Kinaesthetic voicing: Listening to French dancer Stéphanie Pons

This article describes the ways in which the voice of French dancer Stéphanie Pons was animated with the making of a multimodal archive the Bibliothèque corporelle . It was based on the reconstruction of a dance that she had performed over 28 years ago, choreographed by Angélin Prelocaj. This was part of the Gestures and Frequencies study developed within the context of the IDEX-funded Performance Lab from 2019 to 2022 at the University of Grenoble. The notion of frequencies emphasizes the idea of the dancer ‘tuning’ into the repeated action of a movement and identifying its specific gestural quality. It illuminates the ways in which multimodal archiving methods activated the dancer’s agency and perspective of dancing through voicing and sonifying gesture.