E u r y t h m y
Eurythmy A Creative Force in Humanity
S y l v i a B a r d t
The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America Publications Office 65-2 Fern Hill Road Ghent, NY 12075
A W S N A P u b l i c a t oi n s
Experiences from Pedag Pedagogical ogical Practice
ylvia ylv ia S
Bardt Bar dt
Eurythmy A Creative Force in Humanity
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Eurythmy A Creative Force in Humanity Experiences from Pedagogical Practice by Sylvia Bardt
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Printed with support from the Waldorf Curriculum Fund Published by: The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America Publications Office 65–2 Fern Hill Road Ghent, NY 12075 Title: Eurythmy: A Creative Force in Humanity
Experiences from Pedagogical Practice
Author: Sylvia Bardt Translator: Mado Spiegler Eurythmy Consultant and Reader: Mollie Strube Amos Editor: David Mitchell Proofreader: Ann Erwin Cover: Hallie Wootan © 2008 by AWSNA
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Table of Contents Introduction by Mollie Amos .........................................................
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Foreword by Virginia Sease .............................................................
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Preface .......................................................................................... 11 Introduction to the Being of Eurythmy •
Movement ......................................................................... 13
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New Artistic Impulses at the Beginning of the 20th Century ........................................................... 14
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The Origin of the New Art of Movement .......................... 17
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The Threefold Art of Eurythmy ......................................... 18
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Artistic Creation and Artistic Knowledge in Eurythmy ...... 20
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Embodying the Spirit—Spiritualizing the Body ................. 25
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Teacher Preparation ........................................................... 26
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Age-Appropriate Exercises with Children ........................... 30
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Letter and Word ................................................................. 35
Eurythmy in Preschool .................................................................... 41
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The Curriculum—a Work of Art •
Correspondences between the Developmental Phases and the Eurythmy Curriculum .......................................... 45
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First and Twelfth Grades ................................................... 48
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Second and Eleventh Grades ............................................. 57
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Third and Tenth Grades .................................................... 65
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Fourth and Ninth Grades ................................................... 74
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The Bridge Years Fifth/Sixth/Seventh/Eighth Grades .................................... 82
Sphere and Circle as Moving Gesture ............................................. 94 Education of the Movement Organism through Eurythmy: Ages Twelve to Fourteen ................................................................. 100 Thoughts on Teaching Eurythmy in the High School ..................... 116 The Professional Picture of the Eurythmy Teacher .......................... 127 Endnotes .........................................................................................129 Eurythmy Training Centers ............................................................ 133
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Introduction by Mollie Amos For over fourteen years Sylvia Bardt has been visiting South and North America bringing eurythmists and teacher trainers the art of Waldorf education. In this book Sylvia takes the vantage point of eurythmy and shows how through eurythmy the curriculum can be woven together into a whole and colorful tapestry, full of life. The development of the child from kindergarten through elementary and high school stands at the forefront of her work and forms the basis for all the exercises. Although Sylvia hails from Germany, her writing expounds the universality of education and eurythmy, which leaves teachers in different countries free to adapt and develop exercises suited to their own language and region. In this sense this book will be a helpful guide to educators in the English-speaking world. Peterborough, NH November 2008
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Foreword by Virginia Sease The research upon which this book is founded was the product of its author’s many years’ experience teaching the art of eurythmy in all grades. The book can also provide a clear overview for those wishing a general introduction to this new art of movement, which is known almost as widely as Waldorf pedagogy itself throughout the world. It is a sign of the 21st century that in the ‘civilized’ Western part of the world, humans are increasingly forced to curtail their original joy in movement through the widespread use of machines and mechanical means. No matter how much we appreciate these aspects of technological progress, many people are left wondering about the effects of impoverished movement upon future generations. At the end of the 19th century, as an answer to this human condition, Rudolf and Marie Steiner gave eurythmy to humanity. Its practice has one precondition: “This new art of movement can be performed only by those who acknowledge and live in the conviction that human beings consist of body, soul, and spirit.” In no earlier age was it more important that human beings, in order to save their original humanity, not only understand their native threefold nature but also live it and exercise it. Whereas the entire Waldorf school curriculum is built upon the threefold division of the human being in body, soul, and spirit, eurythmy offers yet more possibilities to experience, through continued practice, the
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laws of the threefold nature in their most subtle connections. Animated by this fundamental idea, Sylvia Bardt describes the eurythmy curriculum and its enactment. She shows very clearly how children and adolescents can find, through eurythmy, an access to themselves and to the world. Particularly beautiful is her presentation of the correlations between stages of life in regard to eurythmy teaching. Thus the reader can come to conclusions about the meaning for human biography nowadays of concluding twelve years of teaching in the sign of the circle, i.e., in the sign of the sun that makes possible our life on earth. Especially through eurythmy as visible speech and visible music, adolescents experience their own universal nature, which connects them, as humans, to all other humans. May many more children be accompanied by the teaching of eurythmy and by watching eurythmic performances along their road in life. I speak for myself and for many others who love eurythmy in thanking the author for having made this book accessible. Dornach, Switzerland January 1998
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Preface J’ai tendu des cordes de clocher en clocher, des guirlandes de fenêtre en fenêtre; des chaînes d’or d’étoile à étoile, et je danse. I stretched cords from church spire to church spire; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance. – Arthur Rimbaud The art of eurythmy attained its greatest expansion through the work with children and adolescents in what are now 700 Waldorf schools all over the world. In various courses taught by me—for beginning teachers, craftsmen and farmers, school parents and doctors—I experienced ever anew its varied possibilities. In these encounters, questions came up again and again over the years about the background and the roots of this art of movement. These questions led to this book. This presentation will attempt to trace connections between eurythmic work in the schools and the sources to which eurythmy owes its origin. The contents and the methods of eurythmy for various ages and in various life situations can be derived from anthroposophical anthropology. I do not, however, intend to give a systematic, comprehensive description of the eurythmy curriculum. Instead, by “hanging garlands from window to window,” I hope to stimulate new thoughts about eurythmy as an artistic-pedagogical method.
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It is my hope that as many of my colleagues as possible will feel encouraged to put their experiences down in the same way, and thus stretch “golden threads from star to star.” This work would not have happened without many years of friendly cooperation with Rosemaria Bock, whom I thank gratefully.
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Introduction to the Being of Eurythmy Movement
Movement belongs to the human being’s very first sensations. In the mother’s womb, the developing child feels the mother’s breathing, her heartbeat, her walking as beneficent rhythms. Her speech too reaches the child in the form of moving waves and subtle ripple effects. Before the nursing baby fixates on an object, before it can move itself by grabbing, sitting up, let alone standing, it reacts primarily to the objects moving in its surroundings. Its own movement impulses are shaped by the sense of the moving environment. When young children later observe the flowing water, the bird in flight, the wind’s rushing, when they experience that all of nature speaks to them, they move toward all of these joyfully and move with them, imitating what they see and hear. The adults’ work, other children’s play, cars driving by, everything calls for the children’s imitation. And they feel delighted when rhythm too becomes part of the surging motion: when clapping, singing, hopping and dancing organize the movement. Eurythmy takes up all these impulses which constitute the child’s vital force. They appear in poetic and reflexive form, leading to natural dance movements. It thus makes sense that the first formal ‘instruction’ given to children should be a movement class. It begins with the three-yearold. Natural motions, ‘read’ or picked up from humans and from nature, are brought into formed, meaningful images. The child can plunge into these images and constantly transform itself into them. It can feel itself as a butterfly, a sun, the wind, as a little dog or a princess. In the process, it is often touching to observe how malleably the little child’s gestures adapt to each of them. 13
Adults need to re-learn this flexibility, by seeking in themselves the movements of nature and then taking hold of them and forming them in a new way. Speech and music also are alive in the element of movement; they resonate within human beings and around them: They are forces that create movement. Rudolf Steiner expressed this harmony between inner and outer worlds in the following verse: 1
Suche im eignen Wesen: Und du findest die Welt; Suche im Weltenwalten: Und du findest dich selbst; Merke den Pendelschlag Zwischen Selbst und Welt: Und dir offenbaret sich Menschen-Welten-Wesen; Welten-Menschen-Wesen.
Seek in your own being: And you shall find the world; Seek in the World-process: And you will find yourself; Pay attention to the pendulum Between Self and World: And there will be revealed Human-Cosmic-Beings; Cosmic-Human-Beings.
New Artistic Impulses at the Beginning of the 20th Century
The world of art opens itself to us in melodic form and moving color: music and poetry, sculpture and painting, theatre and dance. In ourselves we feel the possibility and the desire to gather this multiplicity, to connect the arts with each other, as is the case, for instance, in a song or in a painted sculpture where two art forms are connected. Human beings–and this is a sign of our universality—feel the desire and the ability to unite in artistic form domains that appear separated in their immediate environment. We can be musicians or poets, sculptors or painters; but we can also—once we have found the proper artistic form—be all these things at once: “Human-Cosmic-Beings.” The architecture of the human body shows us in distilled form the connection between the human being and world. If we consider the hardest part of our organism, the teeth: Whereas in the animal world around us, teeth generally have extreme forms, we note that our own constitute a harmonious—actually human—totality. We find in the molars and premolars the ruminant’s gesture; in the canines, the predator’s gesture, in the incisors, the rodent’s gesture. Thus, the entire animal kingdom is virtually contained in this “Human Cosmic Being.” This presents human 14
beings with the justified challenge to seek, out of their own being, for further universalities. The quest for the balancing pendulum, the balancing between human being and world in the realm of art appears ever more urgently in the soul of individual artists at the beginning of the 20th century. We may select from the multitude of such seekers the painter Vassili Kandinsky (1866– 1944) and the musician Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951). In his book Of the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky writes: “Schönberg’s music leads us into a new realm where musical experiences are not acoustic experiences but purely soul experiences. This is where the music of the future begins.” 2 These words characterize the novelty in the artistic impulse of those years. The correspondence between the two artists 3 shows that they were both intensively, and independently from each other, involved in creating a theatrical total work [Gesamtwerk, a word coined by Richard Wagner—translator’s note]. In 1908–1909, Kandinsky was working on The Yellow Sound, for which the music was written by composer Thomas von Hartmann (1885–1956).4 At that same time, Schönberg was writing his play with musical accompaniment, The Lucky Hand ( Die Glückliche Hand ). Both artists turned to a neighboring art and tried to do new things by blending different arts. Also at this same time we encounter the preliminaries to the birth of the new art of Eurythmy. From its very beginning, this art stood under the sign of concordances. During a lecture series Steiner gave in Hamburg on the St John Gospel, he asked young Russian artist Margarita Voloshin: “Would you be able to dance that?” She said yes, and, not pursuing the subject, merely answered that whatever a person feels can be danced. 5 There the snippet of a conversation ended. The time was not yet ripe for Steiner’s veiled proposition to develop a dance form that would allow the artistic expression of far-reaching thoughts through movement. Yet the very brief conversation did not remain fruitless. Years later, Margarita Voloshin painted images from the Gospels. She represented repeatedly and in very expressive fashion the theme of the Miraculous Fish Haul (John 21, 4–12). 6 We can experience the birth of eurythmy as an archetypal picture. Out of hidden depths, out of the water, the
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element of streaming life, solid forms, nourishment, fish in abundance are drawn. Whether they are practitioners or spectators, human beings nowadays are not yet able to grasp and apply the fullness of forms, the formative potential of eurythmy in a way adapted to the times.
Fig. 1 – Magarita Voloshin’s The Harvesting of the Fishes
Luckily, Steiner was able to pick up a few years later the suggestion he had made to translate spiritual scientific representations into artistic movement. In 1911, on behalf of her 18-year-old daughter, a mother asked for a thoughtful and healing kind of movement that would be in agreement with the artistic impulses coming from anthroposophy. Happily, Steiner’s pursued the question and developed something completely new with the gifted young woman, Lory Smits (1893–1971). Eurythmy was born as “visible speech,” as “visible song.”7 Steiner did not connect eurythmy with any existing dance school. Greek temple dance, although we know very little about it, may be seen as one source of eurythmy. Other sources are human speech and song.
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Steiner described it in the following manner: The connection between speech and eurythmy is that “whenever we form a word, we compress the air into a particular form. Those who can observe supersensibly the forms emerging from the human mouth see forms in the air; those are the words. If one copies them, one has eurythmy, which is a visible expressive gesture, just as the form of air in speech is an invisible form in which the thought penetrates, creating waves that make it possible to hear the totality. Eurythmy is the translation of air-gestures into visible limbgestures, expressive gestures.” 8 The Origin of the New Art of Movement
When we exclaim “Ah, how beautiful!” the soul opens up, it surrenders to a strong impression. Here too, the mouth opens into an A . What could be more immediate than for the arms to open up and thus, through a bodily gesture, bring soul experience to expression as an “Ah!” If, on the other hand, we exclaim: “Alas, what a pity!” (Wie schade! ), the “Ah” also opens, but simultaneously falls a little, it closes up at the level of the larynx, no longer streams to the outside. Similarly in aber and abwehr the A remains open, yet the nuance of separation surrounding the sound must be expressed differently in movement. For instance, the hand may turn out, in a stiff ‘tree trunk’ gesture ( sich einstämmen). Each sound has its archetypal gesture, which must be infinitely differentiated depending on what it being said. Over the years, Steiner developed gestures for all sounds. There are in eurythmy a multitude of arm-movements, as well as foot- and legmovements. Rhythmical stepping, different foot positions have expressive potential, in particular the walking of spatial forms. We can thus form straight and round forms, individual and group forms, geometric and poetically free forms. By contrast with other dance forms, the performer in eurythmy mostly faces front, so that the face always remains turned to the audience. This produces a new, qualitatively very different understanding of space, which demands a very wakeful consciousness. The expressive force is fundamentally different depending on whether I ‘rise into’ a more
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spiritual space behind myself or whether I move forwards toward the spectator. This offers eurythmy quite new creative possibilities as a stage art, if colored light and colorful garments pick up and reinforce the gestures and spatial forms according to mood and meaning. At the beginning, music was used primarily as a kind of addendum, for preludes and postludes. But increasingly Steiner shaped it into a toneeurythmy, taking into account the lawfulness of beat, rhythm, melody (melos ) and harmony as well as tones and intervals. We thus have in eurythmy an art of movement combining in rhythmical fashion music, speech, color and moving sculpture (eurythmos, beautiful rhythm) blending them on a new level and, in a broad sense, creating a ‘total work’ ( gesamtwerk ). It is an autonomous art, which is further put in the service of pedagogy and healing therapy; their collaboration, on a new level and in an expanded sense, can in turn blend into a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk ). The Threefold Art of Eurythmy
Everything that lies hidden in eurythmy was present in the very first indications given by Steiner. From the beginning, one could perceive the unity between what would take form as a stage art, what would flow into a modern pedagogy, and what would take form as hygienic movement and therapeutic eurythmy. Lory Maier-Smits reports that, at the start of the first eurythmy course, Steiner emphasized: “This new art of movement can be executed only by someone who acknowledges and lives with the certainty that the human being consists in body, soul and spirit.” 9 This made clear from the outset that it was not just another artistic reform-movement, but that it was born from and for the human being. Had this threefold quality not been part of the essential nature of this art form, the precondition of an acknowledgement of the threefold human being would not have been present at its baptism. A few examples will show how, from the beginning, Steiner saw eurythmy in its threefold effectiveness. When introducing the gestures for the consonants, Steiner connected them with a great variety of images and situations. Describing and
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practicing the first five sounds, he said: “If at some point you deal with excitable, agitated or nervous children or adults, the sequence D F G K H has a calming and releasing effect.”10 And after setting up the next sequence L M N P Q , he summarized this group as having “an enlivening, stimulating effect. You should prescribe these for people who are tired, listless and sleepy. Doing them will wake them up, will stimulate them and trigger their interest.”11 At the point when this art was being born, he thus mentioned its healing and educating potential. On the Sunday of the founding week of eurythmy, Lory Maier-Smits reported doing eurythmically the first complete word. It was no mundane word, but the exclamation “Hallelujah,” which means: “I cleanse myself from everything that hampers my seeing the highest.” 12 What weight this carried when spoken and brought to eurythmic expression at the (official) birthplace of eurythmy! It became the petition of every person doing eurythmy: Make me a gate through which speech and music can become visible. Make me selfless and strong. Let not my own will, my own feelings, my caprice be satisfied, but the will, the feeling and the sense of the Highest. Thus appears the deep Christian origin of eurythmy. Marie von Sivers perceived the depth of this moment and noted: “Herr Doktor, by rights, this should be a source of vast strength!” To which Steiner answered: “Of course! Did you think we were just here to dance? We also want to help heal sick people.” 13 This thread of healing was picked up the next day of the course. Sound- and word-gestures led to new forms. The walking of forms in space is also effective and full of possibilities. Steiner mentioned that the spiral is not simply a nice expressive version of particular circle dances, but can also be put into action therapeutically. If done rhythmically in the right way, curling inward strengthens the human ego and counteracts anemia. If the spiral curls outward from inside to outside, it can help counteract selfishness and excessive full-bloodedness. The new movement-art, eurythmy, was born in three forms: as stage art, as pedagogical art and as therapeutic art. The art of living consists in being human, in bringing thinking, feeling into a lively correlation. The art of eurythmy consists in giving expression to a speaking quality
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in movement that is curative, educative and purely artistic. The artistic means of eurythmy, namely pure movement, the feeling and the character of the movement, point to the fact that this three-way conversation is the common wellspring of this archetypally human art, which uses as its instrument the human body. Artistic Creation and Artistic Knowledge in Eurythmy
In order to approach the being of eurythmy from as many sides as possible, we need to take an apparent detour and follow the working method of two men to whom European spiritual life owes a great deal: Michelangelo and Galileo. Their lives were immediately adjacent: Michelangelo died on February 15, 1564; Galileo was born on February 18 of the same year. Michelangelo built the Dome of St Peter’s in Rome. It is a powerful heavenly vault magically produced on earth, looming high above the church, above the entire city, a masterpiece of artistic balance. Galileo recognized and calculated the laws that Michelangelo had used in his building. He comprehended in his intellect what Michelangelo’s creative genius had applied intuitively, and he formulated the scientific laws that became one of the foundations of modern life and now belong to the common fund of human culture. No one can graduate from an institution of higher learning without knowing Galileo’s Law of Falling Bodies and that of the Pendulum. It is by using Michelangelo and Galileo as examples that Steiner speaks of the process of artistic creation and of the ensuing process of coming to know and formulate the laws that govern the work of art. He points out that human beings perform without any intermediary the exchange with the spirit that allows them to incorporate into physical matter laws which they have yet to discover. They do this without intermediaries, i.e., not through reasoning, not through concepts, altogether not through the intellect. Human beings are so constituted that they can embody in the material world that which lives in them as an outflow of the spirit working within them before they can grasp it intellectually. This is true of all artistic creation. This fact is of interest to 20
us because it shows us that in human physical life, there is a ‘something,’ an inborn capacity to execute the laws of any particular organ prior to understanding these laws. So when we ponder the law, it is quite clear that our intuitive ‘feel’ for it, as expressed for instance in a work of art, not only is present, but must indeed be present before the law has been incorporated in the soul.… Thus we observe in reality: A human instinct purified and raised into the spirit allows us to create immediately (out of the spiritual world) what we later discover. Just as animals create instinctively, for instance the wonderful structure of the beehive, in the same way the human being creates instinctively, out of the spirit, before the spiritual world is reflected in the intellect. 14 If we trace the way in which Steiner brought into existence the art of eurythmy, we can see a creative artist at work. He performed the movements for each sound in very poetic, eloquent manner. Thus, when demonstrating the P, he reached down from his chair and “pulled up around himself, like a mantle of stars, a fullness of color and light. It was an inimitable gesture, full of dignity and grandeur.” 15 He also gave very sober, concrete indications. Thus, the first indications for the vowels I A O: “Stand upright, try to perceive yourself as a pillar, the base of which is in the ball of the foot, and the top of which is your own head, your forehead. You learn to perceive this pillar, this verticality as an I (ee). …The weight rests in the ball of the foot, not in the entire foot! Now shift the head of the pillar behind the foot point ; this will teach you the sensation of A .… Bend the head in front of the pillar point and you will have the sensation of O.…”16 In the act of creating eurythmy, Steiner was thus proceeding like an artist. He only provided laws and explanations after the archetypal forms of the art had been created . When eurythmy was later brought to the public at large, he gave introductory talks to the performances and provided explanations. We thus can say that from this point of view, he was like Michelangelo and Galileo—and the Dome still stands! Two examples from our century may help us expand our understanding of dormant or awakened creative forces in the human being. The first is a painting by Emil Nolde (1867–1956): Hermit in 21
Tree . We have a cool blue-green area, the garment of a man sitting in the branches of a tree. Black hair, black eyes, warm reddish brown beard. The high forehead radiates in warm ochre. With his luminous, somewhat bent forehead and dark eyes, he looks inward as it were. His right hand is held like a mirror, the palm of the hand facing him. Thumb and hand radiate the same warm yellow as the forehead. He is peaceful, radiant, turned inward, at peace with himself in his entire character…. Reddish black and brown, green and blue also appear in the sky, the foliage and the branches in the background where colors are more distant, denser and more natural. Another image by Nolde represents Christ and the Children . Slightly bent forward, the main figure turns his back on the viewer. In a bluegreen garment, he bends lovingly toward the children in red and yellow garb. The children’s side of the painting is luminous and light; indigo and strong dark violet occupy the facing side of the painting, which is
Fig. 2 – Emil Nolde’s Hermit in Tree
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Fig. 3 – Emil Nolde’s Christ and the Children
the world of adults. Trustful and joyful, the children come to Christ. Form and color create a harmony built of contrasts. A chord is sounded, a consonance. Christ and the Children was painted in 1910, the Hermit in 1931. What is it about these paintings that makes them so eloquent for us in connection with eurythmy? In both cases, the main figure is in a state of active rest, in harmony with itself and at the same time involved in a conversation with itself or with the environment. Both figures are similarly constituted of colors familiar to us as from the eurythmic gesture for M, and both move in an M gesture. Not only do the external forms a imitate this sound, but in their inward being, they sound the M, especially Christ bending down to his surroundings and taking it up into himself. In his first lecture of the Speech Eurythmy Course, Steiner spoke of the M sound as a statement that “things are in harmony. There is a very close fit, as in the end of the word Leim (glue).” In these images by Nolde, the harmony has taken the form of a painting. Steiner covered the whole arc from artistic creation to knowledge of the artistic laws in manifold ways reaching into modern times. As we have seen, his intuitive knowledge of the inner forces of color, form
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and movement flow immediately into artistic creation, and only then are processed conceptually. We are challenged to work with the results of his research and to make them our own as much as possible. Emil Nolde’s two images can encourage us to take another look at the eurythmy figures, to study them more closely through intensive practice, through eurythmic wakefulness in our encounter with the world, and with the world of art.
