Summer Research Reports: Lani Alden on Onnagata Voices in Early Sound Recordings
BCNM is thrilled to support our students in their summer research. Read about Lani Alden on Onnagata Voices in Early Sound Recordings!
Over the summer, I was able to, with the assistance of BCNM funding, make substantial progress on one chapter of my dissertation. Specifically, I was able to complete the important digitization of a collection of vinyl records from the first half of the 20th century, which preserved the voices of onnagata performers (assigned male at birth performers of female roles on stage). With this, I completed a substantial section of my chapter tentatively titled, "Sonic Transitions: Onnagata Voices in Early Sound Recordings and Film" using this archive of early sound recordings and film to explore the voice of the onnagata. In this chapter, contrasting the films of the onnagata Hanayagi Shōtarō (1894-1965) with recordings of onnagata such as Onoe Baikō VI (1870-1934), I explore the tension in the recorded voice as it moves from the disembodied medium of the phonograph to the presence of the gendered body in film. I argue in this chapter that recordings of onnagata voices and bodies in audio and film complicate the institutionally (in sexology, etc) sexed body of the onnagata. Additionally, I explore how cis actresses adopted onnagata voices and acting techniques themselves, using the opportunity of the recording to consciously 'drag' themselves as a distinct form of woman enabled by the creation of the 'onnagata voice' (itself a product of recording technology) by the onnagata preserving their voices in recordings and on film. Reading this in relation to contemporary theories surrounding the trans voice, it is clear that, for the artists deploying the onnagata voice, a form of womanhood was produced by the deployment of a stylized way of speaking which was distinct between the realms of audio and film. This work would not have been possible without the close audio analysis that digitization provided.