“The artist is a vehicle through which the Gods create”
Art is born of the union of the physical world and the spiritual world and their mutual fructification, for in art the external form is imbued with spirit and the spiritual content is clothed in external form.
The mystery of the Creative Word, of artistic speech, is only able to be understood and become deed in the light of this insightSpeech reveals to humans their divine nature; the sounds of speech are creative forces which unite them with their spiritual origin and enable them, once again, to find the path leading to the spirit. Speech raises the human being above the level of the animal; it leads back to the Divine within his ‘I’ the part of himself that calls itself ‘I.’
It is what you do before utterance that is of importance… moving from imaginations(apprentice stage) to inspirations (journeyman) to intuitions( master) where the audience and the performer are no longer in dualistic space but are actually within each other where the illusion of space is totally overcome.
Art is a manisfestation of Love. An actor, a performer, a storyteller shares his/her work out of this spirit and prepares her/his work in a similar vein. Without this there is no sharing just a self-seeking expression of egotism and audience manipulation.
Love mediated by way of the senses is the wellspring of creative power, of that which is coming into being. Without sense-born love, nothing material would exist in the world; without spiritual love, nothing spiritual can arise in evolution.
When we practise love, cultivate love, creative forces pour into the world. Can the intellect be expected to offer reasons for this? The creative forces poured into the world before we ourselves and our intellect came into being. True, as egoists, we can deprive the future of creative forces; but we cannot obliterate the deeds of love and the creative forces of the past.
We owe our existence to deeds of love wrought in the past. The strength with which we have been endowed by these deeds of love is the measure of our deep debt to the past, and whatever love we may at any time be able to bring forth is payment of debts owed for our existence.
In the light of this knowledge we shall be able to understand the deeds of a man who has reached a high stage of development, for he has still greater debts to pay to the past. He pays his debts through deeds of love, and herein lies his wisdom. The higher the stage of development reached by a man, the more does the impulse of love in him increase in strength; wisdom alone does not suffice.
The anthroposophically inspired actor must create and imbue his/her whole performance through a communion with that which makes language and gesture, even bodily gesture alive and creative i.e the sounds and their zodiacal and planetary sources, woven subtly into the fabric of the performance, and lifting even the mundane into the mystery of the Spirit Presence. Not just a true reflection of real life but a deep creation of the reality of the human being. Steiner’s Drama course in a nutshell.
Every movement you make works with the substance of space around you being filled with reality, with an envelope of air of light, of life, of atmosphere. This is the womb we all live in and is bounded by the ozone layer skin in the upper atmosphere of the earth. Each movement we make leaves an effect but when we become aware of the reality of our body as well as the subtle bodies, our aura, we discover that radiating is actually at the basis of everything, and that we work constantly with the energetic breath between what is outside and what is inside. In moulding you shape the outside but also imbue it with your inner creative energy. This is a radiating within the element of the more contracted earth, like modelling or sculpting. Likewise floating in air, as opposed to water, is the same as the Chekhov floating exercise only here we link it to the above, to Up, and do not keep it bound only to element of weighty water. This up includes the rising evaporation of the substance into the airy element. This element of water includes all the gasses, and so you can see how water can become very refined and subtle too. All this is floating and creates a sense of ease, a feeling of ease.
Punch (Down) is like a meteor burning through the atmosphere reaching a moment of impact/ contraction. It also radiates on after completion. Everything living does this. Floating radiates within its very large, expansive quality of space.
Now Glide. Like a wing works, a glide works with the air above and below it and keeps a buoyant balance wherever it is. We have worked mainly in the horizontal, in relation to leftness, a quality which has a specific psycho physical sensation as do the ups and downs. I hope you have sensed and perhaps named these. So gliding is really the archetype of flying. Gliding is the closest a human being can come to actual flight unpowered by any engine. When you find that balanced glide in you, you overcome weight and feel free but never entirely as then you would fly off and discarnate . There is always a hidden anchor grounding point and that is your centre, your creative source.