Fig. 4 – Eurythmy gesture for “M”
On March 1, 1923, when the first Waldorf school entered its fourth year, Steiner spoke about the eurythmy gestures at the Teacher’s Conference. “Students felt that the wooden figures of eurythmic gestures should be presented during the pedagogical week. I will provide such a series. It is needed. While they are also important for a psychological physiology, Waldorf teachers should work with them in order, more generally, to know better the human organism. What we can learn from these gestures provides a foundation for general artistic perception, for knowledge of the inner human organism.” 17
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The eurythmy figures—colored, two-dimensional wood figures— do not reproduce just one moment, one stage of the sound. Rather than being simple replicas, they are real images of truth ( Wahrbilder ) in that they show, not one moment, one stage of the sound, but simultaneously the origin, the existence and the disappearance of a sound. They challenge us to live into them. We must ‘put them on,’ for only then do we recognize each individual sound in its multiform unique existence. Embodying the Spirit—Spiritualizing the Body
What does it mean to demand that we observe a thing in such a way that we slip into it, that for a short while, we experience ourselves as this ‘other’ facing us, that we understand it in its ‘movement-form’ (Bewegungsgestalt ), its color, its stance. This describes the process that all teachers must undergo with their children if they are to do what Steiner calls “to read the children.” For this, simple observation is not sufficient. Teachers must develop a wakeful imaginative consciousness, translated into movement, if they want to know the temperaments, the disposition, the boundaries of the children and seek an answer to the question: “What in this child is old (what comes from the past) and what in this child is the future?” We must learn to read the children. The writing that tells us about a person takes many forms. In his Bergen lecture of October 11, 1913, Steiner described the child still surrounded by forces that cast light on the time preceding the descent to earth incarnation. “The struggles endured in the spiritual world, preceding birth and determining the destiny, play around the child’s aura, forming images of tremendous scope and wisdom.”18 These forces do not all dissipate in later life. In each person, we find unused forces of movement, ‘saved-up’ forces that remained unspent when the child stood up and learned to walk. These are our most innocent forces; it behooves us to transform and school them. Our gaze can then be led to look into the prenatal time of the child facing us. Then too, the movements that reveal so much about a person, become, as it were, transparent for what the child wants and needs in order to realize its intention on earth.
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How shall we bring out and school these surplus forces of movement slumbering in each one of us? When we do eurythmy, we are dealing with mobile life forces; we move our physical body according to those laws. This in turn changes the physical body. And how do we do eurythmy? Much of it is done through imitation, repetition over extended stretches of time. Children do it. But so do the adults. This sleeping eurythmy contributes to our health, it enriches our formative forces. We can also do eurythmy dreamily, through empathy: this too can be beneficent and is often very beautiful. And finally, we can try to do the gestures in as wakeful a fashion as possible. In the latter case, what we do can be repeated, taught, learned. We can then bring out completely new capacities in the person. Thus we can say: • • •
Eurythmy done primarily out of the force of imitation heals what in us is old, the past . Eurythmy performed primarily out of the feeling realm, is satisfying in the here and now, the present . Even at a beginner’s level, eurythmy done out of clear consciousness, performed by using the ego forces, builds up future forces for the world and for every individual.
Teacher Preparation
Every eurythmist must at some point ask the questions: How shall I teach this art? How can I process it for myself and with other people? We need to identify some leading thoughts, find something like a land map or a star map, drawn from a higher perspective and showing as many roads and directions as possible. Eurythmy must lead the individual to the human in him/herself. We must find connections in the here and now with our spiritual origins. Steiner described an approach to this task in words that can serve as guidelines for us, even though they were meant for anthroposophic work in general: Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, intended to lead the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe.
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It arises in the human being as a compelling heartfelt necessity. Its entire justification must be seen in its ability to satisfy this need. Only those individuals can accept anthroposophy who find in it something they feel compelled to seek from the depths of their feeling (Gemüt ). Anthroposophists can only be human to the extent that they experience a vital need to answer this question about the being of Humanity and of the world, a need as vital to them as the experience of hunger and thirst. 19 Regarding the questions that concern us here, we can take quite literally the saying: We want to lead the spirit in humanity to the spirit in the cosmos; we want to guide our movements in such a way that they are related to cosmic movements. We can say about eurythmy that it appears in the human being as a heartfelt necessity, and it finds its justification in its ability to satisfy this need. These phrases will help us even in the method of our teaching. There lives in all human beings, in all our students, no matter how young or old, a compulsion to move, and to move eurythmically. The way we teach—implicitly, without explanations—must justify what we are doing. Only so will the unique and incomparable beauty of eurythmy be accepted and acknowledged. Echoing the leading thoughts again, we can say that eurythmy can be accepted only by those who find in it something they urgently seek from the depths of their feeling disposition. Human beings can be eurythmists only if they carry that particular question about the being of humanity and of the world, a need as vital for them as hunger and thirst. If we allow this quote to guide us in our work, we plunge (or rise) into realms where joy and inspiration flow into all our doing. Let us look at a basic eurythmy exercise, which is for many eurythmists a daily archetypal exercise (Ur-Übung ). The human figure is organized in six geometric positions: 1. Arms horizontal at shoulder height—feet closed 2. Arms at larynx level—feet slightly spread
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3. Arms at heart level—feet open wide enough to form a pentagram 4. Arms and legs spread—fingertips and toes are aligned vertically, and a more or less quadrangular figure appears 5. Arms raised so that the connecting line between them touches the cranium 6. Arms parallel vertically, creating a very thin rectangle, feet closed as in 1.
Fig. 5 – Series of eurythmy forms given by Steiner (after Agrippa von Nettesheim)
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Steiner adapted for eurythmy these positions drawn in the 16th century by Agrippa von Nettesheim,20 who had first assigned them to his students. At first, Steiner kept to the pure geometric forms. Later (1924) he loosened the rigid form and transformed it into an exercise for the modern human being. Reading the connection to the human being, he gave a sentence for each position: 1. I think speech. 2. I speak. 3. I have spoken. 4. I seek myself in the spirit. 5. I feel myself in myself. 6. I am on the way to the spirit within myself. How different the exercise now becomes! Now, clear thoughts connect with limb movement, thinking is led into will movements. Only now does the totality of thinking, feeling and willing appear. A clear, warm sensation, a sense of well being grows out of what was until now “just an exercise.”
Fig. 6
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In a different manner we can study the relationship of thinking and willing activity in the eurythmic exercise. We seek the soul. The spirit radiates in/for us . The “seeking” comes to a focal point, and, as a result of seeking, something “radiates” in us. Both ways lead inwards. The form consists of two spirals, the form such that at any moment its direction must change in order for the inward sweep to attain its goal. The gesture acquires a will-full character. To the first form, moving forward, a second form is attached, moving backwards. This (choreography) requires clear representations, clear thinking activity and strong will-imbued actions. If we engage to excess with this action, no matter how clear our thinking, it is as if the ground slipped from under our feet. The sculpting of the curve requires the strength to stop. “We seek the soul. The soul radiates for us.” The words spoken in connection with this exercise open up a higher dimension; they are related to all three of the soul activities, feeling included, which are brought together in the person doing eurythmy. Age-Appropriate Exercises with Children
We have noted in passing that when he founded the field of eurythmic exercises, Steiner offered them to adults. We can experience in our own practice how deeply the serious and regular performance of these exercises forms us in our humanity, through a veritable schooling. What does it mean to work with children in this manner? With children between the seventh and the fourteenth year, we must work in such a way that thinking gets rightly connected with the will. But things can go astray in education. Steiner explained that human beings develop morally to the extent that, on earth, they have the opportunity to connect their thinking with their will. This connection is natural in animals (insofar as animal thinking has a ‘dreamy’ quality), but in human beings it must become a moral deed. 21 How then can we approach our assigned task of schooling these capacities in an authentic, child-appropriate manner? What can the child do, when living out of the forces of imagination and imitation, to bring about a confluence of the streams of thinking and willing? At first, the child does it primarily by
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guiding the old head forces into the young limbs; when it learns to walk, it ferries the past over to the future. In the first seven years, no movement consciously guided by the will is possible or meaningful. We plunge with the child into images, the child is ‘imaging’ in its carefully guided limbs. We can rightly say that in preschool a process of ‘limbifying,’ an embodiment of the spirit, takes place. There is as yet no threshold of consciousness, no active will to dam the stream of images. Thus the limbs are built up with spirit, formed and shaped by the images of movement streaming directly into them. Eurythmy has such an immediate effect of building up the body because there is no ‘filter’ to block it. The life-filled spiritual image of the Sun, the Moon, the Dwarf or the Horse pours into the child’s soul and body, forming and creating it. A four-year-old demonstrated to me how unbounded the work of images is in these first seven years. In the Frog-King play, we had come to the point where the crafty frog must be thrown against the wall. We enclosed him into a careful O, and then with a K and a T from the word klatschen (clap), we clapped him with our hands against the wall. For the four-year-old, images are still so powerful that this particular child couldn’t throw the frog, but became the frog. What did he do? He threw himself at the wall—so hard that we had to rush and put some ice on a big bump before the now-released King’s Son could stand in front of us. At that age, there is no practicing, no remembering, no knowing in the later sense; when we do eurythmy in preschool, we live in the immediate presence of the spirit in physical activity. If adults—teachers or parents—have trained their observation, they see how wonderfully the thinking forces from heaven flow at that age. Steiner described it thus: “The streaming of the forces of growth from the head downwards is predominant in the young child until the seventh year. The entire bodily organization starts out from the head-organization. Until the seventh year, the head does everything; only when thinking becomes emancipated at the change of teeth, does the head too get released from this powerful descending force.”22
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Fig. 7
The gesture expressing most purely the incarnation of the spirit in the first seven years can be drawn as follows (left). After the fourteenth year, this gesture will completely reverse itself (right) In the early grades, we stand between the two gestures: no longer in the purely descending stream, not yet purely in the ascending stream. Life and practice take place in the region that is half-born, only partially engaged in reality, its effectiveness, however, becoming visible. The will impulse, rising into the life of dreamy imitation, imaginal forming, and copying, appears at first like an intrusion or an obstacle rising from below. It sets obstacles to earlier movement, leading to whirling, swinging, moving forms, which are in contrast to the almost holy smooth flow of the first years. Now our concern must be to allow these whirling movements to live strongly in forceful yet orderly fashion. Very often, the key to a successful lesson lies in the transition from peaceful order to strong movement. Starting school is a huge step! Now the children no longer gather around the eurythmy teacher like chicks around the mother hen. Each child has his or her own place and cannot stand anywhere else. To the outside observer, this is merely a subtle difference; but for the teacher’s consciousness, it is momentous and must be experienced with utmost alertness. Whenever one repeats after the seventh year an exercise that was done before the seventh year, one notices how differently the children experience it. In the kindergarten, contraction and expansion can be 32
accompanied by the verse “I am hidden—I am here!” When they do this, children experience themselves as alternately round and dreamy or wide-awake and happy (see chapter: Sphere and Circle as Moving Gesture ). The same movement, when done in the first grade, evokes, together with dreaminess and wakefulness, a first stirring of the active, ascending will: “I can stand on tiptoes, go down slowly—and now I stand quite firm!” If I don’t want to wobble, I must do something about it. This big novelty is a first exercise in independence in the first grade. During the ninth and tenth years of life, we need to practice more and more the starting point of a movement, as can be seen in an example that would have been inconceivable earlier. From a biographical point of view, the situation is now such that thinking and will must be brought together in practical ways. If one misses this turning point in the ninth and tenth years, catching up later is possible but only at great cost. Let us remember that, when a young child walks through the room, he or she always moves in one direction—from back to front, from invisible to visible, from spiritual world to earthly life. One might say: The child was ‘being walked’; his activity was passive, it happened as if by itself. But, “if I must walk backwards, I must consciously develop the activity, overcome myself, i.e., call upon something above myself ( Übermir ).” In order to offer the child a field of practice allowing it to build a strong and healthy relationship with the self and the world, it must learn to practice walking backwards. At this age, one component of the curriculum is the biblical story of Creation treated as the evolutionary history of the human ego, and also as the teaching of historical epochs. The curriculum aims at teaching the movement of the Ego into the World. The eurythmic ‘I’ is to walk the path from spiritual world to earthly world and back. Here we see how eurythmy flows out of the being of humanity. For the choreographic form of the word ‘I’ is a straight line going out into space and returning on itself. By contrast, whenever we walk a circle or any other closed form, we express a relationship with space, with the world, with the ‘We.’ One new development at this age is that children start to walk the circle frontally, which is a way of practicing the idea: “I am a formative part of the 33
whole.” Walking the circle and many other spatial forms always frontally connects spiritualizing of the body (walking backward) and embodiment of the spirit (walking forward). Let us consider from this point of view an exercise for the seventheighth grades on the words: “I will—I cannot—I must do it.” These words actually describe in general the existential situation of that age. How then shall we do the exercise? The first path brings us backwards, actively—from here to something in the spiritual realm. The second path, forward, ‘drops’ me down into the earthly front space. Having, as it were, ‘pulled myself up’ by my own hair like Baron Münchhausen, I apply all my force in all directions, by walking the circle. The movement parallels the soul’s experience: I will experience myself, overcome myself; but I am unable to handle either the strength of my body, or my inner weakness, yet I must attempt it, and act. We finish the exercise by clapping; this, as it were, underlines the gesture. For every time I touch my own body, I trace eurythmically speaking—an E and “the E fixes the ego in the etheric.” 23 This allows the overcoming-of-my-own-weakness to be absorbed into my habit-body; it makes this effort into a life-habit, rather than an exception. Such are the secrets concealed in such a simple exercise! We must look elsewhere to see the effects of the ascending and descending forces in the higher grades. Help does not come principally from outside; instead, a qualitative element in the movement itself is increasingly at work. Starting from ninth grade, we speak of the possibility for the movement to make dynamics visible. The line’s expressive power speaks in space through form and direction. Its strength determines its qualitative expressiveness. A line may start softly and end powerfully, which expresses a different mood than the same line started boldly and running out to a whispered ending. After the birth of the astral body, i.e., when the soul becomes individualized, the student can perform an outwardly identical gesture twice, in ‘polarized’ versions. The ‘I’ appears expansive and radiant in the first version, and shrinking, wilting, the second time around. In one case, the movement is filled with spirit, it describes an ascent leading to
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resolution. In the second case, the same round form will breathe in its surroundings . If gestures are to be differentiated, if qualities are to be not just perceived but actually formed in a conscious manner, it requires thorough preparation by the teacher, especially in the Middle School years. The quality of the movement is connected with rhythm. We can follow the way the two streams are expressed, not just in the ascending and descending direction of the walking but also in the length of steps. The short step awakens me; the long step makes me sleepy. Until the ninth year, each step is an image. There are (long, slow) giant-, dragon-, season-steps and (short) dwarf- or ant-steps. (Children yawn when they spend too much time with giants.) The raindrop falling is short, the fog rises slowly. In the ninth year, waking and sleeping still slide into each other. But there soon appears a beat-like—not yet dynamic—rhythm. In the Twelfth year, the counter-rhythm appears. The child unites waking and falling asleep, rising and falling. It practices in its own body living and being lived in, being an ego and being the world at the same time. A new life appears in the middle sphere: a strong, half-awake, half-dreaming life. All movement must start from this central point, from the human being’s living breath. It must flow down into the feet and up into the arms. The feet must be able to glide, float, stumble or fall according to the demands of the work of art. The ‘language’ of the feet requires long cultivation before we come to the point of really “speaking with our feet” in eurythmy, instead of just mumbling along.24 Letter and Word
We have come to the point in the development of movement and its differentiation where we must explore the meaning of the spoken and heard word. “God does eurythmy, and in so doing, produces the human form as the outcome of eurythmy. To the extent that human beings return to the forms of the divine creative word, they continue the work of the gods.”25 How literally should we take these words from Steiner? Much of what he said in the first lecture of the Speech Eurythmy Course can already be found in things he had said a year earlier, speaking as a
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pedagogue. For instance, “All vowels sound at a deeper, inward register, whereas consonants objectify forms.”26 Vocalizing in eurythmy brings the body almost to rest. The sensation of the word’s spirituality streams into the body, forming, warming, creating. A true embodiment of the spirit takes place. All consonants are movement and sensation; the spirit of the sound is, as it were, shaken out, rolled, waved. In the process, the body is burned through by the spirit. Clearly ‘consonanting’ spiritualizes the body. This is true in every eurythmic action. How then should children spell the letters to satisfy the requirements of this anthropological condition? In the first three years, we rely on archetypal images and simplicity. We take an elementary approach to the sound and the gesture of consonants and vowels. There is a very narrow threshold on which it is decided whether at night the words, the sounds and the movements reach the real sphere of truth (we might call it the angelic sphere). We can see this in the following example from a first grade. As a way of tuning the children’s souls and bodies at the beginning of a lesson, I often ask: Where shall we seek our strength today? The answers tell me unmistakably the mood of the class. At the beginning of the year, suggestions always come from the technological sphere: We look for strength in airplanes, tractors, etc. At the end of the first grade, it is clear to all of us that a car has much less power than a stone, a mountain, the moon or the flowers, for the airplane is manmade and the flowers are created by God. We can then say: We have much heavenly power, much human power, and also, if we so choose, much devil’s power. But the devil’s power must be used in such a way that it doesn’t oppress us, let alone topple us. This takes us directly to the essentials of language, connecting it with the child’s forces of growth. Ultimately, we may find a starting verse like the following: I will be still. I shall listen. I shall learn in the world. I will listen to what the heavens, What the earth tells me. 36
Now the image carries the speech: Vowels and consonants are linked in the word and we must fulfill their task of forming, spiritualizing and enlivening the body. This speech, strengthened and working into the body and the spirit, will then have acquired the winged power allowing us to converse at night with beings of the higher worlds. In curative eurythmy, we work with the effects of single sounds and series of sounds, constantly repeated. In the grades also the path leads us through a sound series. Such series provide us with the extensive experience of image- and concept-free speech. Let’s see, for instance, how we approach the alphabet in the fourth grade. We walk from A to G and then ask, “What does H look like?” The answer must come from the light-filled open space created by G and it must prepare the ground for I. The H-gesture is ‘demanded by’ the alphabet. A too looks different depending on context: If we work the series backwards from G to A, we end with an in-breath, whereas A placed at the beginning of the series has a gesture of wonderment. Which stories hide in the sequence LMNO? We experience successively divine wings, human breath, curiosity and O—how good to have all these things! If we succeed in practicing in this way, a deep satisfaction takes over the class. We tie in directly and actively with the gods’ work, with the formative forces active in the universe. Working on the same themes in the ninth grade is very different. The plunge into the original powers of sound is a more wakeful one. We discover anew the many different laws with which we had interacted practically: The consonants are trace movements of the outside world and the vowels are the lively expression of the inner world. When we work eurythmically with foreign words or with entire poems, we develop a more wakeful relationship to our own movements and speech. For instance: The same meaning can be expressed by different words in different languages. Thus bud (English) can be translated as kalyx (Greek), poppek (Serbo-Croatian) bimbo (Hungarian) bottone (Italian), silmu (Finnish) Knopp ( Norwegian). Or soul (English) is Seele (German), psyche (Greek) ame (French), anima (Italian). 37
These differences spark the children’s interest, an interest for the world whereby children perceive with wonderment how different the gesture of the German Seele is, with its long strong E caught between the mysterious S and the embracing Ls; and the Italian anima— focused on the central I, an open A at both ends and joyfully breathing N and M. This awakens interest for the self, insofar as I experience my own movement, my own formative gesture, the extent to which I can really succeed in being true to the form of the words. There are many more exercises to awaken new perceptions; they can excite even a blasé fifteen-year-old. The feeling that the same old hat at last makes sense touches even children of that age for whom eurythmy is not necessarily the focal point of interest. Looking at the process of spelling we can see how it is turned inside out depending on the students’ age. At first, the image of the sound moved in the bodies. Now the essence of the sound is made visible in the body; for instance, the character of the letter F must be reproduced through the arm and the entire countenance. The bony, awkward forms of the students resist becoming transparent for the spiritual meaning of a sound. Continuing the work, we can penetrate in an artistic process whereby we can bring to expression in our limbs (the material of spirit) the ideals, thoughts, sound-images (the matter of the word). In the upper grades, the processes of embodiment and enspiriting now become fused. At the core, arising as the source of art, we have the geometric figure of the rhombus, born from the meeting of two triangles. Working with the eleventh grade, we might start as follows: We attempt to explore a new quality through movement. Can we make visible in ourselves light and darkness? Can we light up the darkness in the direction of blue? darken down the light in the direction of yellow? The second step consists in expressing these qualities not only in my own body but also working with others as a group. The color is created in my inmost being and expressed through the body; the body ‘paints it’ so vividly and soberly that this ‘painting’ can be seen and judged (objectively).
