This past April, I attended the inaugural programming of Art on the Steps at the Sydney Opera House. This new series of visual arts commissions takes place on or around the monumental concrete steps that flank the opera house’s famous shell-shaped auditoria. Art on the Steps opened strong with two works from Australian artists Frances Barrett and Mel O’Callaghan, performed over a consecutive Friday and Saturday at sunset hours. The works were companions with a common medium: the voice. While Barrett’s Celia was performed in the resonant cavity beneath the steps, O’Callaghan’s Live Echo took place atop, transforming the existing architecture into choral risers.

The series is part of a noticeable trend in the opera house’s recent programming. In addition to crowd-pleasing light projections, they have begun seeking commissions that draw attention to the histories and affordances of the site itself. For instance, Quandamooka artist Megan Cope was commissioned in 2023 to produce midden-like sculptures that emphasized the significance of Tubowgule (the land occupied by the opera house) as a gathering place for First Nations people pre–British invasion. This direction was energized partially by the opera house’s former senior curator Michael Do, who commissioned Barrett and O’Callaghan for Art on the Steps. Neither artist had musical backgrounds, so they sought collaborations with composers and musicians to support their creation of performances that could be sung by groups of delegated vocalists.

Celia was performed on a temporary stage installed under the opera house steps, where the brutalist ribcage of the building—the dramatic concrete beams supporting the venue—swept overhead. Seven vocal improvisers (Alyx Dennison, AnSo, Anouk, Leah Berry, Nicole Smege, Sonya Holowell, and vengeresse) and a conductor (Joanna Fabro, co-composer of Celia and Barrett’s long-time collaborator) entered and faced one another in a circle on the stage. Carefully aimed theatrical lights produced a centralized warm glow among the vocalists, as if they were standing by a campfire and preparing to tell a story with their long shadows.

The performance opened with a brief improvisation of haunting sounds—sighs, clicks, rasps, and moans—that grew steadily into a more organized composition dominated by cries, bleats, and a range of eerie noises I can only transcribe phonetically: “zzit, zit” and “whoo-pah.” Across the half-hour performance, the emitted noises veered from otherworldly to distressingly human and mournful. They reminded me of sounds generally reserved for primal grieving, like wailing and cooing. Felix Abrahams, Barrett’s sound designer, “spatialized the sounds” (as Barrett later explained to me) to make the vocalizations murmur and flock around the audience seated in the round.11Frances Barrett, personal communication with the author, May 27, 2026. Toward the end of Celia, language emerged among the sounds in short overlapping lines, including “I am here / but I am going” and “Resurrected from / from the ear.” These lines—repeated as the work crescendoed into a noisy din—gestured toward the piece’s namesake.

“Celia” was the name given to the last Pyrenean ibex, the first animal to have gone extinct twice. After extinction in 2000, preserved female ear tissue was used to “de-extinct” the animal via cloning in 2003, but the clone died shortly after birth. Celia reflects Barrett’s interest in “endling” calls—the sounds made by the last of a species before extinction—as well as feminist and queer theories of the voice. Intrigued by philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of the infant cry as an appeal to the mother’s ear, the artist wondered how a mother’s cry would sound in the absence of an infant ear to hear it.22Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford University Press, 2005), 169–70. While experimenting with destabilized vocalizations, Barrett and Fabro created speculative cries that were then developed further with the vocal improvisers. The resulting work gave voice to an extraordinary form of bereavement: the loss of one’s only remaining kin. The work reminded me that among the stranger urges induced by grief is the desire to search for the departed—to call to them, invoke their presence—even if it will be in vain.

While Celia confronted absence, Mel O’Callaghan’s Live Echo offered an unmissable presence. As the sun began to set, I watched as three hundred choristers from the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs walked in formation down the steps toward conductor Brett Weymark and the waiting forecourt audience. The choir, dressed in colorful tulle ruffs, then sung their way through a composition broken into six chapters, each with a personality informed by geology, planetary pulses, breathwork, frequencies, and ritualistic patterns that have long fascinated O’Callaghan. Together with composer Dan Walker, these interests were transcribed for the voice as rippling polyrhythms and pulsating breaths timed to match the beats per minute of trancelike states. The tonal palette of Live Echo struck initially as lamenting, but grew increasingly optimistic, a shift guided by the stunning voices of soloists Ria Andriani, Josephine Brereton, and Andrew O’Connor. Hearing the choir modulate in and out of synchronicity—calling and responding, exulting and echoing as golden hour befell the opera house—was both spectacular and restorative.

