Dancing the Voice: Embodied Empathy and Shakespearean Affect in Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles

This paper examines how Shakespeare’s affective and empathetic dimensions can be articulated beyond spoken language through ballet, focusing on the adaptation of Hamlet by Kenneth MacMillan: Sea of Troubles (1988). By translating Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic language into choreography, this ballet foregrounds the expressive capacities of the body and invite reconsideration of how Shakespearean empathy operates when verbal articulation disappears. The paper situates MacMillan’s choreography at the intersection of vocal theory and embodied cognition. Drawing on Chiara Guidi’s reflections on theatrical voice, I approach voice not primarily as a vehicle for semantic meaning but as a sonic body, whose rhythms, intensities, and pauses activate perceptual and affective responses in the listener. For Guidi, theatrical voice precedes linguistic comprehension and produces a relational space in which performer and spectator meet through sound and vibration. Spectators do not simply interpret speech but participate in a process of embodied listening shaped by rhythm, breath and silence. This perspective becomes particularly productive when placed in dialogue with Shaun Gallagher’s theory of embodied and enactive cognition. Gallagher argues that understanding others is not primarily a matter of detached interpretation but emerges through embodied interaction and perceptual engagement (2020). Spectators respond to the movement and expressions of others through sensorimotor processes that allow them to resonate with perceived actions and affective states. In performance contexts, this mechanism produces a form of embodied spectatorship in which audiences experience affect not only intellectually but also through bodily attunement. MacMillan’s Shakespearean ballets can be understood as staging precisely this encounter between embodied expression and affective perception. Although ballet lacks spoken dialogue, the moving body functions as a form of voicing through movement, communicating emotional and cognitive states though rhythm, gesture, and spatial tension. Choreography thus performs a role analogous to voice in Guidi’s framework: it generates affective meaning through dynamic patterns that precede narrative interpretation. This dynamic is particularly evident in Sea of Troubles (2023 [1988]), MacMillan’s choreographic response to Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play is profoundly concerned with acts of voicing – most famously in Hamlet’s soliloquies where thought becomes audible through speech. In MacMillan’s ballet, however, this vocal dimension is translated into bodily movement. Patterns of hesitation, suspension, and abrupt changes in energy evoke Hamlet’s internal conflict and existential uncertainty. The choreography interprets psychological tension through the instability of the body rather than through rhetorical articulation. Through partnering, spatial proximity and the rhythmic flow of movement, the ballet produces an affective environment in which spectators experience relational dynamics through kinaesthetic and perceptual engagement. By bringing together Guidi’s concept of voice as sonic embodiment and Gallagher’s account of enactive spectatorship, this paper argues that MacMillan’s ballet reveals an alternative mode of Shakespearean empathy grounded in embodied perception rather than linguistic understanding. Ballet spectatorship becomes a form of affective listening through the body, in which movement functions as a ‘voiceless voice’ that activates empathic resonance. Reconsidering Shakespeare through choreography thus highlights how the affective force of his work can emerge not through language but through the dynamic interplay of bodies in motion.