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We also work with the qualities of the past (back and down), future (front and up) and present. At the center of the work, and of this entire field, we might use Marie Luise Kaschnitz’s poem Future :
Endlich Sagt euch los vom Grauen. Zwar in Asche sinkt die Welt, doch Geschlechter werden bauen was vor unserem Blick zerfällt.
At last Speak yourselves free of the dread. True, the world sinks into ashes, but future generations will rebuild what crumbles before our eyes.
Ehe noch des Unheils Ende und ein neuer Stern erschien, muss im Herzen sich die Wende, muss ein Wille sich vollziehn.
Even before the evil ended and a new star appeared, must the heart prepare the turning, must the will be fulfilled.
Nur Geglaubtes lässt sich finden. Nur Gewissheit wird den Stein heilger Kräfte neu entbinden.
We can only find what we believe. Only conviction will give birth to the stone of sacred forces.
Stund um Stunde sind verkettet Ehe uns die Zukunft rettet. Müssen wir die Zukunft sein!
Hour after hour is linked Before the future saves us. We are the future!
We might, instead, choose to use the Sanskrit poem: Look to this day, For it is life, The very life of life: In its brief course lie All the realities and truths of existence, The joy of growth, The splendor of action, The glory of power. For yesterday is but a memory, And tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived Makes every yesterday a memory of happiness, And every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day!
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From the very first gesture, the poem opens up; the expanse of the world must become real for me. Endlich! (At last!): Here, we make a great E, embodying the spirit of the world within us. In this sense, we apply to the poem things we had previously practiced experiencing their qualities more strongly strongly.. To To wrestle to ascend into these struggles, students st udents are plunged body and soul into the true meaning of the word. At the conclusion of the poem, this wrestling can be sealed: Reaching above my head with the right hand, and with the left hand to the earth, standing on one foot, I indicate that I am not standing in place, but that I am ‘on my way.’ The zodiacal fishes grow out of the text (see chapter First and ), admonishing us to see ourselves as mediators between Twelfth Grades ), heaven and earth.
Fig. 8
At these points in the High School, no matter how often we fail, we experience again and again that the rustle and whisper of daily speech can be transformed, here and now, by the individual, into the sound of the trumpet, and more beautiful yet, into the sound of the orchestra when we travel the entire way together, as a group.
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Eurythmy in Preschool We all know how existentially crucial eurythmy is for the child in the We first seven years. For the child to cover her face with her hands means, for the sense of life, “I am hidden, in the dark, no one sees me!” Movement and being are one, the child rejoices with her hands; she is angry with her feet; when the soul moves, she claps and stamps. Little people make no distinction between their inner feeling and reality reality.. Just as inner and a nd outer being still flow into each other, so too their body and the surrounding world. For the child, objects are a re beings. The table ‘hurts’ just as the child’s forehead does. Only gradually do children experience the human sphere and the outer sphere as separate. Wee assume that what we feed W f eed children makes a difference for their sense of taste and well-being. The same is true of the clothes we put on them. Do we pay the same attention to the important questions as to whether and how our movements around the children matter? Great things are revealed in human movement. Stance and gait reveal a friend’ friend’ss state of mind and health. Consciously or not, we read in the tilt of a head modesty, pride, aggressiveness or attentiveness. And how strong the acoustic impression made by sounds! Not only can we hear who is walking down the hall, but we can even sense if the person is excited, angry or tired. Adults can read movements. Children feel them, imitate them. They absorb them much deeper, because they lack the protection provided by being able to interpret them. They have an immediate impact on their soul and feeling life. But whenever we take something in, it gets transmuted into form! Nutrition is one example of this fact: Whether it is too little food or
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an unbalanced diet, everything has an effect on the formation of the organs. Why should it be different with the ‘ingestion’ ‘ingestion’ and ‘digestion digestion’’ of movements? It only differs to the extent that the absorption of movements is deeper yet, more closely linked with the person’s soul. It doesn’t just affect the body, but affects strongly the highly fragile structure of the child’ss soul-life. This is true of all movements, for children live incessantly child’ in movement. Whereas we adults ponder and listen quietly, children ‘think’ with their hands and feet; they are constantly active and can only listen without moving for very short periods of time. All games are learning opportunities: jumping, skipping rope, skating, balancing, running fast. These games are always successful if the children participate in them with their whole being, joyfully. The body becomes active, healthy and untiring. Nothing else happens when we do eurythmy with preschool children. We hop, we stamp, we run fast and light-footed, together or alone, just as we do when we play. The eurythmic impulse, the contents of the movement isn’ isn’t just on the body: It is primarily located in inner experience. Eurythmy can start more or less like this: We open arms and legs wide and jump happily: “Y “Yes, es, yes, yes, here we are!” Joy, Joy, openness radiate ra diate throughout the movements. Then we reach up to the sun to gather strength. We clasp our arms to our chest, then relax and reach above our heads. We make a eurythmic O, we take the sun in our arms, The eurythmists speaks: “Let’s get a lot of strength from the sun,” or “We look for strength in the earth.” The sentence is similar, gestures too, now narrow,, now wide. But when she says, “Let’s narrow “Let’s get a lot of strength from the earth,” instead of forming a sunny O (above our heads), we reach down to the ground with a strong D gesture and a vigorous explosive sound. If it is stormy outdoors, and the children come in winded, they may wish for the power of the wind. This gathering-in of forces can be repeated in every lesson, along with the alternation of contraction and release. Every time the same, yet every time new, according to the children’s needs. The eurythmist working with young children is called upon to be wide-awake in soul, flexible and absolutely sincere. The soul coloring
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is passed along to the children’s souls and bodies through the teacher’s gesture. The child’s surrender to the environment facilitates the wonderful capacity we call imitation, upon which all learning rests. The child is open to all the movements in her environment, takes them all into her spirit-, soul- and physical-constitution by reproducing them. This places us before a momentous responsibility to perform our own movements in a meaningful manner, carried aloft by the spirit, never allowing them to become mechanical. Allowing the children to move in a manner copied from technology would be like giving them stones instead of bread. We grasp the world with our hands and feet. We want to induct the children in their use, humanely, subtly, with empathy. How can we do this? Not with sermons, but with an image: We are walking through the woods, stepping on soft moss, then on pine needles, now on stones, and now we come to a brook and jump across it and at last we come to the meadow. Now we go down, skipping happily. The images must be strong, experienced inwardly. They can be accompanied by a verse, or the sound of bells, wooden sticks, a harp or a recorder. In any case, the adult must participate! The adult’s ‘mantle of movement’ must be wide and enveloping enough for all the children to be carried along in it. We want to ride. We call the horse, “Come, come, come!” With our arms we form a loving O. We stroke the little horse, “Ai, horsey, Ai, Ai, Ai.” The eurythmic gesture for the sound Ai , in which one hand or arm glides in front of the other, is self-evident for the children who pick it up gaily. “Ai, what a beautiful coat you have.” Then we sit up, close our fists on the reins and off we go: “My white horses, they love to go slow, with measured step along the way.” Slowly, knees raised, feet extended like hooves, we are both rider and horse. We clearly experience the children pulling inward through these images, healthily, in harmony with the self and with one’s actions. How easily said: a human being in harmony with his deeds! And how rarely we adults manage to be in harmony with ourselves and with the world in our thoughts and deeds! We have before us an archetypal model of humanity.
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We have such an image before us at Christmas when we celebrate the birth of the Child and of Christianity. From this anniversary a stream of life flows over the entire year. In our education of the young child’s movement, we must dedicate our entire attention and responsibility to this enchantment of Beginning. If we connect the movements with that which contributes to human skill and strength, with speech and with contemplative music appealing to the feelings, then the highest forces truly come to inhabit the growing body, connecting heaven and earth in the human being. If this is successful, we are entitled to hope that there will be an Easter, a resurrection in the child’s future biography. The person will be able to spread wisdom and blessings into old age.
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The Curriculum— a Work of Art Correspondences between the Developmental Phases and the Eurythmy Curriculum
In his treatise on Plant Metamorphosis, Goethe wrote: “All forms are similar, and not a one resembles the others. And thus the chorus points to a secret law.” This describes from another point of view the fundamental gesture at the root of pedagogy. The secret laws of the various ages are revealed quite individually in each person. Every external form, but also every soul and spirit form in the human being points to the ‘secret law’ of humanity, differentiated in each individual. What a glorious task is thus assigned to pedagogy! The educator’s ever-renewed preoccupation is the search for the generality as reflected in the particular. Another motto, this one by Schiller can also be of help: “Do you seek the highest, the greatest? The plant can teach you. What the plant is without applying her will, this you must be willingly.” To sense the processes of growth, to perceive them imitatively and to lend them form and expression in colors, musical tones, in clay, wood and stone, or through word and movement—all this leads us to Art. Yet if the material of this art is not just a component of the world but a world all to itself, if this material is the human being, the whole human being in his/her temporal and spatial form, then the artistic creation is not music, painting, sculpture or poetry, but the art of education. The true art of education, as understood by Waldorf pedagogy, builds on the idea of transformation, of metamorphosis. At every age, it asks one question: What is now the highest, the greatest? Which food, which material and which method does the child need now in order to develop
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this highest capacity out of his own will ? In this manner, the Waldorf curriculum represents a totality. It is a work of art, to be ‘read’ from the development of the growing person and aimed at his/her formation in the most comprehensive sense. If this aspiration is sound, it is a very rich one, and it has far-reaching consequences. How do the different totalities look? The current stage of life determines the choice of materials. Just as the human being is an articulated being of spirit, soul and physical body, so too we must determine the subjects to be taught in such a way that they are articulated yet well related to each other. Head, heart, hand—science, art and religion—are connected and in balance if the teaching is anthropologically sound. In order to do justice to human beings developing in the stream of time, the curriculum has to be a fine-tuned composition. In the first years, one needs to work especially out of the will, external activity and imitation. Middle childhood demands primarily a penetrating attention to the feelings. The adolescent needs strong challenges and stimulation guided by the intellect. In this way, the curriculum has a wide sweep, differentiated according to age. This articulation is also at work in the composition of individual subject matters. Indeed an attempt is made to match individual lessons with the human archetype, its roots, leaves and flowers, i.e., will in the realm of action, feeling in its multiplicity and intellect. When teaching foreign languages in the early grades, whether Spanish, Russian, Chinese, or French, the children speak and sing, and auditory material is introduced through movement. In the middle grades, the children start to write; using the foundation of those early years, they practice grammar and syntax. In this fashion it is possible to build up in the higher grades the structure of speech on the foundation of a feel for language. A free, autonomous intercourse with the language—appropriate to individual and age-related capacities—is now possible. This construction based on the totality could be followed in detail for all subjects. If we now train our gaze to the teaching of eurythmy, it becomes clear that it plays a mediating role. Eurythmy builds bridges between the subjects and within each subject matter (see below). But in the person
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too, eurythmy is constantly building bridges, between doing, feeling and thinking. If one of these soul activities is missing, movement ‘falls out’ of eurythmy and it turns into simply dance or gymnastics. Eurythmy mediates between the subjects to the extent that the themes of the main lessons, which are most markedly related to the children’s developmental age, can be elaborated eurythmically. For instance, we might think of fairy tales in the first grade. In eurythmy, fairy tales get picked up in the form of playful, circular movement. Fractions in the fourth grade are picked up in the form of differentiated spatial forms and stepping series, helping the child to literally embody knowledge. In sixth or seventh grade physics, the first laws of mechanics translate into the rod exercises practiced in eurythmy. Using copper rods about three feet long requires a great deal of precision and skill. For instance, it is necessary that there be a square angle between the rod and the outstretched arm. Or again, the rod gets thrown and caught in a beautiful rhythm, alone or in groups. Precision and empathy, not arbitrary willfulness, are required. When the tenth grade works with rhymes and meters in poetry, eurythmy embarks on the independent elaboration of poems. Spatial forms for a sonnet are contrasted with forms for blank verse. Adolescents are challenged to apply their personal sense of style, prepared in the learning of literature and composition, and to express it in the body. Eurythmy takes up the themes of each age and treats them in the whole person: thinking, feeling and volition. If this is successful, one could say that eurythmy acts like a kind of burning-glass for the entire pedagogic process. Ideally, its task is to create in movement a kind of quintessence of the most diverse subjects. We shall select one motif to throw light on this Gesamtkunstwerk (unified work of art) concept. Whereas we mentioned earlier the unity of life-stage and teaching material, we shall now attempt to show the compositional unity of the curriculum. It is not just by approximation that the curriculum builds on the fact that schooling goes on for twelve years. If it is truly a totality ‘read’ from the being of humanity, then the respective sections must have a well-proportioned relationship to each other. It can’t be just a matter of piling things upon each other.
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There must be an attempt to build a vault, an arc reaching from the first to the last grade. And if these are fitting, it should also be possible to demonstrate a correspondence between the second and eleventh grades, and similarly between the other ages.
