came to Plaza to teach theatre (acting, voice, movement, devising) and lead a youth group in a nine-month process to create a show. At Plaza I had my first Linklater vocal warm-ups. I participated in this program for three years before going to CalArts to get a BFA in Acting, where I engaged in formal Linklater training for four years.

Thirteen years after undergraduate actor training and working professionally, I decided to study voice at Central School of Speech and Drama (Central) in London. The primary vocal method studied at Central was Linklater’s Freeing the Natural Voice. But Central also exposed me to various other practices including Roy Hart technique, Fitzmaurice Voicework, and teachers like Cicely Berry and Barbara Houseman.

My training at Central encompassed a multiplicity of workshops in vocal anatomy, accents, vocal pedagogy, and practice as research. It culminated in a Master’s thesis, “Latino/a Voices: Reconsidering the ‘Natural,’ ‘Familiar,’ and ‘Cultural’ in Freeing Vocal Expression,” where I examine closely how Latinx students, speakers of English and Spanish living in the United States, reconcile the notion of the “natural,” “familiar,” and “cultural” in the process of training and freeing the voice. The topic developed from my experience as a bilingual, Latina actress and voice teacher working in the United States and in Latin American countries.

My goal was to adapt Linklater exercises so that the process of freeing our voices could embrace our cultural, embodied histories. I was intuitively advocating for a sense that the “familiar” isn’t merely habitual and therefore something that must be gotten “rid of,” but that the “familiar,” particularly in bodies of color, includes cultural wisdom that is essential to the process of freeing one's voice.

My time at Central almost fifteen years ago was the beginning of a profound, messy, painful journey of undoing, decolonizing myself, and imagining decolonial frameworks I can use to guide actors and non-actors in vocal expression that empowers and liberates by embracing fully who we are and where we come from.

It doesn’t feel intuitive to believe that the power of voice is in listening deeply. When we stand and listen, the breath comes. 

Madeline: Given that journey, what are some of the ways that you are teaching and framing voice differently?

Sayda: I am reframing voice practice through exploring and transforming the way we relate to time, through using the Nahuatl concept of Nepantla to counter either/or mentality, and through play.

When we slow down, our breath expands. We don’t have to think about it. Slowing down contradicts oppressive structures that we navigate daily in our world and community. Our bodies have internalized these, which directly impacts our access to our breath. Working slowly means we can be present. I organize practice/classes/private sessions so that we work slowly even if we only have fifteen minutes, transforming our sense of urgency into vast space, working as if you had an hour even when you have three minutes before an audition. Slowing down is powerful and vulnerable.

What does it mean to acknowledge that we are whole and that we are enough? Just being able to sense that in your body and be with it—"I am whole, and I am enough”—and know that when we are working with our voice, we return to notice the source of life, our breath. There’s nothing to work on when it comes to our breath! We live, we move, we do things every day because we have breath, because we have life.

What does it mean to cultivate our voice? For me it means that we slow down enough to be able to simply observe and learn from the breath, from its rhythm. Working on our breath is difficult because it invites us to do nothing but to stand in our power. It’s easy to fight or bully our breath. We live in a world that teaches us that power is force, so allowing contradicts that. It doesn’t feel intuitive to believe that the power of voice is in listening deeply. When we stand and listen, the breath comes.

I am using the concept of Nepantla, a Náhuatl word that means “in-between worlds” to reframe vocal practice. Writer Gloria Anzaldúa defines it as “that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another, when changing from one class, race, or sexual position to another, when traveling from the present identity into a new identity.” In my voice work I lean into what it means to exist in an in-between state and to embody in-betweenness as a place of possibility. Nepantla directly contradicts the notion of either/or, which is prevalent in white supremacist culture and in actor training, particularly in voice training.

I teach voice through play. I cultivate a space where nothing is fixed. I create a space of possibility. I encourage and invite students to play and laugh as a direct path to noticing our breath. In this space transformation is possible. I tend to the space with intention. I model slowing down. I don’t talk about it, but I move through my lesson fully in my body. I am still figuring out ways to articulate this practice because it feels ungraspable; it has to be experienced, not only understood.

What could it mean or look like for a director and vocal coach to collaborate in a reframed, decolonial way?

Madeline: As a director, when I bring anyone into process, it is because I know they carry something vital to the world we are about to build that does not exist without them there. Each collaborator shifts our patterns of understanding for the entire world we create. This means it’s ideal for any collaborator to join the process as early as possible.

