Polyvocal

Produced or delivered by many voices. And these voices do not have to come from separate sources, or be acknowledged as coming from separate sources. For instance, in a Richard Pryor performance, there’s a crucial polyvocality, and yet these utterances visibly emerge from the same body. Similarly, when a ventriloquist performs on the stage, in the traditional Vaudevillian mode, she activates a certain polyvocality in her practice: we know, yet disavow, that the two voices we hear are in fact emanating from the human body before us. And yet do we know this?

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