First and Twelfth Grades First Grade
The most important thing is to learn to ‘read the child.’ And a really practical knowledge of the human being oriented towards the body, the soul and the spirit helps us learn to read the children. This is what makes it so difficult to speak about ‘Waldorf pedagogy’ in general. For Waldorf pedagogy is not something one can learn or discuss, but is pure praxis: One can only narrate through concrete examples how this praxis is exercised in this or that case, for this or that need. 27 What do we read in the gait of a three-year-old child? Is its step heavy because it is still awkward, or can we observe softness, roundness? The child bounces like a little ball; on the whole she already knows her way and can be quite coordinated. Yet in the detail she is not yet secure, still bumps into things, hurts herself, awakens to her own movements from impact with the environment. While the child is round and heavy, her gestures have something featherlike. This quality disappears over the next two years. The goal of greater accuracy appears in the movement body. The child discovers balance and educates it further. What delight when the little boy manages to stand on one foot! What jubilation with the first jump! Jumping from a chair into the adult’s arms comes early, with joyful trust; it is a leap into the process of shooting up. It is a momentous developmental step when, on her own, the child jumps from a stool or a stair and manages to maintain her balance! And now to the schoolchildren! Goal-oriented, they walk up to the teacher on the first day of school. During their admissions interview, they happily skip on one leg. And with a little luck they catch the ball. They are familiar and at ease in their body. Exercises of ‘body-geography’
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are easily started and can be continued with ever-greater expectations of success: left hand to right eye, left foot to right knee, and so forth. As we can see, the child’s movement informs us about her maturity, its developmental steps. The movements give us many clues about the relationship between the spirit and the physical body. How short a step then to using movement to engage in a conversation with the body, to nurture and educate it! This eurythmic education of the movement must always aim at imbuing the child’s entire being: spirit, soul and physical being. What happens in the first grade? To put it abstractly, we attempt to awaken soul images through movement images. The connection between inner image and external image can be established by the magic of imitation which children still control when they first enter school. Here is one concrete example: The children stand in a circle. In a natural but measured voice, the teacher calls: “Sun, sun come forth!” Doing so, he form a generous O-gesture filled with life. The arms are rounded high above the head, warm, colorful in their mood. The children’s arms follow suit: Small suns appear, almost filled by the head. Many of the children’s arms touch their heads, because the head is big and the arms are still short. Many hands rest on the head, little arms get quickly tired. Some of the suns do not seem visible at all, they are barely suggested—and yet the eyes tell us that the sun is shining. Here it is important to discern: Is the child tired? Is she getting sick? Or is the connection between spirit-soul and body still weak? It is good for the class teacher to observe eurythmy classes without teaching them, and use this opportunity to ‘read’ the children. Precisely there, seemingly simple gestures allow the teacher to read quite clearly how smoothly the children have slipped into the instrument of their bodies. A loving word, an approving nod or a stern glance can help along many a developmental step. The children need for their practice to be accompanied by many people. They learn from their environment. At that stage, the children always stand in a circle during eurythmy class. Everybody sees everybody else. Each child knows where he or she belongs. This makes for security, poise and confidence. This very habit
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allows free movement to unfold. The assigned place in the circle acts like an authority. This is empowering, because it is economical. With habit, it takes less time to get the class in good order. Through the power of imitation, the children are completely oriented to the teacher. They live powerfully in the periphery. At that stage, the mood, the atmosphere (set by the teacher) are easily absorbed and are extraordinarily effective. To a certain extent, the circle in first grade is still a vault, a golden sphere. The children still hang from golden threads.
Fig. 9
The gestures flow out of an overarching image into each single child. There it becomes singular movement, individual style, even self-will. Right and left also are super-ordained in the universe. One theme of the first grade is the discovery: Where in myself is the right, where is my left hand? With my two feet The earth do I greet First comes the right Then comes the left, First the busy one Then the nimble one. With my two feet The earth I greet. Universal laws become the child’s possession. How strongly the imitation of movement penetrates the children is expressed not only in their bodily motions, but also in the way they move through space. Much
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of what we do in the first grade lives out of the images and mood of the fairy tales, with archetypal forms like the circle, the straight line, the spiral. If we think of the spiral staircase in Snow White’s castle tower, or the narrow steps across the brook in Little Brother and Little Sister , or of the castle courtyard through which the animals canter, or the vault of the sky in which birds are circling. The children move individually and freely, but within the great image and law of the general forms.
Fig. 10
There is another angle from which to consider the fact that the child ‘moves toward herself’ out of the heavenly vault, out of the periphery: She approaches herself, not from space, but from the outer boundary of her own body. This occurs in a great variety of finger games and foot exercises which humanity had used since time immemorial to educate its young. To bend and stretch, to wriggle and reach, to point, to hide, all these actions and the quality of movement they represent are practiced to the accompaniment of various verses. My fingers, they are nimble and fast, Sometimes dark, Sometimes light. They can stretch, And they can crane, And they can hide quickly. He is the smallest and cutest. He is the smartest. This one doesn’t like to get up
(make a fist) (spread out) (spread out) (hands behind the back) (little finger) (index finger)
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Except to get a ring. This one is the strongest And we use it a lot. But the other fingers Must keep him warm and safe.
(ring finger) (thumb) (closed hand)
The human being lives on earth in space and time. We saw how powerfully the instinct for movement grows from the periphery, from the child’s environment. Space plays an enormous role—the child’s memory is still bound to space. If the path we follow through the woods and meadows crosses a brook, it goes without saying for the first grader that all the children must jump at exactly the same spot where the teacher did. It can take a while before every single child gets there, but this is irrelevant—time doesn’t count, space is essential! A few years later, the child’s relation to time and space will be transformed. Ten-year-olds all jump at the same moment, no matter where they stood when the teacher mentioned the brook. The word directs the movement, not the imagined event in space. This should be sufficient to suggest the working style, the color of that age in relation to eurythmic movement. We shall now turn to the conclusion of eurythmic work in the school, in twelfth grade. The Twelfth Grade
To the casual observer, the tall figures crossing the schoolyard suggest a depressed, subdued mood. Their steps are sluggish in their heavy boots. Their shoulders are slouched. But suddenly there is the sound of raw joyful shouts, an awkward leap. The twelfth graders are intensely involved in conversation, busy with the experiences of the latest lesson. Posture and mood are clearly influenced by the individual soul disposition. It is important now to take the students at their most fundamentally individual. This personal space, this sphere of individuality is, however, sacrosanct, inviolable, inaccessible to anyone else. How shall we understand the contradictions? In the first grade, we lived in the periphery, in space, in imitation; that is an aspect of the circle . These central forces must be understood as 52
the individual ego-activity. This is where the work must take place. In the eighteen-year-old, the human form is largely developed. This instrument, like any instrument, must be tuned and coordinated with its user. This is not an external process, but one that must lead to the outside . Founded on an inner impulse, inner motivation, arms and legs, hands and feet get coordinated. In the first grade, right and left within the circle and in my own body need to be exercised. Now this imitation from the inside out is taken up with the verse “I think speech.” The students take up six positions. They sense, at first without any corrections, the most varied relationships between arm and leg movements. The limb is always stretching out, tracing different configurations. “When we teach eurythmy to adults and we start them out on this exercise, they are sure to find their way into eurythmy. When the gestures are practiced in sequence, this exercise is one of the best curative exercises to help harmonize the soul in all cases where it so dissipated that this condition is expressed physically in a variety of metabolic illnesses.” 28 These words of Steiner can strengthen us as we work with adolescents. This inner disintegration affects all of us nowadays. Praxis shows that twelfth graders can become completely absorbed by this very demanding exercise. Once again: The essence of the exercise is precise position, not fluid motion. Quietly holding a position enables clear, strong consciousness and wakeful sensations. Eurythmists construct six very different positions according to strict geometric laws; however, instead of the impetus coming from the periphery to the person, these positions are formed out of the person’s own body-form. This transforms thoroughly the larger meaning (Gestus ) of the movement. A circular form is created through and out of the human being. This can start around the eighteenth year. We find in the twelfth grade curriculum many indications based on this new quality of the circle, simply by translating contents in movement. Faust wants to find out what it is “that inwardly holds the world together.” This is a central theme of the twelfth grade. In religion class, the theme is a survey of world religions, in biology, the human being as crown of creation. This Gestus can now be both content and method. ‘Method’
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in this case means: What gets done is determined by the music, the text, whatever medium ‘constitutes’ the work of art. This also determines the style of the work. It must be free and objective. The only authority is that of the material itself; the teacher can only be a helping instigator. Again and again, students choose the theme of birth and death in its many representations (Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s Chorus of the Dead , Chopin’s Funeral March, Nelly Sachs’ Chorus of the Unborn ). What are the forms, the colors, the spatial gestures related to this theme? We interrogate the formative forces surrounding us and we seek them in the zodiacal cycle. This investigation must be done in speech, which provides peace and spaciousness. The ascent into this conversation can be facilitated by the season. At Christmas we deal with the Capricorn; in the course of a class conversation, students gather everything related to the Capricorn: the sign, the season, the month, the quality of that moment in the year: dying, shrinking, cold in nature. But also, Christmas: joy, rejoicing, the birth of the Most High. The sun is at its nadir. Now, the slow ascent has started. From the outside, we isolate the Capricorn’s qualities: He stands up high, on a tiny ledge, he leaps with great surefootedness; he seeks wide views, high overlooks; he is shy. We notice qualities of this constellation that run in polarities.
Fig. 11 – The sign of Capricorn
Contraction Nadir of the sun Shyness Small platform
Expansion Turning of the sun Courage Big leap
We can find polarities in colors also. Clenching is black, spreading is white, although it shouldn’t be ‘frozen’ as typical of a final stage, but strong, will-full activity. The quality of the Capricorn—an active wandering
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between polar opposites—is red. Mixed in the right proportion, these colors produce the almost holy color of human incarnation (Inkarnat = peach blossom, constituted of red, white and black). Through conversation, we can find the eurythmic posture suggested by Steiner for the zodiacal sign of the Capricorn: left hand closed at the forehead; right hand forward, opened at the end of the outstretched arm, looking out. The legs are spread as if ready to jump, yet firmly planted, left knee locked. On the right side, knee and hand look out into the world; on the left side, a holding back—an inward quality and an outward one, a front and a back. The step corresponding to the sound originating in these gestural qualities, L is very easy to do and not very big. Many students follow this guided yet autonomous Fig. 12 path. In doing it, an intuition can surface that the build of our body is related to forces of which the visible planetary bodies are merely an external expression. Some years we can go through the whole zodiac with the students. The insights must be authentic in order to work with them and apply them artistically, as for instance in the following verses from Dante’s Divine Comedy . If the all-encompassing factor, the newfound oneness is to become a theme for artistic work, the circle as ideal form must emerge in the twelfth grade. It is not an easy form.29 Eternally wandering in light, The sun is on the way And it appears in every position On the arc of the sky. When it awakens in the sign of the Capricorn, Full of radiant power When day and night are equal,
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Like the intuition of spring, When green breaks out, young and jubilant Out of the tender bud’s sheath, When the Creator’s great becoming Newly creates the entire realm, The sun pours onto earth Its strongest force of form Creating, forming and building, It radiates life far and wide, All temporality contained In the image of eternity. The circle turns towards the sun, facing to the front, fast and lightfooted, unhesitating! This requires from every single person a wide-open consciousness: I must attend to myself, to the people in front of me and in back of me, to the circle which we all run, and to the center that holds us all! When we awaken in the sign of Aries, full of radiant force, the circle changes; there is wakefulness, something erupts, with an almost attacklike quality.
Fig. 13 – The sign of Aries
This sign, the symbol of Aries, is formed by the circling individuals, but it soon disappears again, for it says in the poem: “When day and night are equal, reminiscent of spring…” A state of equilibrium demands contrasting formal qualities. There must be distance. The conclusion of this eurythmic exercise can be formed by communal work determined by the qualities of the text. The theme of this work cannot be merely the result of fancy, but must be relevant. There is a radial quality. What is weaving between the text and the class? To what extent are the individuals and the group able to reach for the generality, and how narrowly bound will they remain to their singularities, their weaknesses and comforts? 56
After twelve years of eurythmy, one may succeed in concluding the work in the sign of the circle, the sign of the sun, which enables our life on earth.
Fig. 14 – The sign of the Sun
Every verse moved in the first grade—insofar as it had been brought in word and image and reinforced through imitation—every one of these verses can now be interpreted eurythmically, In the twelfth grade, everything starts with the individual person. Day after day from the cosmos, Stars give me my life. I will gladly give thanks to the world through my deeds.
Second and Eleventh Grades Second Grade
We turn toward an inner tier of the curriculum’s vault, the relation between second and eleventh grade. Swallow Song The swallows, the swallows They fly in all directions. The sky is their blue home, The sun shines in and out, And when the sun shower comes They jubilate in it, Shake their wings, Catch pearls of rain. 57
And when the evening bells ring, They are all dry again, And whistle by like hurricanes Around the house and the church steeple And call each other to the race: To bed, to bed, to bed! The sun touches them with its last rays And darkness falls on golden space And silence, silence, silence— Thus is God’s will. – Martin Lang All the children ‘fly’ in a circle, arms outstretched. Then they stop and create a big L gesture. The gesture is ‘placed’ in front of them, at head level, then their arms sink to their sides in a flowing motion. Each child builds its own heavenly vault and stands in its midst. Again and again, we repeat this L. A new strong movement starts. We are no longer swallows! We are raining! A large R flows over our backs and down our heads. We walk in silence, tiny steps, as befits raindrops. All the children turn around. “We the swallows, we the swallows”… quickly, every child changes from raindrop to jubilating swallow. We laugh at the swallows, we leap higher and higher, as high as the sky. All the children are involved, sometimes in the form of thick, dark rain clouds, sometimes as drops and swallows. Differentiation starts in the next lesson. We form different groups: swallows, raindrops, church spires. Now the entire poem can be interpreted as a eurythmy play with many changes from animated movement to quietude, alternating between one group of children and the rest of the class. It all ends with a big B. Arms clasped around our bodies, many children’s heads leaning to the side; the breath is deep. Peace has returned: time for bed, for bed, for bed. A satisfied peace settles on the class. Provided the moment isn’t prolonged to excess, it is a delight for all involved. After the vigorous movement, a healthy life-sense reigns. Another example can lead us still deeper into the work with the second grade. It is late summer, the swallows are gathering on telephone
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wires. We speak about them, exchange observations. Then we repeat our swallow play—always, always changing. Yet today other birds fly through: What might they be? Some children fly, the others look on: What is it? An eagle! But it hardly beats its wing (the child’s face looks severe, ominous). Is it a sparrow which constantly interrupts flying to hop on the ground and shake its wings? Is it a parrot with his screechy calls? Animals provide an inexhaustible theme—autonomy, supported by imaginative unity. We often have in front of us ‘masters of the beasts,’ children who quite strongly step into an animal’s essence, completely alive in the animal’s Thou. In the second grade, the circle, several circles, become dominant. The protective, concealing sheath still gives order and security. We observe very closely which children are often (perhaps too often) ready to demonstrate for the group, and which ones rarely are. It is part of the normal development at that age to make oneself the center of interest in a healthy fashion. When most of the children can take this in stride, the second grade is ready for an exercise with profound pedagogical effects: a kind of Dionysian round, which is one of the exercises described by Steiner: I and You / You and I / I and You / Are We ! There is an intensifying repetition up to the We . Then the words get reversed: “You and I / I and You / You and I” and we are back where we started. Silence/rest follows the vigorous movement, the mutual encounter. The children move across the space diagonally and in pairs, coming together, then separating. At the We, they cross paths. As in the text, the second part of the movement mirrors the first. In the first grade, the main effort went into creating of a healthy unity, to create, among other things, a strong home for the class spirit. Community was the biggest concern. In the second grade, we must work harder on differentiation. The I and You exercise draws out the individual but quickly restores him/her to the whole. The single person has the main
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role , but each person is most important! We notice here a strong social and therapeutic effect. We learn to understand what Steiner meant when he described the exercise as being effective against ambition and envy. Let us consider the stories that are told in that class. The theme is I and Thou writ-large! The human being as an Ego between the Thou of the angel and the Thou of the animal. We have both qualities in ourselves: something of the saint and something of the clever sly fox and greedy wolf. We take up and choreograph sacred festive texts. Simple spatial forms walked by individual children and by the class as a whole, large festive arm gestures can be connected to a beautiful Silesian Christmas carol. The children stand in two circles, but since all the children want to participate, we are distributed through the room. The circle turns into a square. Each child walks its own path, yet the form as a whole is cohesive. Von seinem ewgen festen Thron Ist Er herabgestiegen, Der eingeborne Gottessohn. Er will verborgen liegen In einer Krippe schwach und klein, In Windeln eingehüllet Der allen Sternen gibt den Schein Der Erd und Himmel füllet. Hallelujah, hallelujah!
From his eternal mighty throne Descended He, The inborn Son of God. He will lie hidden Small and weak, in a crib, Swaddled in cloth. He who gives stars their radiance, He who fills heaven and earth. Hallelujah, hallelujah!
Accompanied by the text or by the melody, the path evolves into the form. Thus in the second grade, the community gets formed. Out of many single activities by the existing group: the group is transformed into a community. Eleventh Grade
In the following text by an eleventh grader, we see again the theme I and You, in a strikingly new form. It opens up to the listener after repeated reading or speaking, when the I and Thou is revealed as its key
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Fig. 15
You will lose your gods, Your dreams of certainty in this life, Your hope, Your waiting for God’s guidance. We are alone at first. Destiny was put into our hand. We are responsible for every deed. We must seek a new God Who will of us make a world and out of the world an ‘I.’ We must find the one, The one waiting for us Wanting to be experienced. He is the goal of all our life. Either we go under or we flower in eternal light. Yet only to our children will we be able to transmit some hope in God’s guidance. But who is a child? – Marco Walker
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Young, dark, serious eyes gaze with a grave smile. A few weeks ago, the hair now shorn was shoulder length. The text, written by an eleventh grader was handed to the teacher with a gesture of indifferent abandon. The class starts. We stand in a circle. The goal of our attention is conscious posture. How do I stand? Is my head, with its vault of the skull, erect and awake, well centered above the body? Can I feel my shoulders, the wonderful space around my head, neck and shoulders where a connection is established with my comrades? This shell, this supposedly empty space? This ‘nothing’ in ourselves is getting more and more interesting! We observe: What happens when we all move to the middle? How do we carry our heads? Are we carrying them at all, or do we ‘lose our head’ when we walk? We all know this ‘headlessness’ from our daily lives. Here in the eurythmy class, we can experience on a small scale how to remain clear-headed, how not to run like a chicken without a head. We can experience this simple encouraging pace in almost archetypal, fashion. Now we direct our attention to our walking. We loosen the foot, a stream rises up to the head across the back; in the loosened step, the front takes along the head. The front carries the head, and the stream of movement flows back down our front to the foot. Observing, describing, studying in action, we work on this walking, we get reacquainted with this walking, which is after all quite familiar. Further practice makes clear that the stream of walking doesn’t just flow over the person; it also flows through the earth! The foot placed in front gives a backward impulse and enlivens the back foot for the next step. In this fashion, each step connects me with the self and with the earth.
Fig. 16
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Walking is an open secret, and in the eleventh grade, with the students approaching their eighteenth years, there is something deeply satisfying about my own walking. Now students can work independently and wakefully on the mystery of the upright posture and of the free step. Few words are needed. Students experience that they have arrived at the center of the realm of self-knowledge and self-education. Often we can sense something like a mood of friendly reserve over the eleventh grade; hope and readiness. For many classes this year represents an inner high point. The focus is not on final exams and graduation requirements, but rather on the Way , Being, the Practice . We must strive to satisfy this readiness. For eurythmy, this means seeking the way which this particular class must follow. Is it moving colors? Color in lyrical literature? Is there something for us, say, in Hebbel’s Nightsong ?
Q uellende, schwellende Nacht, Voll von Lichtern und Sternen: In den ewigen Fernen, Sage, was ist da erwacht?
Welling, swelling night, Full of lights and of stars: In the eternal distance, Say, what awakened there?
Herz in der Brust wird beengt, Steigendes, neigendes Leben, Riesenhaft fühle ich’s weben, Welches das meine verdrängt.
Heart in the breast becomes tight, Rising and ebbing life, Gigantic the pulse I feel, Pushing aside my own.
Schlaf, da nahst du dich leis, Wie dem Kinde die Amme, Und um die dürftige Flamme Ziehst du den schützenden Kreis.
Sleep, there you enter as softly, As the nurse to the child, And round the pale flame You draw the sheltering circle.