There is great power in deciding for each production who we want to be as a collective. Voice can feel like an embodied version of community values statements. The air we breathe in and out and share with each other is fundamentally a point of connection that requires mindfulness. It can be an act of ceremony, healing, and empowerment.

Subject to budget and scale, a vocal coach can collaborate with the ensemble for an hour or for multiple days, weeks, an entire process; but in each case, they offer the ensemble a collective experience. They function as a partner toward the empowerment of breath and healing for story and storytellers, not as a technician who has come in to fix a problem. It’s also important that a collective experience empowers rather than erases the uniqueness of individual voices.

In the case of Native Voices’ Antikoni, the actors were performing in a museum that was not built as a performance space and had an echo to contend with. The space also previously held the remains of Native ancestors’ bodies, so I didn’t know what having spirits in the building might also do to the actors’ bodies. Different performers had different levels of training, but that was less significant.

On another project, as part of a residency at Center Theatre Group, I explored what it would mean for certain characters to be unable to laugh—and what that might mean in the body so the performers didn’t feel closed by that limitation. Where could that vocal energy redirect to?

There is such a wide array of circumstances in which asking “What does this do to the breath? What can we learn?” is so exciting, but it requires time to be curious. Our bodies have to be nurtured. We carry these bodies with us through our whole lives. They are always transforming. As artists, we love transformation, so invitations for breath to transform us are thrilling to me. Breath is tied to health, wellbeing. Breath is not a product. It is a lifesource.

What I’ve been most impressed by in your work is its ability to give everyone equal access to their vocal power quickly. It takes away the power dynamic of who has had access to graduate acting training, instead centering this collective training together.

Are there ways that you, as a voice practitioner, would like to see vocal work incorporated into a director’s process?

I felt the weight, courage, power, and potential for liberation in the work. I felt like I could encounter the cast, the space, and the text and invite them to play. 

Sayda: I know the economy of our work is challenging, but there are various ways that voice work can be part of a project from the beginning. The invitation is for directors to consider the role of voice in their play. What does the play offer, or what are the needs of the play–accents, attention to heightened text, embodying historical content? What are the facts of the production: Is it being performed in a place that has historical weight and can impact the bodies and voices of the actors?

I have been dreaming of these frameworks and collaborations for so long, and when you reached out to me to collaborate on Antikoni it was intentional. You explained that the play was about repatriation and was being performed as a reclamation of a museum space that used to house ancestors' remains. Your acknowledgement that the space presented difficulties not only vocally but spiritually is something I had never experienced before with a director. Your ask was different, and I felt it. I felt the weight, courage, power, and potential for liberation in the work. I felt like I could encounter the cast, the space, and the text and invite them to play.

This framework begins to transform the sense that the vocal work is something that a voice coach comes to “fix” during tech week. It also transforms the prevalent notion that projection and articulation are the main gains from having a voice coach in a production.

What I am proposing is to ask, “Am I interested in creating the space for voice work to support the vision/intention of this play?” I think this could take many different shapes and forms. Some directors are interested in the imagery as the primary language of the play, and I am inviting directors to consider the role of voice in their work. When I say voice, I also refer to how the body speaks. So that even in a play that isn’t text based, how would the collaboration between a voice coach and a movement coach and the designers impact the process and the product? To me the words come out of the body. The body is already speaking. The body tells a story. To me, as a voice person, these are not different languages, and to decolonize the process would mean to break the notion that voice is separate from movement, and movement is separate from acting, and acting is separate from voice. We can redefine what it means to collaborate and open up our practice so that it is changed and impacted by other practices.

Madeline: Why do you love voice work, and how do you imagine it might be transformed in the generations to come?

Sayda: For me voice is at the heart of storytelling/performance, and voice is identity. So, I love voice work because when embodied consciously and compassionately it is transformative, healing, and a bridge for intentional connection.

What I imagine for the generations to come is an explosion of voices that find their power in ease and generosity. I imagine a direct connection with nature through breath, to embody groundedness because we belong, and feel our voices resonate and move through our bodies like water.

Madeline: Breath is power, like water. Air is our literal lifesource. As our access to clean air decreases, I find my attention to breath and my love for it expand in ways I could not have imagined. Fires, pollution, and COVID have changed my level of consciousness of what I inhale and what I exhale. Speaking through masks, protecting what air enters my body—this has changed my expectations of it. As I imagine forward, I no longer take for granted time to breathe, and I am conscious of whenever I am lucky enough to be somewhere where I can breathe freely. I want our rehearsal rooms to be a place where we can breathe freely. Because I can’t help but notice the direct tie between hyper vigilance and lack of breath.