Slashing is really just a fast glide like a jet or as i said a samurai sword slashing through air or substance. It leaves a willed strong effect and also radiates on. Radiating itself is raying light, the sun-centre light which we all have when we give attention to things. Our eye is always radiating our attention on what we observe and give our attention to . We radiate our attention when streaming through our gestures and especially when we realize our sun-centre our heart-centre, our creative source is by its nature radiant and expansive. At the basis of all creation is this radiant fire this spirit this light. So earth water air fire all begins in fire. Without fire we couldn’t t do a thing.
If we look upon speech merely as a means of making ourselves intelligible, merely as the garment of intellectualistic thought, we kill it as an Art. We tear it limb from limb when we simply adapt it to our intellect, instead of allowing our intellect to be illuminated by its light. When speech is thus intellectually conceived the stream of its sound flows grey and lifeless, instead of glowing with a many-coloured, jeweled radiance. The rhythm of speech, its melody, its sculptured outlines, its architectural impulse, the strength or the calm of its metrical beat, the dignity of its cadence, the curve that welds all these together and parts them asunder, and throws them again into a whirling vortex, — till the movement sweeps onward to a Dionysian revel or flows bright and crystal-clear in Apollonian dance … a dead world this for most of our contemporaries, life and riches for those who possess its key.
When will the day dawn that will give back to us again the understanding for the magical and healing forces of the word, for the waves of the spirit that surge beneath the word and seek an outlet through it? To live consciously in the breath, to give form to the breath, to use the breath as a chisel and with it give plastic form to the air, to feel the quivering, subtle vibrations of air and ether, to experience the overtones and the undertones, the delicate intervals within the diphthongs, through which filters the stream of the spirit — here is an artistic activity indeed, working creatively in the finest of substances. Here is a nobler task than that forced outpouring of emotion in sounds tending to become animal-like in their nature, such as we find only too frequently on the modern stage. But so long as there is no discrimination between spirituality and empty pathos, the way is barred to the redemption of art and all that is highest in man through the word. These things, subtle and impalpable though they be, must nevertheless be raised up into the consciousness.
Speech reveals to man his divine nature; the sounds of speech are creative forces which unite him with his spiritual origin and enable him, once again, to find the path leading to the spirit. Speech raises the human being above the level of the animal; it leads him back to the Divine within his Ego. That spark from the Divine Ego, which, issuing forth, prepared itself to become man, had of necessity, as it traveled the path leading into the material world, to unite itself with the forces of destruction. When the densifying process worked too strongly, damming up the spirit, as it were, then the form could be cast off by the ever-recurring forces of death and change. Thus there arose the animal kingdom, which may be likened to a kind of extended alphabet, containing within it all that burdened man too heavily when he carried it compressed within the limits of his own being. In man it was able to be so far clarified that it could develop into the Word, into Speech. Sound, tone in the animal kingdom cannot rise to the level of speech. It remains mere noise in the case of cold-blooded animals, and, in the case of warm-blooded animals, inarticulate sound. Even in its most beautiful form, in the song of the birds, cosmic tone cannot fully reveal itself; the song of the birds is at most only its faintest echo. It is in speech that the individual force of the Ego first finds expression through tone and becomes aware of its own being. Through speech, cosmic forces can, as it were, focus themselves in an individual Ego and from out this Ego work creatively once more.
One of the major symptoms of the general crisis existent in our world today is our lack of sensitivity to words. We use words as tools. We forget that words are a repository of the spirit. The tragedy of our times is that the vessels of the spirit are broken. We cannot approach the spirit unless we repair the vessels. Reverence for words – an awareness of the wonder of words, of the mystery of words – is an essential prerequisite for prayer. By the word of God the world was created.
In the core of the human soul there is a central silence.It is here that the Spirit/God/ The Higher Self, enters into the soul. The Persona finds unity and blessing in that spark which neither space not time touches. Here is to be found a light that wishes to penetrate, to permeate this simple core, the still desert…. to get into the secret, to which no one is privy, where it is satisfied by a light whose unity is greater than it’s own. This core is a simple stillness open and receptive yet also the source of all our creative life-giving impulses. It allows God in and radiates God out pervading all our actions in word and deed.
