What is the voice embodied? How is it possible to understand the voice as a gesture: a movement perceived as body? What are the creative processes of expressing voice? An interdisciplinary study into the artistic training and performance of voice, the aim of this thesis is to explore these research questions by examining three contemporary voice practitioners in conjunction with my practice. The practitioners, Noah Pikes, Enrique Pardo, and Linda Wise, are original members from the Roy Hart Theatre (1969-1990). Founded in the 1960s on the pioneering work of the German musician and voice teacher Alfred Wolfsohn (1896-1962), Roy Hart and the Roy Hart Theatre extended Wolfsohn's distinctive interdisciplinary approach to voice training within theatre practice. This investigation brings together the practices of Pikes, Pardo, and Wise for the first time to explore a lineage of Wolfsohn and Hart's work. Examining the practitioners' interdisciplinary methodological approaches to voice training and performance, the research reveals how these original members of the Roy Hart Theatre are challenging conventional methodologies to the way in which the voice of the actor-singer-dancer is trained through practice. My interaction with these international practitioners and their practices produced primary documentary evidence in the form of video footage and interviews. This primary research material presented within the thesis, was filmed in the artists' studios in London, Zurich and Paris over a five-year period, and provides rare experiential insights into these contemporary interdisciplinary approaches to training voice and performance in multicultural professional workshop settings. In addition, the thesis contains DVD recordings of the documentary: 'The Whole Voice' (2002) detailing Pikes' praxis, and my contemporary solo theatre performance: 'The Badlands' (2004). Demonstrating elements of the practices central to my investigation, the performance of the 'The Badlands' should be viewed as one example in practice, of how the ideas explored in the thesis might be realized. Whilst the study of artistically training and performing voice is a practical endeavour, pedagogically the practice poses a number of complex theoretical questions concerning the nature of how the integral brain/body is experienced. My research endeavours to bring theory and practice together. It reveals variations in the practitioners' praxes, including a shift from Wolfsohn, who drew directly from the psychological theories espoused by C.G Jung, to Post-Jungian perspectives. The study explores the significance of this development, placing a particular emphasis upon how agency and the imagination are conceived in practice. Exploring beyond the fundamental Jungian and post-Jungian psychological theoretical frameworks underpinning the practices central to this study, I propose through my practice to examine the significance of extending Wolfsohn's original ideas about the voice embodied from an existential phenomenological line of thought and the parallels this philosophy shares with more recent research stemming from neuroscience.

Murals have been the formal visual interpretation of the cultural, social and political life of all ages. Throughout they have been consistently combined with their architectural setting, for example, in ancient Egyptian tombs, in Renaissance churches and on the external walls of buildings in Mexico in the twentieth century. This is a central feature of mural painting. However many contemporary murals do not integrate with their architectural settings, in other words, do not fulfil the site-specificity of the architectural spaces for which they were made. This means that the most important aspect that distinguishes murals from other types of painting is absent. I studied and analysed a number of murals produced in the Italian Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo as this particular period is considered to be not only one of the most significant in the history of art but also a period in which painting and architecture were very closely allied as practices. In particular the radical developments in painting of pictorial space took place along side the developments in architecture. I argue that Renaissance murals could be described, using the terminology of contemporary art, as site-specific art. By identifying the relationship between pictorial space, architectural space and compositional structure I was able to test, through my own practice, the importance of these relationships in understanding the site-specificity of the compositional structure of murals. To address the issue of sitespecificity in murals, I investigated and developed a set of compositional structures through my mural practice that could be applied in the design, execution, and teaching of contemporary mural design. I have developed the notion of a deconstructive method of mural design in which the illusory space of the mural derives its compositional structure from the architectural space in which it sited. I have applied it, tested it and refined it through the execution of a number of hypothetical and live mural commissions. I believe that the approach to the study and practice of mural design I have developed from the perspective of a practice lead researcher contributes to the furtherance of mural design as both a profession and field of study. In particular the identification of compositional structures in mural design and the proposal of a deconstructive method contributes to our understanding of what a mural is as well as current notions of site-specificity in contemporary art.