Voice Lab – Post Internet Dance Edition
A post-digital performance about voice, self, and digital traces in analogue life

C_Music NOW

The digital mantra has permeated every aspect of our lives: from work and leisure to information, and ultimately, the steady absorption of online practices into the fabric of our daily routines. Our world has become so enmeshed in its own digital image that some voices already speak of a “post-digital” era – as if our present condition belonged to the archaeology of a future that has only just passed. In the midst of such an unprecedented fever, what remains of the voice as a physical presence?

In Voice Lab – Post Internet Dance Edition, the soprano, vocal artist, and composer Frauke Aulbert treads this thin ice, presenting a sequence of vocal acts in which the voice – and its plurality – takes centre stage. Adopting the form of a YouTube vlog, she trawls for found “objects,” moments, and situations from the vast ocean of the internet, assembling a singular choreography for voice with the invaluable contribution of her collaborators in lighting and set design, Jakob Boeckh. At times self, at times persona, Aulbert poses a disarming question: what truths lie hidden in the manoeuvres of a voice?

At its core, the performance serves as an ideal introduction to the world of experimental vocal techniques. Drawing on research into diverse vocal practices across cultures – such as Nō theatre, Gugak, and beatboxing – while also activating her background in classical Indian dance, Butoh, and acrobatics, Aulbert assembles a live laboratory of vocal dramaturgy. Here, the voice reveals itself as restless materiality and, above all, as a corporeal phenomenon: phonations, guttural sounds, whispers, sung speech, and other manifestations demonstrate that every vocal gesture carries within it an embodiment – a performative residue that is not ancillary to vocal practice but a theatrical quality yet to be fully explored.

At a time when artificial intelligence can reconstruct even the most intricate textures of the human voice, Voice Lab – Post Internet Dance Edition reminds us that a voice is never singular, but a swarm of many – a transversal conduit to the deepest strata of the human condition and a sounding line into the uncertainties of our new (post-)digital reality. Above all, it renders the voice as a bird that has broken free from its cage, soaring beyond the confines of conventional lyric expression, speaking through this truly torrential Sprechgesang* of our cultural adventure in the twenty-first century. For sometimes, the inarticulate speaks more powerfully than volumes of scholarship.


* Sprechgesang (German, “spoken singing”): a vocal technique in which the performer delivers text in a manner suspended between speech and song. Following the rhythm indicated in the musical score, the performer briefly touches upon pitches without fully sustaining them, producing an utterance that hovers between recitation and singing.