Voices on the Mountain Top

In August of 1997, I traveled with company members of the Blue Ridge Theatre Festival to Caux, Switzerland where we had been invited to teach workshops for the Moral Rearmament Association's week of "Creativity and the Arts." My workshop was entitled Voice Production and it was one of nineteen workshops which ranged in subject matter from acting to directing and from puppetry to painting. The workshops were taught by artists from India, Sweden, Great Britain,

Russia and the five of us from the United States. Four hundred and twenty people from all over the world, speaking a variety of languages, gathered at Mountain House, Moral Rearmament's turn of the century Belle Epoch former grande hotel, 3000 feet up in the Swiss Alps. The surroundings were beautiful and tranquil, the view of Lake Leman and the French Alps was breathtaking and the flower gardens were spectacular.

On our first day we were divided into four communities. Each community was made up of members of four or five workshops. My community included teachers and students of acting, directing, and dance plus voice production. It was the responsibility of all community members to do the work of this huge house - including cooking, meal clean up, cleaning, preparing and serving tea, gardening and flower arranging. I volunteered for the cooking team (which was responsible for preparing and cooking one lunch and one dinner for 420 people during the one week period).

Each day began at 7:30 with an optional quiet time of meditation, followed by breakfast at 8:15, community meeting at 9:15 followed by the 'Open Space,' a pantomime or small play which dealt with an aspect of creativity, followed by a BBC type interview of one of the artists by Hugh Williams. Then the workshops would take place from 10:30 - 12:20, followed by lunch, free

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time, tea, lecture by a guest artist, dinner and then a musical or theatrical performance in the beautifully appointed theatre or Great Hall. It was a busy day but one with enough breathing time built in to allow for walking, resting, reading or writing. I enjoyed the almost monastic structure and spiritual focus of the week.

On the second day at Caux, our workshops began and would continue for five days. I had fourteen students in my class, seven men and seven woman ranging in age from 14 to 70+. My class included two women physicians - from Sweden and Romania, a judge and his wife from Lebanon, a retired British military officer (who had spent his days engaging his neck muscles as he barked out orders), five teenage Czech students of acting who had come to Caux to perform in a production of Dr. Faustus, the mother of two of the teenage actors, a woman who had always dreamt of acting and two translators who were interested in developing their breathing/speaking voices. Only one of the students had ever had any voice training.

Most of the students spoke some English and I spoke some French and we had two translators who translated for the non-English speaking students. We met in a soundproof movie viewing studio but I knew that we would soon move outside. My goal was to work to help the students free their voices, and support their sounds so they could call comfortably across Lac Leman to France. That idea seemed to thrill the students as much as it did me. We had a clear, tangible goal. We started to work with breath, easy sounds and free release of sound into space. Quickly we moved from floor work to standing up. We worked in a circle. We did the Native American song which Frankie Armstrong had taught us at the VASTA Conference in Philadelphia in 1993. "Earth,

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