We came up with the miracle of sleep, the mystery of time, in which “there is nothing,” in which the soul expands. The answer of the starry world sinks into the opening soul. At the end, consolation, protection and warmth. The gestures must breathe, they must become colors. Already the first flowing and swelling L can radiate a sacred mood. The students no longer stand in a circle; each of them has found his/her place
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in the room, each of them alone with the poem. Not imitation, but the personal quest, the personal start-out-on-the-way is contained the theme! The swelling gestures become a motif, two expanding Ls, rhythmically articulated, then a rest, a breath, night. A second time, two growing intensifying Ls appear, then a rest, but now in the light of the stars. Rhythm, color qualities, intensification—these are the life of the poem. Students work on the inner qualities of the words and movements. Individual quest, whether successful or not, is a solitary return to oneself. Young people experience the solitary seeking. It is part and parcel of this grade not to work in the circle. Every person in the room tries things out. The teacher must not be simply an observer. The mood of the work is greatly augmented when the teacher too, rather than being an outsider, mixes in sincerely with the seekers and practitioners. We practice and discuss stylistic issues in relation to walking. How do we select the pace? Where do we move? Where do we stop? Which path should we walk in order to make more visible for ourselves and for the spectators the nocturnal quality of the piece? Not everybody will be active: As in ordinary life, some people will always imitate. Do we want to have a performance? If we take our collaborators (the students) seriously, it is right and necessary that they should be consulted. If despite pep talks and encouraging nods, the courage isn’t there, then the work should remain a ‘study,’ and we should feel satisfied, without conveying any sense of ‘resignation.’ This is important, for at that age, young people are very thin-skinned. Thoughts are perceived; feelings are realities. We constantly work with these in eurythmy. Consequently, as a teacher, it is particularly important to monitor one’s own feelings. In the second grade, the theme was I and Thou. In the eleventh grade we seek metamorphosis . Experience shows clearly that this theme lends itself to intensive solo work. When conditions allow, it is wonderful to let as many students as possible do solos if they so wish. Appropriate free choice can be practiced. The question is not whether something will be done, but rather what will be done. To be independent means working with a will that is increasingly my own and increasingly free.
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How differently the work proceeds now! We must find texts. Who will start alone, at which spot? Who will draw the movement and demonstrate it? Who wants to start with the teacher? Can someone find the sound-gestures in order to understand the poem in greater depth? As in life, very different courses will be embarked on. At that age, young people see themselves and others very clearly. Working artistically through eurythmy means using the body as an instrument, my own feelings, my own thinking as artistic media: Through art, the person reaches down to a very deep layer of self-perception and self-education. In the second grade, the child stood in his experience via images and stories of being between angels and animals. In eleventh grade, we no longer have images, but the experience of the Ego and of the World, through movement. The artist in the human being can set to work, with the brilliance that characterizes that age.
Third and Tenth Grades Third Grade
Had there never been any angels Human beings wouldn’t live either; For in the human being, an angel resides Like the clapper in the bell. Each bell sound announces That the two ally themselves; Yes! Your angel sings, the beautiful one, And your heart bell tones.
These words by Anna Iduna Zehnder describe poetically the mood we experience among third graders. Especially by the end of the year, we can ring these bell-tones of the heart. At the beginning of the lesson, we hear two notes, played on a flute or a xylophone: It is a Major Third, always the same interval. This is like a friendly nod, a greeting with
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lower arms and hands waving through the room, a smile matching the movement. In the next lesson again, two sounds greet us as we enter at the beginning. They sound different, more inward, like a wafting, arms and hands fluttering towards the child. The sounds are always turned inward; the corresponding gestures move close to the child, wafting toward the body, sometimes near the eyes, even when the teacher doesn’t demonstrate it in that way. This is the Minor Third. The children soon learn to distinguish between the two intervals and to perform them, almost by themselves. Spontaneously, as if determined by the sound, the circle grows a little smaller for the Minor Third; it moves outward when the Major Third appears in sound and movement. Inner life turns into spatial movement. Inner life is expressed in armmotions. In the first two grades, we built upon the bell, the circle, the musical Fifth. Now we live within it. The image, the sound of the Fifth, of the circle, of the sheath, carry us forward and yet in the musical Third there is like a delicate breath of our deepest experience. As a result, the quality of the circle changes. It starts to breathe and metamorphose. It might turn into a lemniscate, or stretch out into an ellipse. It can be doubled or multiplied, but the third grade still lives in the circling movement. The gesture of the Third is also present in the Main Lesson. The teacher tells the story of Creation: unity of the world subdivided into nine units: day and night, water and earth, Adam and Eve, etc., until the expulsion from Paradise. Other Old Testament stories tie in with it. The children follow evolution through these images of human history re-experienced in the Major and Minor Thirds. Then comes the house-building Main Lesson. Due to the variety in the world, we can use the elements to build our own house: stories about mountain, water, wood, warmth, air and light… Human beings assemble into their houses many components of the world. This throws some light on the eurythmic investigation of space. In autumn, we pick up house building motifs.
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Du hast, o Gott, des Jahres Lauf Gekrönt in Deiner Macht: Der Felder Samen gingen auf, Es glänzt der Erde Pracht. Du hast das ganze Jahr erfreut, Du liesst den Regen fliessen, Dass aus der dunklen Erd’ erneut Die Halme konnten spriessen.
O God you crowned the year In your power: The seeds of the field welled up. The splendor of the earth is shining. You brought joy to the whole year, You allowed rain to pour down So that, in the dark earth ripened The stalks could sprout.
Nun wogt das reife Korn im Tal. Nun gibt es keine Not; Nun jauchzt und singt man überall; Denn du gabst uns das Brot.
Now the wheat ripples in the valley. There is no hunger anywhere; Now all sing and rejoice; For you gave us bread. – Elisabeth Gräfin Vitzthum
One way to give form to this poem is as follows: The children stand in two concentric circles. Upon further examination, we notice that they actually form many squares. A big job now lies ahead of the children: Although the circles must be preserved, each child must follow his/her own angular and smaller path. It is no longer possible to dreamily follow the general movement.
Fig. 17
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The forms are such that the children always return to their own square; it gives them a satisfying sense of security and order. We can then make it more challenging yet, expect more independence. For instance, on the first line, only the outer circle moves; on the second line, only the inner circle. One can also have the children perform different arm positions in the inner and outer circles. How nice, when every lesson brings something new, when every time things get more difficult; at that age, children need and enjoy that! The children are changing fast, and we must keep abreast of these changes in our eurythmy teaching in order for our methods to meet them. Imitation goes a along way, yet the exercises must become bigger and more diverse if they are to lead to autonomy. The sound-gestures are completely alive from the images dreamily absorbed and imitatively felt. The O was the golden sun, or—a bit darker—the full moon; bright red and small, it was the poppy in the meadow or the rose in the garden. A whole new world, a completely different—more energizing— approach appears when the teacher says: “With my hands I am calling a name. I clap – – ! Whose name is it?” A slew of suggestions come up; reality and wishful thinking mingle: Gisela who would so like to be called upon and Tim both raise their hands. A little abstraction is needed: The name must be recognizable in the rhythm. At last, Jonas recognizes himself. Another step forward is taken when a name is spelled out. It may be the end of the year before the majority of the children can read in eurythmy. The path ferries them over from the image of things to a kind of ‘moving symbol.’ The path followed by humanity in its evolution from spoken to written word is more or less completed in the third grade. Again, the children have the pleasure of success: We can speak with our arms—it is like a new language. English, Russian, German, and now Eurythmican! These sequences nurture the ninth year of life! Fun, orderly spunk and jokes are moods that the children expect.
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Humorous material makes it especially easy for the children’s awakening and growing independence.
Der Riese sitzt am Brückenhaus, Und will den Zoll erheben. Der Meister Zwirn im Wanderflaus Will ihm den Zoll nicht geben. ‘Zoll hin, Zoll her! Den zahl ich nicht , Ganz sicher nicht. Was haben denn wir Schneider Auch gross für ein Gewicht’!
The giant sits at the toll-gate, Wants to collect the toll. Master Yarn in his traveling coat Will not pay him the toll. ‘Toll here, toll there! I shall not pay I will not pay. Important we the tailors are!’30
The giant of our imagination stands in the middle of the circle. A cheeky I (pronounced ee (for Ich, I) for the giant; a tiny O for the toll gate; Meister Zwirn (Master Yarn, the tailor). Whenever the sound I appears, all the children point at themselves; at “traveling coat,” I stroke the coat with cozy relish. I won’t pay! Again the I of the Giant, the O for the small coin. Only occasionally does the teacher accompany the gestures: They are completely legible from the picture, so that the children who have ‘slipped into’ the story have no trouble remembering the lines. But on another day, the giant actually appears! He might be the teacher or a High School student! Now the giant’s gestures and the tailor’s are completely different. The strings of imitation need to be wound back. What laughter when a tailor moves the giant’s sound, or the giant absentmindedly hops along with the little people! From session to session, ever-anew, independence is practiced verse by verse in a kind of ‘soul-calisthenics.’ The environment is no longer a part of the child, it no longer flows into the child, who now starts to stand apart from the world. In the third grade, this separateness is merely a delicate, imaginative shading; in the next grade, it becomes a central motif. To the extent that there is a correspondence between the third and tenth grades, the latter brings out a new wakefulness. It represents an intensification of what was experienced in the third grade: There is a new relationship to the world.
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Tenth Grade
I am to myself an alien land, Ich bin mir selbst ein unbekanntes Land, and each year I discover new und jedes Jahr entdeck ich neue paths. Stege. Bald wandr’ ich hin durch meilenweiten Some days I wander through vast sands Sand and through gardens overflowing und bald durch blütenquellende with flowers. Gehege. And every time my goal disappeared So oft mein Ziel im Dunkel mir in darkness, entschwand, verriet ein neuer Stern mir neue Wege . a new star appeared to show me the way. – Christian Morgenstern Morgenstern’s lines set the mood for this age. When young people 16–17 years old move, it often feels as if they are wearing gloves, top boots and oversized coats. To the ear, they are barely audible, brooding and dreaming alone or in groups, or else we hear colorful voices, not always ‘speaking’ perhaps, but in any case very audibly expressive. Eurythmy, visible speech and visible song can seem to present them with unwarranted expectations at that age. It takes too much courage to reveal oneself through movement. One would like to hide, one dresses up. The students clearly feel that eurythmy pierces through their disguises. When human beings move in eurythmy, they reveal themselves without makeup, honestly. The eurythmic expression of that age group confirms unambiguously what Steiner described: Education through eurythmy is an education for honesty, for truthfulness. Tenth graders feel that. They seek refuges, hiding places; they pull back, mortally wounded, until they feel stronger, more secure. In this situation, students meet the teacher in a new way: Now teachers address them like adults (in German, with the polite Sie , as opposed to Du). Everybody addresses them differently, even those who long taught the child in the lower grades. This fact in itself can occasion long conversations. 70
Eurythmy makes it possible to bypass the debates by working with personal pronouns. How should I walk to express ‘I’? “I walk” is very different from “You walk.” This is particularly true since ‘I’ is used as a substantive; it is the mysterious word which only I can use to speak about myself, this inexchangable ‘I,’ which I always know as long as I am in good health. Many years may pass, I may be in a foreign country, have fainted, or be in pain, yet I always know that I am this I . What can we do to make visible in space the ‘memory of the I’? Students who have connected the points of this investigation and are gaining some degree of selfunderstanding find that the straight line retracing its steps is the form for ‘I.’ And what about ‘You’? I know the ‘You’ well, from Fig. 18 all sides. In fact, I surround it, yet always remain aware of myself in the process. This produces the spatial form of the loop. There is in the form something protective, but also something a bit unfree.
Fig. 19
How different the qualities are that live in the third-person pronouns: he, she, it and their plural forms! These pronouns are more vague, more indeterminate, also more comprehensive. This quality can be expressed by a curved line curving backwards. The one being addressed is not being protected, he/she is left free to step by him/herself into the protective sheath of the curve.
Fig. 20
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Students who arrive to class ‘hungover’ may leave forty-minutes later spreading an aura of satisfaction, of unspoken ease. A kind of practical self-knowledge has been born. For more than one person, this kind of work represents a significant step toward autonomy. If we work on texts from this point of view, the work finds new motivation. “I am for myself an alien land.” How satisfying for us to have the straight-line ‘I’ out of conscious recognition of what it represents. A new beginning takes place. Eurythmic work is of a piece with the person’s being. Sensations experienced in various degrees of truth strengthen the students and carry them along! Let us remember the third grade: A delicate germination of the questions “Who am I? and Who are You?” was answered in the stories of Creation. Six years later, the young person is addressed differently. Again, the question appears: Who am I? What does it mean that people now offer me this new form of address, or even impose it on me? For the young child, the answer came from the outside; in the tenth grade, it must come entirely out of deeply intimate experience. In the third grade, the Minor and Major Thirds resonated as a soul experience coming in from a distance. How are they approached in the tenth grade? It is easy to see from various life situations that at that age, the adolescent is at odds with him/herself. A range of feelings, thoughts and deeds, often out of alignment with each other—clever arguments and thoughts are expressed, totally contradicting the deeds. Strong feelings hide behind crude or absurd actions. Thinking, Feeling and Willing risk drifting apart. We can feel these soul qualities in art. We practice to find the style of the spatial form expressing it. If we are dealing with an expression shaped by the will, the person needs to be awake, active at every moment. A round form is different at every instant: If it remains unchanged, it soon becomes straight. Will-forms are round, they change directions with every step. This results in many different kinds of practices. How different the form must be when thoughts are being expressed! Clarity, goal-directedness reveal qualitative changes in intellectual activities. Feeling oscillates between the poles of seething will and controlled thinking. This produces the following forms: 72
In the will, round forms
In thinking, the straight lines
In feeling, the union of round and straight Fig. 21
Speaking becomes important in all subjects, including eurythmy. In many classes, profound questions appear, pointedly dealing with the theme of thinking/feeling/willing. How can we do this in art? By practicing! Never one-sidedly. Just as poems can rarely be represented entirely through straight lines, so too there are few life situations in which cool thinking will be sufficient. We are constantly being challenged to establish lively connections. We see this in the greatest work of art, the human figure. The pole of thinking is at home in the head. The pole of will is at home in straight limbs. Anatomically also, the middle sphere is a middle sphere, a mixture. In the human figure we find the incarnation of the phenomenon expressed by Steiner in his Ecce homo.31
In dem Herzen webet Fühlen, In dem Haupte leuchtet Denken, In den Gliedern kraftet Wollen. Webendes Leuchten, Kraftendes Weben, Leuchtendes Kraften: Das ist der Mensch.
In the Heart - the loom of Feeling, In the Head - the light of Thinking, In the Limbs - the strength of Will. Weaving of radiant Light, Strength of the Weaving, Light of the surging Strength: Lo, this is Man.
The urge to move when dealing with the soul activities of thinking, feeling and willing can serve as the motto of this age group: It is a kind of
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threshold beyond which students discover their Zeitgenossenschaft (their own place in historic evolution).
Fourth and Ninth Grades The widely separated age groups revealed their unity to us when we looked at them from specific points of view: periphery and center of the circle for the first and twelfth grades; I and You and You an I in the second and eleventh grades. Fourth Grade
Ten-year-olds stand before us. They radiate pride and joy. We are here, we work hard, we are human. In most schools, the classes are now divided for eurythmy: The children need more room and they need to be under the clearer observation of their teachers. They had the teacher’s attention previously, but at this age it is important for the children to feel noticed . Now attention and watchfulness must shape the teaching methods in different ways. If we remember the way children learned to spell in third grade, we observed an imitative plunge into movement-images, with a very gentle emphasis on awakening and encouraging nascent autonomy. First name and simple imagery were formed consciously by the child. By the end of the year, the entire alphabet stood before us, most of the children were more or less able to move with it, they knew it intellectually and in their bodies (see chapter on Thoughts on Teaching Eurythmy in the High School ). In the Main Lesson, the next step is Grammar and Syntax. How can we make the transition in eurythmy from sound to word? How can we move Grammar? We look for a ‘big’ word, an encompassing word: Universe, Sky, God. Each child attempts to walk in such a way that one sees clearly that it really is a big, overarching word. We walk in circles: Each child forms his own universe, his sky, his god! The next methodical step can involve asking the group: “Who will draw what he/she walked on the blackboard?” We pass from doing to 74
seeing, from activity to sign to abstraction. This moment—the first time the children consciously perceive the role of the blackboard in the teaching of eurythmy—is very important and satisfying for the child. The dreamy doing is awakened, or, put differently, the warmth of the movement is cooled by the narrow chalk line. Now we have a circle on the blackboard. We spell W-O-R-L-D. Something is weaving and waving, it feels strong, alive, heavy yet full of light. The sound gestures of the word are full of life, meaning and feeling ever-new. The children feel deeply satisfied. They feel latently that what we are doing is important, it is fitting. We make important things visible. I can do it alone. Eurythmy is not just for little kids. Eurythmy is true. This way of working with meaningful forms is expressed in walking. We look for spatial forms that express something concrete like house or mountain. We find that a spiral in various sizes and open in front fits the purpose. When looking for verbs, we ask ourselves: Is it an active verb? If so, we walk it backwards in the space. This requires strength and effort, and is much more work than walking as usual. So, forward for passive words, actions that don’t require much work on my part. Active and passive are treated like qualitative values, different from the way they are commonly perceived. For instance, “I sleep” is straight forward, “I work” is straight backward. But what about “I live”? This should last long, it sometimes takes work, yet at other times it’s easy—so we must move from front to back and into the distance. The form leads us to the horizontal. Now we can bring speech to light out of a deeper layer. The movement has truly been raised to the surface when it can become visible speech. The children themselves can find a form for a verse, e.g., the following Miner’s Prayer :
Es grüne die Tanne, Es wachse das Erz, Gott schenke uns allen Ein fröhliches Herz. – Volksgut
May the pine green, May the iron grow, May God give us all A happy heart. – Folklore
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Fig. 22
Steiner called this kind of formative work “Apollonian.” Apollo is the carrier of the spear of light. He brings the light of thinking. We connect with him in our very body, the ‘body’ of space and our own bodies. Fourth graders become “Apollonites (devotees of Apollo).” What is required is not subjective taste but a general law. What a tall order! The children accept it. Joy and pleasure in one’s own proficiency can accompany this work. Space, with its qualities, begins to play a new role. It would be irrelevant to work on Apollonian forms in the round. A circle has neither front nor back, neither left nor right. What lives in the circle is the turning, whirling, expanding, contracting. It is a breathing form, a vortex, cosmic. When one steps out of the circle, one stands frontally, turned toward the world. In real life, fourth graders like to face us, meaning that they are testing us: Who are you? How far can I go? This is why we must show them where to go, in spiritualized yet concrete eurythmic forms. This is also why, when we work in this manner with the children—joyfully, thoroughly and strongly—a sense of contentment sets in. Children increasingly lose the sense of security, of harmony that comes from feeling that I am at one with the world. This loss often leads to insolence, prankishness and much that is questioning, and questionable. Quite literally, the ten-year-old children sense that the world deserves to be questioned. They ask: What happens if I am dishonest? Will it be noticed? What does death mean to me? Who are these people, these adults, around me? Questioning and grieving appear. We must console and attempt to answer the questions—tactfully!
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Eurythmy can do this. It can address the child and say: Yes, I know that your world is failing, it is indeed so; there are similar experiences to be found in music. Listen, but also listen with your feet. Only full notes are played, the children step slowly, without tumbling, without stamping. Beautiful! Each step is as long as the child sees fit. Its frequency matches the sound. Then come two steps, then four, then eight in the same bar. When they walk slowly, the entire class gets dreamy; with footsteps corresponding to eighth notes, the children become merry. And now for a change! Things are just as in life: to sleep, to wake up, happiness, change; these things give color to life, but they must be mastered. Those who can do it are ‘life-artists.’ We practice together:
Fig. 23
Sixteen children live in a common form, each of them completely involved, with all their strength. The law of music, the beat, acquires the qualities of rhythm due to constant changes. Again, what determines the form is the Apollonian element, not the child’s subjective feeling. In the course of the exercise, the feeling moves to pleasure, pride or eagerness, but it is not the end-all and be-all of the exercise.
