Voicing a vision

I am 11 years old and our English and Drama teacher has chosen me for the lead in the Pied Piper of Hamlyn. I am delighted as I love the story and have a vivid picture book of the Robert Browning poem – one of my favourite books. I love the bright, scary illustrations. At this point I intend to follow my Mum and be an artist. As you will hear, life has other plans for me.

The words seem to flow out of me as I imagine playing my pipe and being followed by the children of the town. The following week’s Hoddesdon Journal reports ‘Frances Armstrong transported the audience’. I was hooked. Something inexplicable to me, then and now, transported my imagination and that of the audience to another time and place.

I spent much of my childhood drawing, painting, making puppets and writing plays for them and for me and my friends to perform. I particularly loved the stories and illustrations in Mum’s books of myths and legends, the Pre-Raphaelite paintings and Greek statues. I now realise what a privileged introduction I had to this world.

When I first went to school, it became obvious that I had trouble reading the blackboard unless I sat in the front row, so I was taken to the leading ophthalmologist and optician in the area and given glasses. I was judged to be extremely short-sighted. Not until I was 16 and sent to Moorfields Eye Hospital (the leading eye hospital in the country), was I correctly diagnosed as having major eye conditions which required a 4-month in-patient stay for treatment followed by numerous operations. Just prior to this, I had the first of many strange, synchronistic experiences. Some months before being sent to Moorfields, I had joined a Skiffle Group, singing American folk and blues songs. In December, we were asked to play for a Nurse’s Party, as one of the men in the group was ‘going out’ with a Moorfields nurse. Within weeks of singing with the skiffle group at Moorfields, I was a patient there. Two threads that have woven their way through a long life began their weaving then. Hence the title of my autobiography As Far As the Eye Can Sing.

I continued to sing with the same group, which soon moved on to singing songs largely from the UK and Irish traditions. This was when I learnt my first British ballads, many of them tales of mythic and archetypal situations and figures linking me back to my childhood stories. I was lucky enough to be mentored by the leading figures of the British Folk Song Revival. In our folk singing study group, we used Laban approaches in relation to movement and interpreted these to enrich ways of exploring voice and song interpretation.

My story moves on. I am a social work student at a Therapeutic Day Hospital. My supervisor comes to hear me sing at a London folk club one evening and says, ‘Frankie, you seem to use your songs as part of self analysis’.

I realise that I have chosen songs over the years that illuminate both the ancestral past and my present. One such ballad is Tam Lin, the great story of shape-shifting and transformation. Listening to a fine rendition by an elder of the folk revival, I thought, ‘This isn’t just about magic. It IS magic’. I learnt his version and felt the responsibility of singing such a powerful song – the great responsibility of song carriers.

In 1974, I was invited back to sing at The Philadelphia Folk Festival, having sung there the year before. I had the courage and temerity to begin my Friday evening concert set in front of over 20,000 people with the 11-minute long Tam Lin. I do recall there being total silence. Five years later, on one of my annual trips to Philadelphia, a man asks to speak to me. We find a quiet corner and he tells me that back then, when he heard Tam Lin, he had been ‘in the depths of despair’, his marriage and life having fallen apart. He said, ‘As I listened to the journey in the song, I was taken on a journey too. When I opened my eyes at the end of the story I had been changed. It changed my life’.

It is not the only time this ballad has had such a response.

I hope that, reading this, you can sense how it was that I felt at home when I first encountered the Sesame approach to drama and movement therapy. I heard about Pat Watts and her Enactment of Myth workshops from my maverick Jungian therapist. ‘I’m sure you would love Pat’s way of exploring’. I booked for a day-workshop with Pat and again found myself involved in one of the strange synchronistic events that continued to scatter themselves through my life.