The image of God is at the core of our being. And like the Garden of Eden, it has not been destroyed. It may have become covered over or lost sight of, but it is at the beginning of who we are.
A nineteenth-century teacher in the Celtic world, Alexander Scott, used the analogy of royal garments. Apparently in his day, royal garments were woven through with a costly thread, a thread of gold. And if somehow the golden thread were taken out of the garment, the whole garment would unravel. So it is, he said, with the image of God woven into the fabric of our being. If it were taken out of us, we would unravel. We would cease to be. So the image of God is not simply a characteristic of who we are, which may or may not be there, depending on whether or not we have been baptized. The image of God is the essence of our being. It is the core of the human soul. We are sacred not because we have been baptized or because we belong to one faith tradition over another. We are sacred because we have been born.
Acting – what’s the point? Through the medium of dramatic art and the exercise of our craft, we can enlarge our audience’s view of the world. We can take people(our audience) into other human realities and help them observe the human condition from a different perspective.
Our ability to portray other people in different situations is a way to develop human empathy for those that our audience might not have direct contact with.
Story telling is as old as human experience itself and through story telling, as humans we learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
The actor is the medium. Being successful as an actor means being able to bring a different and more rounded view of the human condition to the audience.
As an actor one needs a text (of some sort – it can be improvised) from which we create a temporary reality which can (indeed should) create a shift in the perspective of the audience.
That’s the point…
That it is fun to do is a plus
To be able to achieve this requires training, technique, dedication and hard work.
Each word we speak has a life of its own, a vibratory signature that creates waves into the expanse of the universe.
When we speak or write, we use the vehicles of words to carry meaning, as well as energy, from ourselves to another person or group of people. We may be speaking to our baby, our boss, or to an audience of 500 people. We may be writing a love letter, a work-related memo, or an entry in our own diary. Whatever the case, each word we speak or write has a life of its own, a vibratory signature that creates waves in the same way that a note of music creates waves. And like musical notes, our words live in communities of other words and change in relation to the words that surround them. When we are conscious of the energy behind our words, we become capable of making beautiful music in the world. If we are unconscious of the power of words, we run the risk of creating a noisy disturbance.
Some of us know this instinctively, while others come to this understanding slowly. Most of us, though, speak without thinking at least some of the time, blurting out our feelings and thoughts without much regard for the words we choose to express them. When we remind ourselves that our words have an impact on the world at the level of energy, we may find within ourselves the desire to be more aware of our use of language.
A fun way to increase our sensitivity to the power of words is to simply make a list of our favorite words and notice the energy they contain. We can write them down and post them where we can see them, or we can speak them aloud, feeling them reverberate in our bodies and in the air around us. This is like learning to consciously play an instrument that we have been playing unconsciously for most of our lives, and the effect can be startling and delightful. As we grow more comfortable and confident playing the instrument of language, we will begin to compose beautiful messages, creating positive energy every time we write or speak Words are Energy.
The actor in the future must not only find another attitude towards his physical body and voice, but to his whole
existence on the stage in the sense that the actor, as an artist, must, more than anyone else, enlarge his own being by the means of his profession…”
For me, the experience of language is musical and dance-like. Steiner describes how the very first beginnings of speech were in fact bornout of dance and song by the women of our far distant ancestors. Language is not man-made but is born out of the Spiritual into the earthly realm, and consists of musically structured rhythmic gestures (words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs etc), not only tonally expressed as in singing, but in forms and gestures that have grammatical, musical relationships, as well as colourful and subtle tonal expressions. It embodies more meaningful imagination imbued emotional/soul and will qualities and contains a much more subtle form of melos, rhythm and movement than is contained in any musical score, and has extremely fine tonal intervals. Of course what underlies all is the actual “speaker”, the human being who speaks,the “Ich” (the individualised human Spirit) without whom no communication could/would take place. Here we must not forget indeed the one(s) to whom the speaking is directed, the listener(s),without whom there would be no speech at all. All the content and the expressive power of language and communication revolves around this active “ still point of the turning world (T S Eliot’s 4 Quartets)and without this ego presence, no living speech could ever arise, but only the dead, colourless, abstracted shadow of spoken language, which our modern consciousness gives rise to out of habit,no matter where on the globe you happen to be. Now I know that what I have just been talking about will itself appear abstract to most,few will understand me, but all my workshops are aimed at making this “I” experience conscious, that the participants may be able, even if only at first in a dim way, to experience their “I” (the speaker), and how, into the activity of listening silence, the power of language freely pours as grace, when he/she allows it. We can then feel the creative might of the language spirit surge through us, and become one with it and all its content. The I and the not I unite.