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Children in their tenth year cross a big divide to a new shore of life. And they must take big steps in the realm of movement if eurythmy is to be of real help in developing the art of living. Frontal walking of forms, grammatical forms, musical fractions—these exercises play an exemplary role at this stage of life. Aside from that musical foundation, beginning exercises with the copper rods and work on alliterations constitute important new accents. “It is a matter of bringing the child’s thinking into the right connection with the willing, and with acting in the realm of Will. It is crucial. And it can fail.”32 If this connection is successfully made, new capacities and a new readiness emerge in the ninth grade, even if, on the surface, the joy of movement seems to have diminished. The Ninth Grade
The fourth grade is at the threshold of Lower and Middle School. The ninth grade is the gate to the High School. And this new beginning is significant in the students’ sense of life; it contributes to their stance in relation to inner activity, to their own active work. Pleasure and displeasure, noise and somber brooding spread. We must acknowledge these moods, but not take them at face value. We should not jump to conclusions when the ‘eurythmy-is-no-fun’ feeling arises, yet we must take seriously the fact that feelings now play a determining role, that they want to appear, and that we must therefore count on them and work with them. The trigger of the movement must come from the middle realm, the realm of feeling. But how shall we do it? This middle is vulnerable, it wants to hide, it specifically does not want to reveal itself. The fact that students’ speech is often crude and rough, or that it takes stenographic form, all these are due to a strong self-protective urge. It is therefore essential to make a big push in the direction of positive thinking. We gather everything that we have learned up to this point in eurythmy and we write it on the board: • • •
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Sounds, vowels and consonants Tone, interval, pitch Rod exercises, rhythm and beat
• • • •
Soul gestures, foot and head positions Forms to express substantives and verbs Exercises for presence of mind and community Geometrical exercises
An astounding diversity appears: We have done a lot. We can work autonomously with the things we ‘know how to do.’ We, that is the students, design forms to match texts of our own choice. The choice of texts clearly expresses the ninth graders: There is fun stuff, humor, aphorisms, sparse expressions, but also very sensitive lyrics for instance Goethe’s poem An den Mond or Eichendorff’s Mir war als ob der Himmel . And the students themselves contribute many eloquent poems. Every day, a form designed by one of the students gets drawn on the board and then discussed together. Should the form be walked? Is it beautiful to look at? Does it ‘work,’ meaning: Is there a fit between the content of the poem and the spatial form? How did the student come up with this form? Very often the answer will be: “It just happened,” or “I don’t know why I drew it like that” or “I guess I just like it.” Discussion can clarify what was done out of feeling—the teacher may walk the form for the students to judge. For the next session, the student completes and corrects the form; on most occasions it needs to be simplified in order to be executed. Contentment settles on the class. Sensitive matters have been thought through and formed, so that they can be put into the practical realm. The group becomes more and more knowledgeable, the forms we design more and more appropriate. This influences the working style as a whole. Now forms prepared by the teacher for a fast musical piece are considered critically and alterations suggested. Activity and inward participation are stimulated by the work already done. What more can we do to be true to the task of linking acquired capacities with the newly found feeling life? Connecting movement with one’s most intimate feelings is the task of this age group. How wonderful the word move in its double meaning: I am moved—I move. We really must succeed in getting the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old to move in a sober way. This can proceed as follows:
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Try to walk a line, with a clear beginning and a clear end. Next, perform the same movement in such a way that the beginning is clear, but the end fades out. It won’t go? Try it. There is no helping it, the arms must be included. Feeling must somehow be included. Graphically, the two paths look as follows:
Fig. 24
Fig. 25
A new style must be developed. Feeling is called upon as a technique for movement. We now are in the situation where we start from scratch again. Dynamics is the magic word at that age, dynamics as method and as style. Now an unfurling spiral looks quite different depending on whether it expresses liberation or torment. Outwardly the spiral may look the same, but the activity of the feeling ranges from the tender to the strong. In drawing, students have learned from the cross-hatching technique that it is possible to express many subtle nuances of the transition from light to darkness. This possibility must now be used in space, with one’s own body. This is difficult, it calls upon the whole person. This age requires dynamic, dramatic impulses—ballads, witchcraft and devilry—but also catchy aphorisms like this one by Friedrich Nietzsche
Wo Gefahr ist, da bin ich zuhaus. Where there is danger, I am at home. There, I grow out of the earth. Da wachse ich aus der Erde. The students first encountered the development of spatial forms in the fourth grade; semantic laws were expressed formally in reverential sobriety. Now, after puberty, we have again the shaping of spatial forms, but from the intimate experience, out of my own dreams, or to gain an overview. This is no longer Apollo—now Dionysus is at work. He must be effective and yet reined in by the young person. So, if in the fourth
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grade the external impulsion of the movement was experienced, in the ninth grade they experience the inner impulse. How does chaos happen? What happens when a group of sixteenyear-olds is loud, when they go wild? In musical terms: It is a badly tuned polyphony, not built according to laws. There is yelling, hitting—even in the absence of meanness or specific anger. In tonal eurythmy, we take hold of this life reality. We have shaped tones and melodies eurythmically since the seventh grade; the intervals —what happens between the notes—have also shaped the movements. Now we are looking for chords; out of the development of the person, a consonance, i.e., the simultaneous sounding of several notes, must be formed, sometimes forcefully. Chords are very powerful, they can be overpowering. This power can be ‘mastered’; when I master myself, I can give the chord a form. And chaos becomes music! We practice finding chords of at least three notes. Does this chord carry me away? Does it tear me apart? Do I jump out of my skin, sometimes literally so? The chord is then a dissonance. What if the sound then leads me through a minor key to myself, into myself, held by the Third or the Fifth, which lies around me like a mantle, a protection and consolation? Or does the sound radiate out beyond me, pull me increasingly into the surrounding moods, so that the interval of the Fifth is experienced like an anchor, a soothing stop after the big ‘flying-away’ Third? Intervals change, depending on the environment in which they live. Many a student may come to the conclusion: I too am changing, influenced by my surroundings. Steiner threw light on this situation in the following words: “And then, something remarkable occurs. We have prepared something, which in the healthy developing person must follow puberty, the independent understanding of what one already possesses. All the things one had understood in pictorial form now arise in full clarity out of intimate wellsprings. I look at myself in the passage to the intellect. This is an understanding by the human being of the human being as such. There thus occurs a meeting between the astral body working musically and the etheric body working sculpturally . Something ‘clicks’ in the person, and through this connection, I gain a healthy awareness of my own
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being after puberty. And thus connecting the two sides of my nature, I as human being have the first true experience of inner freedom, the first true understanding of something which until then I had only seen from the outside. The highest achievement one can prepare in the developing child is that at the right time of life, by understanding itself, it comes to experience freedom.” 33 Steiner gave a verse for the fourth grade that almost has the quality of a mantra, for the teacher to speak while the children perform very subtle postures. This verse, originally given for class teachers and mostly studied in eurythmy classes, works like a very fertile seed. A seed was sown in the fourth grade and it can grow into the independent work of the High School, where it appears as newly discovered independent work. Steadfast I stand in the world. With certainty I tread the path of life. Love, I cherish in the depth of my being, Hope shall be in all my deeds, Confidence I impress into my thinking. These five lead me toward my goal, These five give me my life.
(left leg) (right leg) (left arm) (right arm) (head) (reverence)
The Bridge Years Fifth Grade
Speech and music resound from the periphery of the world, and until the third/fourth grades, the child takes up these sounds and soundimages through imitation. Coming from the outside, a nourishing world of sound forms and shapes the person. Ensouled gestures, ensouled movements arise. We described how, starting with the fifteenth-sixteenth year, something turns around in the gestures: gradually, the word begins to echo from the person’s intimate being. With the ninth grader, movement first takes its origin in the space of the soul. The ninth grader’s movements are secretive, shy, but increasingly individual in form. Slowly we watch
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the appearance of independent expression, expression of one’s own soul, expression of the work of art. Between these two polarities of movement, there lie four highly significant years, which assume a mediating role. These four bridge years between the age of eleven and fifteen in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades, constitute the Middle School. These years bridge between the stages of imitation and autonomy. This is the context in which we can understand Steiner’s formula about eurythmy being “soul-gymnastics.” We could also speak of a “soul-calisthenics.” The origin of movement moves deeper and deeper into the child. The stream of movement was living in the periphery, out of the periphery— we might think of the finger games in the first grade. By the fifth grade, attention is increasingly drawn to the entire body. In Main Lessons, the children have experienced in story-form the procession of humanity through cultural epochs to the present time. Through stories which the child hears, texts which he speaks, images he paints, he lives for a while in the Old Indian, the Persian, the Egyptian and the Greek cultural epochs, and simultaneously experiences his own evolution. There is great pleasure in the sense of life: I am here! When the Ancient Cultures Main Lesson does its job, the child acquires security, feels secure in life. Eurythmy makes it possible to approach these past cultural worlds briefly, in a few words or verses. In the process, experiences are embodied, they encounter a well-prepared soil in the soul and are processed again with hand and foot. How do we move when we dive into the culture of the Old Persians, these men who placed at the center of their life the love of earth, agriculture, cattle-raising? Steps must become forceful. We can hold a staff, use it to guide vocal gestures—movements must become strong, earthy, firm yet loose. Carry the sun into the earth! You, Man, are placed between light and darkness. Be a fighter for the light! Love the earth! 83
Transform the plant Into a luminous jewel; Transform the animals; Transform yourself. The clothes are red-brown, strongly expressive, stern, not flowing. The children might make matching headgear for themselves. How differently one’s movements feel when instead of my everyday head I wear a Persian one! A completely different mood appears with the Egyptians! Measured, but well formed movements. The space is a plane, we must move like a bas-relief, only a twist in our carriage can achieve this. Fingers closed, eye and head neither raised nor bowed, everything steady and controlled. It takes an effort to enter this world of clarity and seriousness. More than the Chaldeans, the Egyptians lived with the stars; calculation of their path was an intrinsic part of life. We want to try and catch in our stern geometric gestures the forces of the stars. Minutes last long when we work like this! Thou sweet well for the thirsty in the desert. It is closed to the one who speaks, It is open to the one who remains silent. When the silent one comes, He will find the well.
Fig. 26
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Astral forces, divine forces still live in us. We are stars, I myself am a star. Its rays shape me , I form it . The pentagram is an inexhaustible theme in the fifth grade. The human being is the star on earth. Accordingly, for one fifth grade, the five-pointed star illuminated the Christmas season in many different ways by. One child began, four more followed, until the fivepointed star appeared. Then we did it with ten people, then fifteen and by the time vacation arrived, the whole class was participating, thirty-five children in all, seven children for each leg. All the teachers were invited to watch the ‘lighting’ of the star, but also its slow burning out, until there was only one star, then four, three, two children … and then, the last child stepped back with a deep breath. When we work with the pentagram we can see clearly that the musical Fifth—the skin and housing of the children—is built and present in all its beauty and perfection. We can read this perfection in the physical body. A well-balanced, beautiful child’s figure stands before us. We are now in the age of joy in movement. Musicality, agility and charm are easily awakened and educated. Sixth Grade
In the sixth grade, we turn our attention to the “Master in the House.” To put it provocatively: He needs to be reminded where he comes from, we want to teach him again, very concretely and very unconventionally, how to pray. Musically speaking, this means getting connected with the sound of the octave. The twelve-year-old children have now arrived in the realm of the prime. Turning to the divine above us, the spirit in us is the Higher Octave. Each rising octave raises us closer to this origin, the descending octaves lead us back downwards. There is hardly any lesson in the sixth grade where this interval isn’t offered to the children, either in gesture or sound; it fits the anthropological situation of this age. We can soften the distress of the time in which the children are growing if we succeed in allowing the most sublime to be present in daily life through activities and movements. We don’t want to cultivate an otherworldly culture. Eurythmy must be a path of practice for the here
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and now. When we recognize what we are doing, we see that the far and near are connected to the teaching of geometry. We ‘catch constellations’ by drawing them. In the sixth grade, the children have their first geometry lessons using ruler and compass. We connect with it in eurythmy and so prolong the work of the fifth grade. The main concern now is not the endpoint of any particular movement, the finished form. Rather, we are doing a kind of moving geometry. We walk circles, lemniscates, spirals, always from the point of view of transformation. The children like to show off quick reactions and presence of mind. We might give the following instructions: • • •
Walk the circle clockwise. Walk it counterclockwise. Make sure that when you come back to your starting point, the circle is as small as possible. Do the same thing again but after half a turn the circle must be small; then turn it big again for the end.
Next: • Walk a horizontal lemniscate always facing forward. • Walk the lemniscate and at the same time change its orientation. • Without changing orientation, allow the rounded end to shrink until it contains only three people. This is moving geometry. Every child is called upon to think along, to participate in the forming. Steiner attributed much value to the faultless walking of large, lawful forms, indeed, when he offered one large symmetrical form for a festive opening, the so-called TIAOAIT, he recommended it to eurythmists as a help against “disheveled thinking.” The gestures of the sounds correspond to the form of the group. The open angle of the A , the vertical of the I and two perpendicular lines in space for the T, close with the round O, formed by the arms and legs. This is movable geometry, carried by the meaning of the verse. The following form for the TIAOAIT comes from Steiner himself.
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Fig. 27
This formal principle of a spatial form proceeding logically and returning to its original source can be elaborated very meaningfully with twelve-year-olds. This form is carried intellectually by its inner logic. We elevate to an art form the consonance of thinking, feeling and deed when we combine it with a text. The following text by Michael Bauer displays again the character of the Octave. Speaking of love, the divine, the text is connected with the lawfulness of the form unfolding in space. The octave and the ground tone sound at the same time. Prayer for Love O God, give me love in abundance That I may be like the fountain by the road! May giving flow out of my heart, As from the fountain standing by the road! And may I give to all, whether good or bad, Just like the fountain at the edge of the road. Also may I be ready, by day and by night, Just like the fountain, standing watch by the road. O God, I beg of you! Grant me the abundance of love.
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Fig. 28 Seventh Grade
On a daily basis, living with thirteen-year-olds is not always harmonious. There is plenty of moody drama. We want to learn how to read the children’s movement- habitus . We should pay particular attention to the origin and the quality of movement, and we note the uncomfortable fact that dramas must be played out. It cannot be otherwise; in fact we should feel alarmed if there were no chaos! How, then, is inner movement connected with bodily movement? We place in our mind’s eye the children’s movements: They come closer and closer to the body. They are no longer carried from outside. Legs, hands and feet are almost deaf, as if opaque, walled off. Upon closer observation we see that the seventh grader’s center of gravity is in the elbow, in the knee, or else in the upper arm, the upper thigh. The human being has, in the true sense of the word, “slid into its corporality.” The strongly centripetal forces—seen from the point of view of physical movement—operating in earlier years have come as far as they can go. There ensues a sense of heaviness and confinement. From the soul’s point of view, something else is happening: a fine vibration of the feeling soul. Personal feelings, pressing feelings live in the
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child; they want to, indeed they must be expressed. A tender inner force fights off strongly formed, ponderous limb forces. Between these two streams, a conversation must now start. Conversations are encounters pregnant with meaning, often controversial, but they are necessary, decisive in the biography. If there is no exchange between the soul life and the outer life—and here we can equate the outside world and the physical body—it leads to rumination and escapism—in our time, the escape into addiction to music and drugs. When the physical body has too few occasions to connect with the spirit soul, the young person risks turning boisterous, chaotic; or else gives up and becomes lazy, lethargic. In something like a gesture of antipathy, the body removes itself from the harmonious chord in which it was living until then. But soul seeks sympathy, it wants to connect with soul and spiritual elements in its environment, it wants to be loved, understood; conflicts also belong to the stream of sympathy. It is now decisive whether soul can meet soul, spirit can meet spirit, so as not to be lost in a vacuum. Every rhythm includes both antipathy and sympathy. The flowing away and the encapsulation live in the alternation of short and long. In eurythmic terms, we can see attitudes of antipathy and sympathy when we practice openness and closure, front and back, flowing out and protectiveness in their many variations. Now rhythmical walking and the postures of antipathy and sympathy take an imaginative quality. We can contrast what is fighting within the human soul: Fiery thinking Timid hesitation Girlish bickering Fearful complaining Will not end suffering Will not make you free. To make allies Never to bend To show strength Calls the gods’ arm To the rescue.
antipathy, no! no! no! no! no! no! sympathy, yes! no! yes! yes! yes! 89
The second strophe, with the repeated “Yes,” fires up sympathy. The foot positions of “Yes” (a half circle traced in the front space) and “No” (half circle described in the backspace)—illustrate the text, show what the soul experiences when we hear the words. The movement, which takes place after the spoken word has died, takes place in the betweenspace, in the inaudible realm! So much remains unspoken at that age! Criticism and questions often remain mute. The art of every educator lies in hearing the unspoken! Musically, this means that the age of intervals has begun. Children no longer should hear one sound after another, but rather the space between them. That which cannot be heard must be taken in, suffered and enjoyed. In the first grade, the children met the musical Fifth in the glockenspiel. In the third grade, the Third was the first touching of one’s own inner space. The octave led and accompanied us in the sixth grade as a bridge between heaven and earth, god and man. Now we go on, listening to the intervals and investigating on our own body. Feelings of sound are linked with qualities of movement. The self-sufficiency of the Prime note, is followed by the painful, tormenting questioning of the Second in the turning of the upper arm. The lower arm and hands hang as if deaf, the movement very close to the torso. The Second affects the person very much, it comes close to the bone! In this interval, the situation of the person going through puberty is expressed in all its passionate pain and questioning. The movement itself, the turning of the upper arm starting from the clavicle, can barely be performed by the students of this age. But it is still worth practicing it. The sound of the Fourth, a rousing, astringent, form, reaches all the way down to the root of the hand. The path of the intervals flowing into the intimate space leads to the Fifth. Coming out of it, we find the Sixth, an interval which children of that age always smile about. Pleasure verging on silliness can be experienced with the Seventh. There is no restfulness there, everything dances and wiggles, until at last the new homeland, the
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Octave unites all the sounds and movements in its greatness and majesty. This is like the path from birth to death. The practice hearing of the intervals teaches about a wide path of evolution. We must repeatedly give the students the opportunity to connect with the intervals through listening , i.e., through a completely internalized path. Inside and outside must remain connected through sound; then the art of movement-eurythmy helps the human being walk artistically the path of incarnation. Then the biography can turn into a work of art. Intervals and soul gestures in the realm of eurythmy are magical words for the thirteen–fourteen-year-old. Eighth Grade
A great arc comes to an end, the time of learning as a group is ending. In the eighth grade, visible links can be found with the other ‘endyears,’ fourth grade and twelfth grade. These are the concluding years of respectively the Lower School, Middle School and High School. In the fourth grade, we experience frontal walking of forms as the expression of the child’s new relationship with the world. Once a fourth grader said that walking turned to the front ‘felt good’—which was saying that it corresponds to “my life-situation”! What feels good for the fourteen-year-old in the realm of movement? If we were to ask eighth graders, many of them would answer, “Not moving at all, let me be!” or “Walking fast, lots of action!” Now movement must have its own character, contour and expression. Undoubtedly, the so-called difficult classes are often kept immobile, out of a disciplinary concern, a fear of arousing the spirits of movement and not being able to get rid of them. Yet in so doing, we actually increase the problem and the concerns. At this age, class teachers need courage in the face of chaos, joy in experimenting. ‘Ensouled gymnastics’ cannot always be still and orderly. Concretely, what to do? What does it mean that movement should have character? In the context of the ‘I’ sound, Steiner described the difference in the movement depending on whether it is performed out of feeling or out of the character of the sound.