By now, I have had numbers of eye operations, can no longer read print, need to use a white cane as a mobility aid and am registered blind. I get a taxi to the venue as I haven’t been there before, feeling that I’ll arrive more relaxed than struggling through London transport. The driver gets lost and I arrive late. A paired exercise in mirroring is underway. Pat comes and takes my arm. She is inviting me to pair with her for the remainder of the sequence. I fold my cane and put it away. Pat suggests that, due to my lack of sight, we gently touch hands. The energy is palpable – a literal warmth as well as an immediate sensation of welcome and inclusion. I don’t always feel this when joining groups or courses. Often people aren’t sure how to approach a visually impaired member and such hesitation can feel like exclusion.

After some chat and some more movement, Pat introduced the myth we were to enact. It was one of the Norse tales of the Gotterdammerung – the death of the Gods. Central to the story are the two sons of Odin, Balder and his brother Hod, who is blind. Pat tells us the outline of the story. The tragic ending is brought about by the blind Hod being tricked by the jealous god Loki into killing his beautiful and beloved brother Balder, one of the Scandinavian Gods of Light. Do I take on the role that seems strangely pointing at me? I offer to play the blind brother.

Later, Pat tells me that she had questioned whether to go ahead with the story she had chosen for that workshop, given my arrival as a participant. She decided to go ahead. I had the choice not to be part of the enactment, but somehow she sensed I might well take up the challenge. This is how my long friendship and working partnership with Pat began and how I am still a visiting tutor on the Sesame Dramatherapy Course at Central School of Speech and Drama nearly 40 years later.

At this time, I had started a Psychotherapy Training with The Guild of Psychotherapists. I liked their eclectic non-exclusive approach and found myself stimulated and intrigued by the range of tutors and lecturers. However, towards the end of the first year of this training, I also joined a course on myth enactment Pat was running one evening a week.

I am lucky enough to have been given the Supervisor of my choice for the coming year, another maverick Jungian with an interest in theatre, so I am eagerly anticipating this.

Then to my surprise, I am invited to join two of the UK’s leading singers to make up a trio. They are both very established. Leon Rosselson is a leading songwriter, and Roy Bailey is one of the great voices of the British Folk Revival. This will mean going on tour, probably abroad as well as in Britain. I am at a crossroads. I recall feeling quite paralysed, drawn by the lure of both paths. Which will be the road untravelled?

To further enrich my choices, Pat had taken part in a number of my voice workshops, which I had been running since 1975, and she had encouraged me to add some experiential work of voice to her classes that I was attending. We became so excited as we discovered how voice and sound could deepen the expression of dramatising a story. We decided to run some workshops together calling them ‘Voice and Movement Towards the Enactment of Myths’. My bowl was overflowing.

Happily, a dream came to my rescue. I was seeing my therapist twice a week for personal therapy as a requisite of the Guild Training and I had total trust in her enabling me to find a way through my dilemma. I told her about the dream and at the end of my session I had my answer. In the dream I am in a small lecture room seated at a round table with eminent philosophers and psychologists. A profound discussion is taking place between these elderly men. I stand up and say, ‘Excuse me, this is very interesting but I need to be elsewhere’. I say this with no judgement, but stating a simple fact. I go out into a long bright corridor and meet up with a Swedish singer and friend of mine. We walk down the corridor and I see a room full of vibrant colour, its shelves and walls covered in glorious fabrics, wools, silks and tapestries. I know this is where I need to be.

Life is now full of rehearsing, travelling, performing, leading Voice Workshops and I’m running Training Courses for people wishing to teach Natural Voice or incorporate it into their existing work. Hence, numbers of Sesame teachers and students come to these courses recognising the value of using voice and sound in enactments.

Obviously, in relation to the practicalities of travel and finding venues on my own, my disability caused stress and frustration at times. However, when actually running groups, I became aware that my lack of sight was in many ways an asset. This was clearly brought home to me when I was helping with voice on Compass Theatre’s Royal Hunt of the Sun. This was when I was about to have an operation which would either give me some sight back in one eye or risk losing the little I had. The director expressed a wish for me to get ‘some’ sight back ‘but not too much Frankie – you give us so much freedom from judgement by not being able to see us’. I realised that I was given another freedom. Because I couldn’t see people seeing me, I didn’t have instinctive reactions to people showing anxiety or disapproval. So I could be uninhibited and willing to make a fool of myself without having to witness people’s ‘normal’ reactions.