The path of the actor is a very special journey towards self-knowledge. The more you devote yourself to the process of knowing your character and the play, the more you unlock the mystery of who you really are! The more you try to know yourself directly the more you remain hidden and clouded in illusion. Just a brief morning thought to ponder on and discuss.
An actor without an artistically trained, free and musically inspired voice is like a musician struggling with both an inadequate technique and a poor instrument. This is something the great Stanislavski in his later life regretted never mastering, and something most acting methods and trainings do not take seriously enough.
Geoff opened up a world within the voice that I never knew existed. It showed me that however exciting it is to break the rules through singing or oratory, it really helps to understand those rules as well. I think for anyone who wants to master the creative side of speech, voice and singing work, Geoff’s knowledge and experience can be vital to that journey. Geoff is an inspiring teacher and an athlete of the imagination.
It is my unreserved pleasure to recommend Geoff Norris. I have worked in the performing arts for 31 years as an actor, director and designer and an opera singer and dancer in the opera The Merry Widow in 1987-88.
I engaged Geoff as an actor in a feature film I am directing, in addition to a leading role in King Lear for which we shot the short film first. Geoff has worked with the company as an actor, voice coach and as my assistant casting director. The response from actors in the auditions has always been one of gratitude that Geoff was happy to provide voice work and helpful directing suggestions during the audition process. The quality of Geoff’s work on the casting days show years of a professional understanding of the voice and of acting.
Having worked with Geoff as an actor, director and with castings I know him to be a valuable part of the acting cast and directorial process, and a colleague who makes a significant difference with the unique approach to voice that he brings.
As a result of Geoff’s work I did not hesitate in offering Geoff two further feature films roles as actor and master of voice, including the promo and feature for a Hollywood script that I was given due to my own work and reputation in the business.
Geoff’s voice work, based on his training at The London School of Speech Formation and Dramatic Art, and furthered by many years of experience as a teacher and director, raises his actors and students standards. This I have witnessed, working and directing actors and auditionees, where despite all usually having acting degrees and conservatoire trainings, Geoff was able to meaningfully instruct them to improve their voice and performance using drills and techniques they were not taught at their drama school.
Geoff is also highly trained and teaches the invaluable but rare techniques of Michael Chekhov, Rudolph Steiner and the art and techniques of Eurythmy developed by Steiner in the early part of the 20th century. My own training, like most drama school students, was primarily the standard Stanislavski, Strasberg’s Method and Meisnertechniques.Years ago I had the opportunity to work with Steiner’s acting approach and with Michael Chekhov technique on stage. Their approaches are very important and vitally needed in raising the modern actors performances but are rarely taught due to lack of practioners or even, in the case of Steiner in particular, the existence of these dramatic and vocal techniques; Geoff is a master teacher and practitioner of these unique and needed methods
The Art of Speech Formation/ Creative Speech was developed by Rudolf Steiner and his wife Marie Steiner in the early part of the 20th century and remains unique its musical and gestural approach to voice production and is quite unlike any other vocal techniques currently in use on the stage and in performance. It is an intense 4 year fulltime training. The use of the breath and the formative gestures and movements of the sounds of speech in Vowel and Consonants, form the basis for this approach and lead to a sound sense symbiosis raising the word from its limited abstract meaning to a creative depth of action, emotion and artistic feeling and form. This art is essential for anyone speaking for a Eurythmy performance as it is in fact this Eurythmic Sound/Sense which provides the basis for all Speech Eurythmy performances, just as the musicians do for all Music Eurythmy performances.