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“The third thing (besides movement and feeling) is that the eurythmists should be able to take things so far with their feeling that when for instance they do an I, they should reach out with the arm in this direction so that the arm feels as if very lightly floating in air, not carried by inner force. The other arm should feel as if all the muscular forces were fired up and set into the arm. Here this arm is raised by levity, and in the other arm. The tensed muscles feel like a kind of constant prickliness This gives the movement character.”34 Here belong humorous poems requiring a great deal of movement in their performance, but also fast, abrupt stops. To fire up all the forces, so that they feel like a spur on the muscles—you can’t do this while walking at an even gliding pace! When one stops after intensive movement, the residual force of will keeps shooting into the body; tense muscles, blocked movement can be experienced. The students are challenged bodily; they sweat, they make an effort. Effort is tension, muscle tension is character in movement. Tension belongs here and cannot be done away with. We need this ‘character’ if we practice the following excerpt from Shakespeare’s Macbeth where the witches chant: Round about the cauldron go: In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Sweated venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blindworm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing. For charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble. 92
This requires fast transformations in the forms and in the impulse of the movements. The student must explore: “Am I moving myself in my bones and muscles, or is something of a moving nature streaming into me?” Here we have the parallel with the twelfth grade. This inner impulse, the eighth graders feel it well; it is part and parcel of them. No one can force me to do it, and no one can take it away. I am the one deciding whether my muscles are tense or loose! Freedom, ‘read from the body’ and experienced now, appears in the curriculum, a main motif of biography. In the twelfth grade, this seed can grow to a hopeful tree. It will then bear fruit all life long. So we work in the sacrosanct realm: the intimacy of the individual. One consequence is that the choice of the texts to be worked on must be chosen individually for each class.
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Sphere and Circle as Moving Gesture The circle and the sphere appear in many forms and guises as educational tools, for instance as toys. From time immemorial, independently of country, race or language, children have played and still play with hoops and balls. The ball in particular is a great educator. Small children touch it; it gets rolled, pushed, thrown and caught. In many variations, the sphere appears, holding many potentialities for play; it is a mysterious thing. Kepler described it as in the highest sense perfect. He said, “The sphere represents the Three in One. The Father is the center, the Son is the surface, the Spirit is the equal distance from center to circumference, the radius.” 35 In each movement class in the simplest arm movements and in walking around the shadow of the sphere, we encounter the circle. It is not by accident that there should be so many circular motions. The unconscious educator of humanity works wisely. Our task is to become ever more conscious as educators. So we find informative a description by Steiner given in Dornach (1914) to architects and farmers: “There is no denying that by simply saying ‘I’ or our ‘Self,’ human beings nowadays can’t think anything much yet. Many epochs of human history will have to pass before we have a fully conscious representation of what we say when we pronounce the words ‘I’ or ‘Self.’ But we can experience the Self, the I , in the (circular) form; specifically, if we go from the purely mathematical knowledge of a form to a feel(ing) for the form, we shall experience the ‘I’-ness, the Selfhood in the circle. To feel the circle means to feel the Self. To feel the circle in the plane, the sphere in space means to feel selfhood, the ‘I.’ If it is clear to you that, basically, for the person who really feels things in a living fashion, when looking at a circle, the feeling 94
of ‘I’-ness emerges in the soul—the feeling of selfhood so that even when seeing only a fraction of the circle or part of the sphere, he or she will feel that it points to autonomous selfhood. Whenever we feel this, we learn to live in the form.” 36 Humanity has been unconsciously educated with the help of spherical images. This was the case, for instance, with images of balls in fairy tales (The Frog Prince or The Crystal Ball ) but also games using balls, marbles, snowballs, soap bubbles and many other spherical shapes. In eurythmy teaching, we use balls made of copper or wood. They make it possible to perform beautiful exercises with rhythm and in group work. Unconsciously, the young child also encounters its developing ego. The task of adults in our time is to illuminate this path lying in the twilight. We want to touch consciously what in earlier times was instinctive. Instincts nowadays are drying out in the sand like water. The humus of consciousness must be laid down for something new to prosper. I put these thoughts about the sphere as a foundation for my attempt to show the transformations of the ball and circle in the eurythmy classes. To touch the circle, to touch the ball, means to touch the ‘I’—this should be a guideline that can enrich eurythmic work from a methodical-didactic point of view. The question then is: How does the element ball and circle get transformed in eurythmic work over the years? At the kindergarten age, eurythmy occurs within the sphere as in a golden sheath. The king’s castle, the sky, the mountain and hiding places all surround the child, they build something like a colorful spherical world around him. The young child is always the center of the world sphere. The child bends his body, surrounds himself with his own arms, makes himself into a ball: “I’m hidden.” And when he says, “I am here,” he jumps out of the sheath, arms extended, legs spread wide. Pure joy is revealed. The sphere surrounds the child, and the child stands at its the center, protected by the circumference. By second grade, all eurythmy takes place in the circle. It develops out of a grape, out of ‘hen and chicks,’ and moves to the castle yard, the cycle of the sun. All movements in space are circling movements. All arm gestures are such that they are suspended from above, from the heavenly vault. As if their arms are suspended from golden threads, 95
Fig. 29
the children do not get tired when they succeed in ‘playing with these golden threads.’ They are then in the action, in the bell, in the ball. They are Rumpelstiltkin dancing around the fire, they do not just pretend. Outwardly and inwardly they live in their own vault. In the course of the early grades, the ball rolls ever closer to earth and turns into a circle, beginning where the child herself is standing. It is not yet something one can oversee as a whole, it is always the path ahead of the child. The child walks around the world, around the garden, around the house, following her own nose. Slowly the circle opens up—to enfold a new space. The lemniscate appears, in which two spaces are hidden. The crosspoints of the lemniscate and the rounding of the circles become strong experiences for the child. Now the ‘You’ appears, the encounter with the other person. In the process, the ‘I’ is reinforced. Insofar as it must remain an ‘I’ and not get lost in the ‘You,’ it must retain its own course, even if the child in front follows another path. Until the tenth year, the child experiences the circular and spherical qualities in this way. Now its relationship to space and the environment changes fundamentally. As does the child’s relationship to the surrounding world, so his/her soul life changes. Slowly, the world penetrates the circle, the child is more and more standing at the periphery, looking in and questioning. He/she also offers the world resistance, asserting his/her own
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will. In regard to eurythmic movement, forms are now walked frontally (facing forward), so the circle can now be behind the child, or the side or in front. Constantly, a new relationship must be found to the form. Until now we encountered two forms—the enveloping circle and the circle as a plane form. They are like seeds from which a multitude of forms can develop, as soon as the child learns to walk frontally. Front/back and right/left take on new meaning. And in this movement, liberated from the circle, more and more complex forms will appear. They all reckon with the possibility of sharing with an audience (facing forward) what has been achieved. If we follow the buildup, it becomes clear that things are more complex. The qualities of sphere and circle are connected with the person in many new ways. They become anchored deeper inside of the person. In the twelfth year, the child is on the threshold of puberty. She becomes heavier, she risks not only falling down to earth, but indeed becoming swallowed up by the world’s gravity. In the sixth grade, we still have in front of us well proportioned, beautifully built young people. One would like to call to them: Come, come down! But always remember how beautiful you are, remember your origin! We must accompany the birth of the new feelings arising day after day. Harmony and order must intervene in the chaos of often overwhelming emotions. This means that the visible circle that had been practiced until now must resonate! Its sound must penetrate all movement, inwardness must awaken, and inwardness must answer. The circle must not only become form, it also must become a musical form: through the octave, the tone which encounters itself as it rises. This interval is in its purest form the sound of the human being working on itself. The interval of the future, which we first intuit, must be practiced in the twelve-year-old. The students plunge deeply and gladly into this gesture and its experience. The greatness and significance of this phase of childhood would in itself be obvious from the admonishment to work with the octave at that age. When it sounds, we walk a circle, the shadow of the sphere. When it resonates, we form the organs of our souls with our arms, a sphere, the raising up of the circle. Here we unite the form and the gesture of
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the circle and sphere. We have a threshold situation, which, as eurythmy teachers, we can help form if we work with the required consciousness on the octave chords. If we now taken one big step ahead to the high school, we look at the poem Self-Determination in which Erika Beltle describes the inner situation, the life stance of the sixteen–seventeen-year-old. Now, wild horses, I seize you by the bridle, You who have escaped me year after year! I followed you uphill and downdale, in dreams And could not see whom I was following. But enough now! The blind standing and traveling, the unexamined fool’s errand are over. From now on, we shall follow only the clearly traced goal. The time has come: The strengthened hand shall hold the reins, bravely. We’ll put our shoulder to the wheel, And if things now go slowly, what we attain will be our own, free land. To represent this poem, the circular form must, as much as possible, take the form of whirls, spirals and clearly defined, well-rounded figures. The circle is no longer harmonious, it does not come to me from the outside as a harmonious consonance. As a tenth grader I must now create it anew. In each moment, at each step, I must attempt to be where I am, or else the tension gets lost. A curving line, ideally an orbit, is always under high tension. If the circle loses its tension, an element of the straight line has infiltrated it somewhere. High tension is will ! It is the language of form derived from the circle to help sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds educate themselves through movement. This work requires a lot of practice, a lot of humor and a lot of strength. The walking of forms, of the sculptural circle must connect with the young person’s being. This will-formative force can resurrect only
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after it has penetrated deep into the human being over many years. Then the circle in the human being connects with the cycle of the cosmos. What precisely happens now in the realm of movement, not least from a strictly technical point of view? A new space opens up, from inside. This process is very concrete, outwardly visible. From a technical point of view, this space is related to the impulse behind every eurythmic movement. The region of the shoulder blade, the clavicle and the breastbone must be felt and consciously used as the point of impulse of movement. If this succeeds, the body ‘grows wings.’ In human beings, wings are not external organs, so this walking and moving requires strong inward and outward impulses. It can help the persons doing eurythmy perceive from inside their own movements, perceive that their arms, and hands, and also their ‘wings’ grow eyes. If the practice acquires this intimate dimension, an important developmental stage has been reached. This can take place at the end of the eleventh grade or early in the twelfth grade. It is then possible to work together on the cosmic cycle as a group. The work on the zodiac crowns the eurythmic schooling until the nineteenth year. In concrete work with twelfth graders one observes how great the need is for young people to experience more deeply the higher forces in humanity, to learn more about the foundation of eurythmy. Shall we succeed in finding texts that we can connect with these questions and the work with the zodiac? Will we succeed in finding answers to the latent question of youth? Can we make these words visible when we give them eurythmic form? If we can, they will become real. Then, through human beings and for human beings, eurythmy will become a creative life-building force. We might take as a mantra the following lines by Steiner about working with the zodiac: What stands before us as a human being, What we experience as the soul, What illuminates us as the Spirit, It flew ahead of the gods for many eternities And its intention was To gather from all the worlds’ forces That together create the human being. 37
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Education of the Movement Organism through Eurythmy Ages Twelve to Fourteen On April 26, 1913, Steiner gave a verse during a eurythmy training course,38 which could stand like a motto for the age of concern to us here and now:
Der Wolkendurchleuchter: Er durchleuchte, Er durchsonne, Er durchglühe, Er durchwärme Auch uns.
The Cloud Illuminator: May He shine-through, May He sun-through, May He glow-through, May He warm-through Us too.
A higher thing comes to inhabit the human being, penetrates it, relinquishes itself to the person—and then goes away. “May He warm through” means “May He make us capable of returning to the world something of what He gave us.” The verse describes a ladder of transformation up to the turning point, the metamorphosis where it involutes. If we present this verse in eurythmy, we form the circle as a breathing form, the image of something super-ordained, something whole. The eurythmists raise themselves up to this higher being and bring it down to themselves in the form of gestures, even into specific movements of the feet. It is not meant to suggest that we should practice the Wolkendurchleuchter in class, with 12- to 14-year-olds. It is reproduced here to alert us, in an artistic way, to the life conditions of that age. 100
Fig. 30
In a lecture on pedagogy, Steiner said: “Please note that the human being adapts to the world; in the very young child, the sculptural, formative forces reside in the brain, and radiate out of it. The muscles then take over. By the twelfth year, all the person’s forces are applied to the skeleton, and from there the human being moves out into the world. The human being ‘travels through itself’ and thus gains a connection to the entire world.”39 And in the second lecture of Meditative Studies on Mankind, Steiner described in the following manner the young child’s anthropology: “In the head, to a certain extent, are concentrated the forces that are particularly effective during the years in which imitation plays such a great role. And everything else happening in regard to the formation of the rest of the organism in the torso and the limbs, everything is an effect of the head radiating throughout the entire organism, into the torso and the limb organism, into the physical body and the etheric body, right into the finger- and toe-tips. Everything that radiates from the head into the child is soul activity, despite its source in the physical body; it is the same soul activity that later works in the soul as reason and memory”40 There we have, sketched out, the movements of forces that form the organism, radiating from the head, ultimately giving the human being its corporality through encounter with the world. Let us follow this path in the archetypal form of the circle and its transformations through the life-stages. Until the ninth year, the circle is the child’s spatial form, very concretely, in its structure and movements. Imitation too has a circular 101
character: It should flow as smoothly, as uninterruptedly, as possible between the teacher’s movements and those of the children. In the demonstration below, we follow the circle all the way to its reversal; these evolving forms could equally well be derived sculpturally from the sphere.41 This is at first meant symbolically: Something that breathes, something rhythmically articulated starts toward the beginning of the ninth year. The world encounters the circle. Thirds resonate in the Fifths of the early years. The circle is evolving:
Fig. 31
Fig. 32
Fig. 33
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Let us remember: Once the human being reaches the twelfth year, he or she moves completely into the skeleton. If we feel our way through the formal metamorphosis that had begun, sensing how the world penetrates ever deeper, the enclosure of the circle slowly breaks open and the outer pushes further in. As this progresses, the lines break through, harmoniously, leading to a well-proportioned division of the circle into three. We are looking at the relationships of forces in the fifth or sixth grader: harmonious in physical form, balanced in the soul realm, awakening to thinking. During the process in which the impulses move more and more from the muscles into the bones and sinews, the child is, as it were, pushed into space by its bodily growth. Now—around seventh grade—the space for personal movement must be experienced anew. We do this in three ways: 1. The space is penetrated with feeling ( durchfühlt ), for instance when vowels are formed, not just in arm positions, but also with groups of children placed in the room: •
The A : a wondering opening
•
The O: the circle as loving enfoldment
•
The U: narrowing Fig. 34
Insofar as the space is thus permeated with feeling, there arises a connection between what is personally felt and the objective element in the world, space. 2. Space is thought-through, insofar as geometric forms are transformed. For instance, the students form together—following the shortest path, the forms of the vowels and other geometric forms, such as an equilateral triangle. 103
3. A will-full takeover of the space occurs during copper rod exercises, insofar as the rods help us create and familiarize ourselves with spaces around our own bodies: quadrangles, rectangles, spherical sections, cones. Thus we see that entering a new relationship with space is a condition for a new relationship to my own body. This is why the time around the twelfth year is an ideal time for rod exercises. Now, these exercises are from an anthropological point of view, from home base, not earlier. Besides the physical aspects described above, there is a soul-spiritual aspect. As in all other subjects, eurythmy students must now awaken to what they are doing. In all will-related subjects, we tend to rely much too long on imitation: In the case of eurythmy, this is a frequent cause of boredom and lack of discipline. But the remedy is the transparency of the whole, not verbal explanations. In an introductory lecture before a school performance, 42 Steiner went into details about the pedagogical potential of eurythmy: We can have the experience that, insofar as they are led to eurythmy at the right age, children feel just as self-evidently at home in eurythmic activity as the very young child feels in the awakening of vocalization and of verbal speech. This represents a substantial expansion of the person’s humanity, an expansion in fact of what is most human in us; and since all teaching and all education must be a grasping of the human being by the human being, this justifies our using eurythmy—originally developed as an art—as a form of ensouled, ‘spirit-filled’ gymnastics. For it works back on the entire human being in return. Actually, it is still difficult to see this from an external viewpoint. But those who can look into human nature, those who can observe how things that were educated in the child can be organically incorporated, through an education of the eurythmic capacity and combined with music and the sculptural arts, anyone seeing how these were developed in the child will also note how it works back on the entire human being in the child. We note that the capacity for cognition 104
becomes more mobile, more receptive, as an effect of eurythmic practice in the school, and we shall see that the child’s entire world of representations becomes more malleable and filled with vivid interest as a result. The child develops a more flexible imagination; he or she is more likely to turn to things with love. In eurythmy we thus have the possibility of affecting the life of representations in such a way that the children can approach on their own initiative precisely what teachers are trying to introduce to them. On the other hand, eurythmic exercises feed back very powerfully into the will, into the most intimate properties of human will. True, words can be used to lie, and mere speech provides many occasions for discouraging children from lying. But eurythmy used in the right way can be very useful in dealing with a childish mischief-like lying. Eurythmy shows that, when we allow words to flow into the body movements, when we speak eurythmically in visible speech, it is impossible to lie. The possibility of lying stops when we get the feeling of all that it entails, when we allow soul expressions to become visible through everything that goes into the body. We see that truthfulness, the property of the human will which is of such immense ethical relevance, can be formed through the right kind of eurythmic exercise. And thus we can say: Eurythmy is a gymnastic drawn out of the soul, and it gives the soul much in return…. Thus eurythmy will have counter-effects—in the direction of mobility, interest and truthfulness—on the capacity for cognition and willing, and on the mood that is affected by the capacity for cognition and willing. So much depends on the human being’s perceiving itself as a totality while doing eurythmy, on the perception that we do not have a body on one hand and the spirit on the other hand. Anthroposophy intends to affect immediate practical life. “Matter is precisely the thing we don’t understand in today’s life, because we no longer perceive the spirit in matter. But this is something that can be perceived only in the doing. We can already see what it is that eurythmy makes of the child. And thus we can say that through the perception of this inner harmony between the upper, more spiritual person and the lower, more physical person, which is what the child perceives 105
practically when doing eurythmy, will initiative is created. And this is something which we must educate ahead of all other things nowadays. Precisely this connection between eurythmic movements and truthfulness affects immediately the eurythmy teacher’s self-education. Not only is the subject matter important, but the method also must be truthful and knowable, In the precious sixth grade, children must be able to comprehend in their minds what we and they are doing. We can show, from the example of a large symmetrical form, the path of such conscious practice. It goes as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Set-up and description of the forms Individual and collective walking Finding the appropriate qualitative sounds Perceiving the commonalities between form and sound
Of course, the students could learn this form faster by drawing it; they would also forget it faster. Forms need to travel through the
Fig. 35
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thinking, through the doing and into the feeling; they must ‘serve’ and feed the whole person and lead him/her to a true human encounter. If this deep encounter doesn’t take place, there is a price to pay; resistances will appear, if not immediately, then perhaps during a following practice. We cannot make any concessions about the honesty of the method. Precisely in the sixth grade, when everything still goes smoothly on the surface, the guideposts are set for the following years’ work. If, at this age, the doing remains stuck in imitation, limp and shriveled movements will be the consequence. If, on the other hand, the students understand what they are doing, they can engage themselves, they will stand straighter, their thinking is given assignments and nourishment, their feelings are freshened, their will acquires warmth and strength. In this respect, the sixth grade bridges over to the High School, even though it still seems a long way off. Is not our present time characterized by the fact that part of the soul remains disconnected from physical activity? We see much—and don’t react very strongly. We hear—and perceive very little. In this realm too, eurythmy should take a hold of the movement organism and educate it. What is heard should be transformed into connectivity, linkages with my own body and with space, the body of the earth.
