About Us

Nicole Ostini

Speech and Drama Specialist
and Theatre Practitioner

Nicole Ostini completed the four-year training at The School of the Living Word in 2002 with Dawn Langman, studying Steiner’s creative speech and Chekhov’s acting technique. She has worked within the arts and education sector for the past 20 years in a variety of contexts including acting, directing, devised theatre, professional development, vocational and drug rehabilitation.

She also took her skill set into the corporate world, training CEOs, Managers and team leaders at KPMG and MLC in presentation skills. She has significant experience working in the Indigenous sector including Batchelor Institute in the NT, Goolarri Media in WA and many remote communities across the Top End.

She currently teaches Speech and Drama at Samford Valley Steiner school and the new Eurythmy training at Pacifica College in Brisbane. She began TeacherPlus to provide quality Steiner-based accredited Professional Development workshops for teachers both inside and outside the Steiner school system.

Katrina Stowe

Katrina Stowe graduated from Charles Sturt University with a BA Communications (Theatre/Media). Over the following years she worked as actor for Arena Theatre Co and Red Dust Theatre, and backstage for Sydney Theatre Co, Marian Street Theatre Co and NOW Theatre, but without much inner satisfaction! A bit bamboozled by the world, she went to Alice Springs and became involved in various community theatre and music projects, working with people with disabilities, homeless youth and young people on remote aboriginal communities. She was part of the Sugarman Project, a bi-cultural project spanning a number of years which culminated in a series of theatrical events based on the story of Dionysus and other Greek myths, evolving out of the need for teaching/learning stories to understand alcohol and its effects on indigenous communities.

It was Alice Springs that she met Waldorf education and the work of Rudolf Steiner. Katrina did her Waldorf teacher training at Taruna College in NZ and has worked as a class teacher and speech and drama teacher in Waldorf schools for 10 years.

Meeting Dawn and training in her methodology has deepened her work in the classroom and reignited her early love for the theatre and performance, giving it a whole new context and purpose. She is currently undertaking a Masters in Theatre and Performance, studying the story of Parsifal, and trying to understand Shakespeare’s plays through the lense of the evolution of consciousness.

Dawn Langman

1963-1969

Always as equally drawn to teaching as to performance, parallel to her arts degree majoring in English literature and history at Adelaide University, and as the major within her secondary teaching diploma, Dawn first trained in mainstream speech and acting techniques at Adelaide Teachers College in South Australia with Musgrave Horner. He had been a former lecturer at the Guildhall London, and had authored several books about speech. During these years she performed regularly in many of the best regarded theatre groups in Adelaide at the time. Her first teaching position in a secondary school gave her the opportunity to teach drama in an experimental educational context in which she was given complete responsibility to develop her curriculum.

1967 – 1973

Success in this led to Musgrave Horner inviting her to return to the Teachers College as his colleague in the Speech and Drama Department. There she also was completely free to develop her speech and drama curriculum in a tertiary context: lecturing in History of Drama/Theatre, teaching speech, acting and drama in education, to teacher trainees both in a specialist and non-specialist contexts. She continued to be actively involved as a performer in the Adelaide theatre scene. During these years her quest for a spiritual dimension both in education and her own art form led to meeting Rudolf Steiner’s work.

1973-1975

Her questions about education, speech and acting became ever more burning, leading her to resign from the Teachers College and travel to England to study at Emerson College in Sussex. At the time this was the only adult college in the English speaking world where Steiner’s work could be experienced. Having initially intended to train to be a teacher in a Steiner school, she discovered it was possible to train in the speech methodology developed out of Steiner’s work by his wife, Marie.

1975-1979

She studied Speech Formation (Sprachgestaltung) with Maisie Jones and Ulrike Brockman at the London School of Speech Formation. Although she was aware that the methodology which could connect the speech and acting process had not yet evolved, she knew this path of speech formation was what she had been searching for, so many years; a path connecting speech with its sacred origins as embodied in the opening verses of the Gospel of St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word’.

1979-1989

Dawn was invited back to Emerson College to take responsibility for the speech and drama work. During this time she was approached by a number of students who wanted a more intensive training in speech and drama; one that reached beyond its developmental for the human being. She founded a one-year speech and drama course which she ran for 6 years. In the meantime the Speech School had moved out of London not too far away from the College. This meant that many of the students who completed Dawn’s one year course went on to complete the speech training with Maisie. Others travelled to Australia to work with Mechthild Harkness who had set up her own 4 year speech and drama training in Sydney.

During these years Dawn also felt increasingly that she had reached the limit of her capabilities to find a path forward based on the integration of her mainstream acting methodology (the one in which she had originally trained) with a speech technique founded in Steiner’s conception of the spiritual nature of the human being and the cosmos. During these last years, Diane Caracciolo came to study with her at Emerson College and introduced her to Chekhov’s acting methodology. Diane had trained with Deidre Hurst du Prey in New York.

1989-1995

Dawn went to USA and studied Chekhov methodology with Ted Pugh and Fern Sloan of the Actors Ensemble New York. Ted and Fern were both master teachers and performers who also worked out of Steiner’s conception of the human being. They were eager to research the connection between Chekhov’s acting methodology and Steiner’s speech work. Chekhov had encouraged this himself from the beginning of his work at Dartington Hall in England when he had invited Alice Crowther to bring Speech Formation and eurythmy to his international theatre School. Probably because each stream of work was still in its pioneering stages it had not proved possible to go very far with their integration at the time.

However it seemed that in our work together now, a new step was becoming possible. Our excitement at what the integration of the speech and acting streams made possible led to an invitation from Sunbridge College in Spring Valley, to offer am intensive one-year training course. This proved so successful that this year was offered to a second group of students, while some who had completed the first year of the course requested to continue in a more advanced year of training.

1995-2005

Dawn returned to Australia and after teaching a number of workshops throughout the country introducing what was becoming her approach to an integrated Steiner speech/ Chekov acting/ methodology, she was approached by several students in Sydney who asked her for a 4-year full time training. (ONE OF THESE WAS NICOLE). So, The School of the Living Word was founded in which Dawn continued to develop her integrated methodology. The school moved to Melbourne for the final 2 years of the training from which 4 students graduated. Then s second 4 year cycle was completed.

Since her return from overseas, Dawn developed a number of artistic projects with her violinist colleague, Perry Hart. These became the laboratory in which she continued to research the possibilities of this technique and hone her own artistic practice. This bore fruit when Dawn was invited by Rosalba Clemente, the then artistic director of the State Theatre of South Australia, to play Hecuba in her production of The Trojan Women in 2004.

2005…

Dawn returned to Adelaide to ‘retire’ and write the books that would record her research. 5 of these have now been published and along with the 6th and final one (still to be completed) they form a kind of encyclopaedic source that demonstrates the potential of this integrated methodology. By then Rosalba had become Head of Acting at the Drama Centre, Flinders University, and invited Dawn to teach speech to the acting students there. This enabled her to work in a mainstream context for the first time since she had left Adelaide in 1973, and to find out whether what had been developed in a non-mainstream context could speak to students who had not sought consciously, and were in no way consciously connected with, Steiner’s work. The feedback from the students showed overwhelmingly how much they valued and felt nurtured by the human and artistic depth of this approach to speech and language.

After 10 years at the Drama Centre Dawn retired ‘again’. Since then she continues to support the Heartfire initiative which Nicole and Katrina have brought into the world as a vessel in which this pioneering work would continue to evolve. At the same time Dawn works with a number of individuals from around the world who are not ambitious for a mainstream career but are searching for a path of theatre and artistic practice which nurtures their creativity in a healthy and holistic way.