Let sound and imagination keep discovering each other.
Life and work
Richard Armstrong is a voice teacher, performer and director whose work connects vocal exploration with theatrical creation. His teaching career included New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing and international workshops at Banff. Armstrong also works with visual images and writing, treating sound as part of a larger expressive life.
Approach and technique
In his teaching statement, Armstrong links the sounds you make with imagination, personality and your state in the moment. He describes moving in both directions: an image or experience may influence the sound, and listening to a sound may suggest another image or possibility. His classes adapt to the people present rather than following an unchanging sequence.
His stated subjects include range, resonance, breath, physical grounding, story, dynamics and repertoire. Improvisation can lead into scenes, songs and original material. You can approach these as connected investigations: what is available in your voice today, what matters in the material, and what happens when the two meet? Vocal variety acquires a purpose through the work you choose to make.
From visual art to vocal invention
You encounter Armstrong as a performer and teacher whose artistic work crosses media. His own biography places his early painting studies with Richard Hamilton in Newcastle during the 1960s. His later teaching includes New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing, from which he retired in 2019, and a long series of workshops at the Banff Centre. That combination gives you a useful context for his attention to images, sound and the making of performance material.
You can also hear an artist’s concern in the way his teaching statement connects exploration with repertoire. A sound is available for development into a scene, a song or a composition. Your vocal discovery becomes part of something you shape and offer to a listener. The inquiry can begin with an image and arrive at sound, or begin with sound and suggest an image you had not planned.
Discovery and repertoire in the same practice
You can understand Armstrong’s teaching through the two-way relationship described in his own statement. An image or experience can affect sound; listening to sound can suggest a new image or artistic possibility. Voice is therefore an active part of invention. You encounter a process in which the material can answer back and change the direction of the exploration.
His stated teaching subjects span range, resonance, breath, physical grounding, story, dynamics and repertoire. These are connected areas of attention rather than a promise that one change solves every vocal problem. Improvisation can lead toward scenes, songs and new material. The practice includes both discovering a possibility and developing it into a form you can perform.
What distinguishes vocal discovery from collecting unusual effects? A discovered quality becomes artistically useful through its relationship to the material. A phrase has a duration, an address and a place in the whole. Your voice can contribute to a character’s action or to the architecture of a song. Selection belongs beside exploration because a finished work needs proportion and direction.
Armstrong’s background in visual art gives you another context for this interest in images and composition. His work does not begin and end with a fixed idea of a correct vocal surface. You can investigate how sound, image and theatrical purpose affect one another. The image remains an artistic resource: it can organize attention without needing to become a literal explanation of what your body or psyche is doing.
His description of classes adapting to the people present also places listening inside the teaching itself. The available material changes from person to person and from occasion to occasion. For your study, the relevant question is how a vocal possibility develops through attentive work. You can follow the passage from an initial sound into phrasing, relationship and repertoire, where its expressive purpose becomes more exact. Armstrong’s contribution keeps vocal technique connected to the making of performance, with curiosity continuing after the first discovery.
Applications for actors
You take curiosity about the relationship between sound and imagination. An unfamiliar quality can become a character possibility, a musical phrase or a way of meeting a partner. Let the discovery have room before deciding its final form.
Rehearsal exercise
Choose a short line that invites someone to come closer. At a comfortable pitch and volume, begin with a simple hum. Imagine the invitation as a warm light, then let the hum become a vowel and finally the words. Notice what changes in your attention and the line’s shape.
Try again with an image of a wide open doorway. You do not need a dramatic sound or an expanded range. Speak the line to a willing partner and ask what invitation they received. Keep one useful discovery, then let the written circumstances lead the next pass. Stop if the sound becomes uncomfortable.
Books and further study
Read the teaching statement together with Armstrong’s teaching history. His account places the start of his voice teaching in 1969 and records work across different artistic settings. Read his metaphors as descriptions of a teaching philosophy. For your own practice, distinguish the artistic question you can explore from any broader claim about psychology or vocal health. The useful evidence is what a specific, comfortable experiment makes available for your material.