Steiner's paired speech technique: vocalise and speak slowly toward breath and reflection, or consonantise and speak quickly toward blood and affect.
Vocalising and Consonantising in Anthroposophy is a technique of dramatic speech formation that Rudolf Steiner set out in the September 1924 Goetheanum course Methodology and Nature of Speech Formation (GA 280), the last cycle he and Marie Steiner prepared together. The speaker either accentuates the vowels and speaks slowly, turning toward the breath and toward reflection, or sharply accentuates the consonants and speaks quickly, turning toward the blood and toward affect. Steiner anchors the contrast in the rhythms of the body itself: one breath to four pulse-beats, and in measured speech four consonants to every vowel. Vocalising carries thought and inwardness, while consonantising carries will, emotion, and outward report, and the general rule can reverse when a speaker comes strongly out of himself. A living dramatic dialogue arises in the shifting between the two modes. The technique belongs today to Sprachgestaltung, the art of Creative Speech taught at the Goetheanum's Section for Performing Arts.
Vocalising and consonantising in Steiner's work names two opposite ways of forming the same spoken line. To vocalise is to lean on the vowels, slow the pace, and turn the voice toward the breath, the seat of reflective thought. To consonantise is to sharpen the consonants, quicken the pace, and turn the voice toward the blood, the seat of will and feeling. The actor moves between them to nuance a scene.
In Steiner's Own Words
If I try to accentuate vocalically and thereby to speak slowly, then I turn toward the breath. If I sharply accentuate the consonants and speak quickly, then I turn toward the blood. Notice how, through such observations, you bring out fine nuances in dramatic speaking. In general you will speak slowly, and thereby vocalise, that which is strongly reflected upon. And you will speak quickly, and thereby consonantise, that which is spoken out in affect, in emotion. Now it can also happen that the general rule turns into its opposite when the human being comes strongly out of himself. Thoughts will in general be expressed in a vocalising and slow way.
What it Means Today
The course in which Steiner gave this teaching, nineteen lectures at the Goetheanum in Dornach over the first half of September 1924, was the last on which he and Marie Steiner worked together, and roughly seven hundred people attended. What he handed on there did not stay a private studio method. It became Sprachgestaltung, the art of Creative Speech, now carried by the Goetheanum's Section for Performing Arts and by training schools across Europe and the English-speaking world. The English collection of the course material, published as Creative Speech: The Nature of Speech Formation, keeps the vocalising and consonantising distinction at the centre of how speech is shaped, and Dora Gutbrod, who sat in that 1924 room at nineteen, went on to teach the method for decades. In July 2024 the Goetheanum marked the centenary of the course with four days of theatre performances and a professional colloquium, alongside a new training, AmWort Theater Art, joining speech formation, acting, and eurythmy.
Thalira synthesis: what makes the technique unusual is that it does not treat a vowel and a consonant as equal sounds the speaker may favour by taste, but reads the vowel as breath turned inward to thought and the consonant as blood turned outward to deed, so that choosing how to voice a line is already a choice about whether the soul is reflecting or willing.
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