During Live Echo, the opera house also became an instrument. Accompanying the choristers were delegated percussionists tasked with striking four huge tuning fork sculptures installed at the top of the steps, two of which were specially “tuned” to match the resonance of spaces within the venue. The choir vocally performed these frequencies as well as notes that simulated the tones of the water beneath the building and the pipes of the opera house’s grand organ. As the resulting vibrations echoed between the facade and the Royal Botanic Garden cliffs behind us, I remembered that as a child I had (mistakenly) assumed that the opera house had been designed to mimic the open mouths of opera singers.33The opera house’s promotional materials tend to describe the roofs as “sails” or “shell shaped.” Sydneysiders have been known to compare the building to orange peels or dishes stacked across a drying rack. Live Echo turned my childhood fantasy into a simple fact: The building was singing.

At the artist talk accompanying Art on the Steps, discussion turned toward whether Celia and Live Echo were indicative of a “vocal turn”—a rising tide of contemporary performance artworks experimenting with the voice. Vocals have always been part of the performing arts, but over the last twenty years some scholars have claimed that a sonic, auditory, or vocal turn is taking place elsewhere in critical theory, choreography, and museum studies.44Jim Drobnick, “Listening Awry,” in Aural Cultures, ed. Jim Drobnick (YYZ Books, 2004), 10; Freya Vass-Rhee, “Auditory Turn: William Forsythe’s Vocal Choreography,” Dance Chronicle 33, no. 3 (2010): 388–413; Antony Hudek, “Guest Editorial: The Vocal Turn,” Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 64–65. I have wondered if something similar might be happening in performance art. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, TENT in Rotterdam hosted Post-Opera (2019), an exhibition and performance art program of experimental vocal practices that was framed by the curators as part of a vocal turn.55Kris Dittel and Jelena Novak, “Exhibiting the Voice,” PARSE 13, no. 2 (2021), https://doi.org/10.70733/35ghjst63tbw. Locally there has been a groundswell of artists working creatively with the voice in Australia, including (but not limited to) Archie Barry, Brian Fuata, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Angela Goh, Deborah Kelly, Katy B. Plummer, Tina Stefanou, and Super Critical Mass. For an international starter list, we could look at Teo Ala-Ruona, Jibz Cameron, Adélaïde Feriot, Rana Hamadeh, Anne Imhof, Raoni/Muzho Saleh, Juliana Snapper, and Katarina Zdjelar. Is something stirring here?

I am wary of “turn” rhetoric. There have been so many turns: the social, the documentary, the choreographic, the educational. Like the wave model of feminist history, turn-centered art history provides a neat narrative, but risks oversimplifying diverse practices. The artists I mentioned above, for instance, vary in practice from unusual spoken modulation to ambient singing to heading experimental choirs.

Turns are often returns of a sort, like the revival of participatory practices during the “social turn” of the 1990s and 2000s. In the case of a “vocal turn,” it is worth remembering that visual artists have been using the voice for over a hundred years, and many examples are part of “the canon” of performance art: noisy Dada poems; futurist operas; Marina Abramović and Ulay yelling aaa-aaa! into each other’s mouths; Yoko Ono’s suggestive sighs and screams. Performance has long borrowed freely from existing disciplines, so much so that art historian RoseLee Goldberg locates the origins of modernist performance art in transdisciplinary experiments.66RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, 3rd ed. (Thames & Hudson, 2011), 9.

This penchant for “borrowing” has allowed performance artists to expose inherited assumptions and emerging crises. If voice-centered practices are increasing, it is worth asking why. Perhaps there is a desire to have more meaningful public and communal experiences with otherwise sequestered feelings. In the immediate aftermath of seeing both Celia and Live Echo, I felt as if I had experienced the dual process model of grieving in a single weekend—while Celia took me deep into the belly of longing and unraveling, Live Echo lifted me toward hope and renewal.77Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, “The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: A Decade On,” OMEGA 61, no. 4 (2010): 273–89. These are pertinent acts in 2026; there is so much to mourn and fight for. We are living through a period where many voices are being silenced, violently or more insidiously, precisely because the voice is moving and affecting. As Barrett’s and O’Callaghan’s works demonstrated, it has the capacity to pierce and soar.