AlanusHochschulefürKunst und Gesellschaft
Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences
Geoffrey is an Actor and Speech Artist with over 40 years’ experience, and as one who has, for a long time worked deeply with Eurythmy and the understanding of this new art of “visible speech”, he has been in great demand over the years speaking for many ensembles worldwide. His sonorous voice has a real musicality, and his flexibility of tone, subtlety of expression, and his agility in many roles, makes him a vital ensemble member and contributor to the seamless wholeness of such performances, allowing the audience easy access to the texts performed.
Apart from his distinguished solo career Geoff has, for many years, been closely associated with the West Midlands Young Stage Group and has co-directed and spoken for their last 4 programs, the most recent being “Dreamscapes” which has and is still touring the British Isles, Germany and Switzerland. This program shows his flexibility and mastery both in the serious as well as in the comedic. In “The Ship of Death” by D H Lawrence, a deeply moving journey of the soul through death and rebirth Geoff mastery and beautiful control of the narrative and ever changing moods of this epic journey made a lasting impact and equally impressive was his, and the ensembles, rendition of a section from T S Eliot’s “The Wasteland” evoking the bleak harshness of a waterless rocky landscape . A lighter side to Geoff’s repertoire came in his charming singing of “Full Fathom Five”, an Ariel song from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and his delightful evocation of the Puck and the Fairy dialogue from “Midsummer Nights Dream”.
He has become well known as an inventor of innovative sounds, beginning with his mysterious whale-song like sounding in Edwin Morgan’s “The Song of the Loch Ness Monster” to his sports car in “One Smile of Light” and in “Dreamscapes” a convincing, powerful motorbike… Young and old have appreciated these hilarious transformations. Likewise his characterizations in Ogden Nash’s “The Adventures of Isobel” added to the mirth of this hilarious and surprising poem, a real tour de force complete with James Bond music and some mischievous Onnagata trans- gendering.
Geoffrey is truly a world -class speech artist whom few can match.
I testify to having worked and directed Geoffrey Norris on my very own film: “The Universe, my Psychologist and I “. As a director, I have been honoured to work with such a professional actor. He always took on board the direction I gave him and made it his very own by adding his print on it. His drama background has played out to be a huge advantage for the dramatic aspect of my film.
I strongly recommand Geoffrey as an experienced and talented actor, on top of being an insightful and sensitive human being which in my opinion is the soul of a good actor.
Didn’t the Druid Bards die out long ago? Well no, there lives today a wandering Bard called Geoffrey Norris whose program of songs, evocation and soothsaying touches the heart in special ways. This inspiring program, performed at the 400 year anniversary celebration of Britain’s greatest Bard , William Shakespeare, at Rudolf Steiner Theatre in London, charmed the packed audience through a variety of Shakespearian soul moods, some playful, some darker, some plaintive, woven through speech and song, moving forward seamlessly in a mono-dramatic collage and wholeness. Geoffrey’s complete mastery of his metier engendered a high level of artistic achievement throughout and held the audience spellbound.
Geoff Norris gave a captivating and moving performance of song, recitation and acting at the launch of the Shakespeare Academy at Bestwood Lodge, Nottingham, where he also directed eurythmist Maren Stott. Alternating between the sonnets on the one hand and speeches and songs from As You Like It and Twelfth Night on the other, he created a single narrative – or poem unlimited – that took his audience on an emotional journey of what it means to be human, both from youth to old age, and from love and power to fragility, corruption and melancholy reflection. Above all these shifting moods, however, Norris kept the voice of hope and beauty shining, and everything he spoke was shot through with the passionate intelligence of a master interpreter.’
The Eurythmy production by Geoff Norris and Maren Stott (with introduction by Alan Stott) for the launch of the Shakespeare Academy at Bestwood Lodge was mesmerising. Time stopped as each movement and sound vibrated with light, and the words I had read over and over again were delivered with fresh and profound life and meaning – a truly unforgettable and inspirational performance.”