I have had many years of crossing back and forth between performing, teaching voice and the world of theatre. I both taught and participated in other teachers’ workshops at International Conferences for VASTA (Voice and Speech Trainers Association) in the United States and United Kingdom, and for the International Workshop Festivals in Australia and the United Kingdom, as well as at 10 of the international Giving Voice conferences, which were a regular bi-annual event in my working life. For the most part, those running workshops were able to include me fully in their events. A great theatre-movement teacher said that my lack of sight confirmed her sense that movement was an inherent, intuitive and internal sense, not dependent on visual cues.

There have been times when a teacher did not have the imagination or willingness to make the adaptations that would include me, and this has sometimes left me feeling marginalised and excluded. One weekend I booked for a course on Mask, Movement and Archetypes with the creator of this approach. Cutting a long story short, this led me to later teach alongside him for some 10 years, subsequently developing my own vocal version from his work for the Voice of the Archetype Workshops that I am still running.

However, into this largely creative and massively enjoyable narrative, I now have to own that life has become increasingly frustrating with the arrival of the almost entirely male- and visually driven digital world. For the greater part of my working life, I have been able to function in more or less the same way as everyone else. We all communicated by letter and phone. Once I lost my ability to read in the 1970s, I was given a grant for an Access-to-Work helper to read my post and help with my finances. I still have this help but so much communication now comes online. Back in 1988, I bought myself a talking computer and felt I was ahead of the game, as many of my sighted friends didn’t have computers at that time. It was essentially a Word Processor that spoke to me as I typed and saved my entries. This was wonderful. I could enter all my contacts and all my song-words and keep track of work dates, times and addresses. I’m now on the fourth version of this model, which has no screen but has the same keyboard and function keys. Then came email, giving me more direct communication. This was all right in the beginning but my dear old computer can no longer read many of the formats now in use. Graphics, he turns into varieties of gobbledegook. Almost by the day I am less able to read the range of emails that land in my inbox. If necessary, I forward them on to my wonderful Access-to-Work helper, and she ‘translates’ them for me, plays the sound-files and describes the photos and illustrations.

This means I feel less in control of my life than I have been for much of the past. You will no doubt have gathered that I have lived a very full life. I have lived with sight loss. I do have a strong need to be in control. I have been privileged to have this control over my artistic life and I still have it when it comes to making choices and continuing to accept life’s challenges. At this point, I need to pay a great tribute to my many friends who have helped and supported me in so many ways.

Writing this very piece is one such challenge. I am writing it on my computer, listening to his robotic voice speaking it back to me as I write. I am to be helped by my dear friend Jenny Pearson. Without a screen, I don’t feel I that can lay out my writing as is needed. Also without a spell-check, I need someone to keep an eye on this for me. I could still see when I learnt to write, but there are now so many words I have never seen and my spelling can be idiosyncratic. Jenny Pearson, who helped with writing my autobiography and with co-commissioning and co-editing ‘Well Tuned Women’, is about to assist with those aspects of this task that I feel inadequate to handle.

I’m aware that I began this piece of writing with great energy and a sense of just how enormously blessed and grateful I am for such a rich, creative and companion-filled life. However, in my 81st year, as I come to the end of writing this article, I find myself more marginalised and excluded from a world that is becoming increasingly visual by the day. Looking back as I write, the loudest voice in my head and heart is saying/singing, ‘The world of drama therapy, voice and movement have indeed been amongst the most bright, colourful threads weaving their way through my life – a rich part of the choice I made to step into that room full of glowing colour and texture that beckoned me in that seminal dream’.