While standing, we listen to a repeating melody. The students follow the pitch with their arms, and also by rising on their toes and down again to match the melodic line. They do so again and again. Suddenly, here and there, someone smiles. Things have lightened up, the melody is shining into our minds. There is a law at work: self-mirroring. After repeated listening, one student draws the melodic line on the blackboard. Now everybody recognizes it: The melody mirrors itself.
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Fig. 36
For the next step, we walk. Again, we keep to the principle of rising and descending along with the melody, but this path is more winding. Something appears, that is intertwined, yet harmonious, a key of G. We can describe it front and backward, alone and in groups, forming the tones with our arms.
Fig. 37
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Fig. 38
Let us look at the metamorphosis of the circle again. We used this metamorphosis to follow the child’s child’s evolution up to the twelfth year, and had found a well-balanced, threefold form. If we sense the development of this form as it continues past the initial reversal, we experience a tug between imbalance and tightness on one hand and expansion to the point of pulling the form apart a part on the other hand. hand . The form expresses expresses an almost unbearable tension. The holding force of the old is still minimal, the new is pushing and pulling but is still fettered. This form is like an image of the human hum an being’s being’s inner condition at the onset of puberty puber ty..
Fig. 39
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What can eurythmy do here? How do we approach the requirement to restore balance and harmony? Only rarely and with great difficulty is it possible to stand on one’ one’ss toes without wobbling and keep one’ one’ss balance. Is it conceivable that the search for different centers of gravity could be the starting point for eurythmic work at that age? The fields of tension between rising and falling, contraction and an d expansion, inside and outside become the working themes. The spreading is a stretch in which the will reaches out, accompanied by a release of vital force. There is an active movement outwards, not a loosening in which the breath runs r uns out. This stretching must be felt and experienced in the soul like being-contractedwithin the circumference. The gesture is incorporated into the physical body with great determination. It acquires character; the students feel their muscles and sinews. Wee are back in familiar territory W territory.. We hear minor chords and find out together that the entrance of a minor chord in us and its soaking through our being has the same effect as the vowel A . When we open up to the world, the entrance of the minor chord feels so strong that our inner being cringes, it hurts—but the pain awakens us. We know this sensation; it is the sensation of the E. How differently it is with major chords: my soul rejoices with the chord—or towards it. It become narrow and ready to accept, it jubilates in an U form, or else it feels like expanding and embracing the world in an O gesture. So we find with the students the inner concordance of chords and vowels. We We discover in Major and Minor a stretching and contracting, a waking and sleeping. It is not so much a matter of virtuoso performances, as it is one of our hearing being ‘true.’ This This causes a certain cer tain kind of levity levity,, even when the general mood of the group is very somber. Children hear well with their limbs! When we work with musical intervals, it is often the case that children’’s gestures display a more secure understanding children und erstanding than their attempts to describe their experience in words and concepts. Making them aware of this fact helps increase their self-assurance in action. Another area of soul-gymnastics is opened by postures, positions completely rooted in soul-sensations. We call them “soul-gestures.” We
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encourage the students: You are someone, show it! Show that you are incredibly smart-compassionate-questioning-grandiose-sad-silly! Show us! Go ahead, show it! The vital question at that age is after all: Who am I? How am I? The question lies in the students, even when they don’t don’t ask it. Which is why we need to incorporate it into these ‘soul-gestures.’ ‘soul-gestures.’ The soul-transformations must be quick, move at virtuoso speed, for that is their nature! Recall how quickly laughter turns to tears, or love to hatred! It is important that soul and body be close and connected consciously with the capacities and skills. It is important that the fourteen-year-old who is trying to become ‘master in his house’ should practice self-determination, deciding how to get along with his feelings— right into his very body. body. Steiner speaks of ‘ensouled gymnastics.’ It must be done artfully a rtfully,, skillfully and easily. easily. Right/left, back/front—learning ba ck/front—learning the dimensions of space with one’s own body—all this provides the ‘shelter’ for my feelings.
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At the end of Middle School and beginning of High School, it becomes clear how successful we were at incorporating the soul into the heavy, empty body through the practice of soul postures. Are there capacities, even though the limbs are still awkward? Has a new originality grown? Can one divine a lighter, freer soul-form—as was the case in the circle above? Is the new space slowly breaking through its bonds and becoming free in the language of forms? In the ninth grade, we jump into High School. One observes at first braver,, more far-reaching movements. One feels more courage in the face braver of assignments: Here is a text—remember what you know! To contract and expand is all al l you need, but you need to be independent. Where does the text pull you in, where does it expand you? And out of what feeling: anger,, pride, despair? anger
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Ich Sklaverei ertrag ich nicht; Ich bin immer ich. Will mich irgend etwas beugen, Lieber breche ich.
I Slavery I will not accept; I am always I. And if I have to bend, I would rather break.
Kommt des Schicksals Härte Oder Menschenmacht, Hier, so bin ich und so bleib ich Und so bleib ich bis zur letzten Kraft.
In the face of harsh destiny Or of human power, I am and remain myself And will stay so till my last breath.
Darum bin ich stets nur eines, Ich bin immer ich. Steige ich, so steig ich hoch; Falle ich, so fall ich ganz.
I am always one, I am always I. If I rise, I shall rise high; If I fall, it will be all the way.
– Ingeborg Bachmann (written when she was 16) The last strophe expresses a law, a general human law. We learned about laws, for instance with vowels. The A opens up, the O surrounds, etc. Let us turn to what we know rather than merely being of the mind. If eurythmy ‘works’ when things ‘fit’ rather than being mere speculations, then doing the gestures should mean that I am able to understand in greater depth and with more feeling the text, the poem that costs me so much effort. Vowels can be formed in space. [Fig. 40] The metamorphosis of the circle has reached its end goal: The fetters are loose, a new circle can exist, a new life can begin. If we don’t just follow its general form, but experience it as movement come to rest, we realize that this circle turned inside out now has changed direction. We encounter an element of freedom. Work in the high school must build on this further. (With seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds it is entirely possible to practice this transformation as a complete series. For us here, it will help us understand anthropological development and stimulate a eurythmic education really true to movement. [Fig.41]
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Therefore, I am always one,
always only one.
If I rise, I shall rise high.
I am always I.
If I fall, it will be all the way. Fig. 40
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What we have observed in adolescent development can also apply to the development of eurythmy in its historical beginnings. Already in 1913, Steiner—in connection with exercises on the forms of the third person singular pronoun er —had given the verse which began our considerations: The Cloud Illuminator (Der Wolkendurchleuchter ). The gestures stream through the body from top to bottom. Precise foot positions help anchor them in the earth. May he shine-through. (durchleuchten = feet in Eu) May he sun-through. (durchsonnen = feet in O) May he glow-through. (durchglühen = feet in Ü)
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Fig. 41
Intended for teachers working with other adults, this exercise was offered at the birth of the eurythmy. It can help strengthen a community, create a vessel in which higher forces can stream. Eleven years later, one year before his death, Steiner gave eurythmists another verse, which they were to use themselves, i.e., not for their teaching but for their personal development as movement-artists.43 With eurythmists also, it can be a matter of repeatedly awakening in oneself a particular soul mood to make oneself receptive to the feeling and sensation of the corresponding gestures. It can be the case that the eurythmists’ meditation about the mysteries of the human organism will allow them to enter this inner experience. This may happen by meditating on what stands in the words with full inwardness, strong inner feeling, so that we don’t just meditate words and concepts, but rather that in the meditation something of what stands in the words gets fulfilled.
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Ich suche im Innern Der schaffenden Kräfte Wirken, Der schaffenden Mächte Leben. Es sagt mir Der Erde Schweremacht Durch meiner Füsse Wort, Es sagt mir Der Lüfte Formgewalt Durch meiner Hände Singen, Es sagt mir Des Himmels Lichteskraft Durch meines Hauptes Sinnen, Wie die Welt im Menschen, Spricht, singt, sinnt.
I seek within my Self The working of creative forces, The life of creative powers. Earth’s gravity tells me Through the word Of my feet, The air’s wafting forms Tell me, Through the singing of my hands, And Heaven’s light tells me Through the thinking of my head How the world, In human beings, Speaks, sings, thinks.
After such a meditation, you will see that you can think of yourself as having awakened from the world’s sleep into the heaven of eurythmy. Again and again, if you arouse this mood in yourself, you will come into eurythmy, the way one awakens from night into the day. Like in the Wolkendurchleuchter, the repetition of the word durch (through) is striking. But now the gesture is turned around: Now through the earth, air and light, forces pour into the human being, the person’s activities—his speaking, singing, and sensing mind. There they live and work anew and can be freely used by the human being. If the person follows the admonition contained in these words, he will make himself ever more into the gate through which the world-logos enters and becomes effective. The young child’s movement lives in its environment and streams into it. The w olkendurchleuchter stands at the child’s age of eurythmy as young movement art. The onset of movement in the young person and the adult, on the other hand, lies in the person’s inner being. The force of sound, tone and word must be formed in inwardness: “I seek to work in the inner realm of creative forces.” The development of human being and the development of eurythmy go hand in hand.
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Thoughts on Teaching Eurythmy in the High School Eurythmy teachers all have tiresome experiences doing eurythmy with High School students. There are many diverse reasons for this. But all lie in the purview of eurythmy. Hearing gets corrupted, testing becomes more rigid. The teachers’ training is insufficient. Yet none of those reasons has to do directly with eurythmy, with the curriculum. As well as a lament, we can sing a song of praise. If we compare high schoolers nowadays with those about ten years ago, we see distinctly that we are now looking at young people who are more prepared in the deeper layers of their soul, more imaginative, but also more critical, more concerned about truthful judgment. They are more open to art and the anthroposophical aspects of their subjects. Especially in eleventh and twelfth grades, they are interested in concrete human and pedagogical questions: Why did she have us do this exercise? What did we do in Lower School? Why? The teacher must be able to answer these questions. Antipathy and sympathy nowadays are sharply opposed. We encounter them every day, every hour. Rejection and receptivity, prejudice and spiritual openness often are present in eurythmy lessons without any transitions. The result is that on one hand we must direct extreme sympathy and openness to each individual student: A warm, wakeful attention for the individual is an existential condition for the teacher. On the other hand, each lesson must be illuminated by the experience of a generally valid supra-personal lawfulness. Eurythmic activity must become increasingly understandable to and intellectually replicable by
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the students. It must be related concretely to life, i.e., practical for each age group. Increasingly, we have to develop our teaching out of a ‘translation,’ translation in two respects: Teachers must translate their materials into the being of the students , individually and age specifically. They must slip under the skin of the group and of each individual within the group. They must also interpret, translate the work . We must take a serious look at the times: What is it the current time demands of the young? How can eurythmy answer these demands so as to be of help? There was a time when this need became particularly obvious: the days and weeks after the Chernobyl reactor accident. This was a fertile time for eurythmic work in the high school. Which movements strengthen the life forces? Do they work only on me? Do they work for the earth? For the universe? Can I actually feel them, experience them? Or am I expected only to believe in them, like so much else? These were questions we were able to meet through practical exercises. We really experienced the grace of the dire need of that time . Then it faded. But the same theme re-emerged as a heavy melancholic pressure in the High School. The High School students’ concrete life sphere was affected when the AIDS epidemic spread through Central Europe. They asked direct questions and begged to experience in this context what life is, what it means to become, to move. We did many practices with the series given by Steiner to Tatiana Kisseleff in 1914.44 It consists in twelve consonants that between them constitute an evolving conversation. The series begins with B of which Steiner said, “Protection in something.” The next sound, M, must be felt. “It gives strength and the ability to overcome.” From B through M, we come to D. The path starts with the plosives, moves over the Zitterlaut (vibrating) R , and the Wellenlaut (wave sound) L and ends with the sibilants S, H and the “remarkably radiant” form above for demonstrating T. The students eagerly took up this evolutionary series B - M - D - N R - L - G - Ch - F - S - H - T, and we studied it from numerous points of view. The activity provided something akin to consolation and security.
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Similarly, artistic work on texts, e.g., Nelly Sachs’ Chorus of the Unborn was met with readiness and a strong engagement. Regarding the search for motifs and the quest for sources to stimulate one’s own enthusiasm, another kind of translation seems important and essential for the High School eurythmy teacher. It is the translation of spiritual scientific knowledge into practical eurythmic exercises. If we want to master the task of doing eurythmy with today’s young people, we must answer the questions: How can I translate the insights I receive from anthroposophy? How can I make them so concrete that they will provide the motivation that is appropriate for our time? One example of bridging through eurythmy from spiritual science to the life of young people comes from Steiner’s lecture “What Is the Role of the Angel in Our Astral Body?” (October 9, 1918, Zurich): We should first develop in images what the spirits of form want to attain with us by the end of earth evolution and, further, out of these images, a transformed humanity, a transformed reality will later arise. And the spirits of form, working through the angels are already forming these images in our astral body. The angels form images in the human astral body, images that one can attain with a thinking developed into clairvoyance. And these images can be pursued. We then shall see that these images are formed according to very specific impulses, very specific principles. They are formed in such a way that the way in which they appear contains to some extent forces for humanity’s future evolution. Whenever we observe the angels doing this work—this may sound peculiar, but it must be said—the angels have a very specific intention for the future social shaping of human life on earth; they want to create in the human astral body the kind of images that will produce very specific social conditions in future human social life. Human beings may resist acknowledging that angels want to release in them ideals for the future, yet that is the way it is. In fact a very particular principle is at work in this imageforming activity—the principle that in the future no human being should be able to quietly enjoy happiness, if others next to him are unhappy . (Bodhisattva) 118
But there is second impulse yet … regarding human soul life, the angels’ intend with the images they imprint into the astral body that in the future every human being should see in every other human being the hidden divine. … To conceive the human being as an image revealed out of the spiritual world, as seriously as possible, as strongly and understandably as possible—this is what the angels put into the images. And once this is realized, it will have very specific consequences. All free religious feeling to be developed in future humanity will rest upon the fact that each human being recognizes in every other human being the image of God, really so, in immediate life practice, not just in theory. And still a third thing: to give human beings the possibility of attaining the spirit by way of thinking, to cross through thinking over the abyss on the way to an experience of spiritual reality . Spiritual science for the spirit, religion for the soul, fraternity for the body, this is the music resounding through the spheres through the angels’ work in human astral bodies. I might say that one only needs to raise one’s conscience up to a particular level to feel oneself translated inside the angels’ wonderful workshop in the human astral body.… Human beings should more and more consciously come to understand what I just told you. This belongs to human evolution … and it must become practical human wisdom. These three themes can be elaborated in the upper grades. They emerge clearly the moment one attempts to find their trace. They are articulated and cannot be separated from each other, they appear ordered as a trinity. This resides in human nature, it resides in the nature of art. To raise one’s consciousness up to a particular level—one does that when one does eurythmy. In tone eurythmy, it means continuing the gods’ work, while doing eurythmy. Or as it was put: “One feels as if transposed into the wonderful angelic workshop.”45 How does the work look in actuality? The new beginning of eurythmic work in the ninth grade contains great promises as well as great dangers. The students know quite a bit, although they know about
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it rather than knowing it in practice. They have encountered the gestures for all the sounds. They have practiced scales and intervals. They have practiced individually and in groups, matching spatial figures with grammatical rules and movements with various soul-conditions, using texts, fairy tales, ballads, poems and proverbs. They have been exposed to a large repertoire. The teachers and the students’ ‘chance’ now rests in the metamorphosed approach of familiar material. Correspondingly, the danger consists in continuing automatically what ‘was done before’ (the same old things). Some of the quality reflected in the words “with the help of thinking, to cross the abyss to the experience of spiritual reality” must appear at the beginning of high school work. Now students can and must become conscious of what they know. This will please even ninth graders in eurythmy class. How can this consciousness-raising occur? Students can find texts of their own choice. Needless to say, they should be short. They actually know a large number of poems in a dreamy kind of way. Each student should draw at least one of these into forms. A feeling of helplessness surfaces. The permission to learn from one’s mistakes can be used as a lure into making a start. When we ask students, “How did you hit upon this?” we are likely be met with a shoulder shrug and, “I dunno, it just happened.” Now we go patiently from the text to the form drawn on the board by the student. We must strictly follow the apparent rules of the drawing. This means that the beginning of the form is marked with a small circle, the end with an arrow, the place for the audience marked with a P. In the conversation that follows, we develop knowledge derived from the sense of movement educated over the years: If there is a passive verb, it feels right to just keep moving relaxedly. If I have a question, I pull inward, or else I pull slowly from my inner space out into the world, seeking answers, i.e., following the rule: “Unfolding spirals express questions.” Divine or spiritual reality is definitely above or behind me, just as concrete reality is in front of me. Elementary formal rules are thus raised to awareness by way of the feelings and the will—all of which the students really know, without knowing that they know it. Now, in the ninth grade eurythmy class, we have the joy of discovery and fun. 120
Two examples are given here:
Wie oft ward ich gebrochen, brach mich selbst, Und dennoch leb’ ich unverwüstlich fort. Was alles liegt in mir verwelkt, verdorrt, Doch unaufhaltsam wächst es drüber hin. How often I was broken, broke myself And still I go on living irrepressibly. How much lies in me withered, dry., Yet irresistibly it keeps growing. – Christian Morgenstern
Fig. 42
and
Das Netz des Himmels reicht weit und seine Maschen sind gross; dennoch entgeht ihm nichts.
The net of heaven reaches far and its meshes are wide; yet nothing escapes it. – Lao Tse
Fig. 43
But there is a second impulse. Concerning human soul life, the angels follow through the images they imprint in the astral body, the goal for the future in which every human being will see a hidden divinity in every other human being. The angels’ activity in our astral body, which they perform without our being conscious of it, must be completed by us; humanity must awaken to it. The realm of speech and language reaches into this region. The cosmic word created the human being. It stood at the beginning of Creation. With the sounds underlying this creative force, we can turn to the divine concealed in human beings. Indeed we become one with it when we do eurythmy! 121
In the course of the school years, this path can be walked ever more consciously. If we as eurythmists are not content with teaching merely the sounds, but can experience enthusiastically in the sounds the force of resurrection, then the spark will be transmitted to the students on a daily basis. The experience of the letters’ creative power can occur by the fourth grade, when most children know the sound gestures. The alphabet can be practiced—slowly, solemnly, gaily, and even sometimes saucily and irreverently! Each child gets his/her personal sound in the circle and it can go around faster and faster. As fast as the wind after a few weeks of practice, the world logos , the alphabet will blow through the class. Now the entire world is with us, all humans, all animals, all plants, and even angels and God, for there is nothing in the world that is not contained in the alphabet. We are all in it, each of us lives it. Once this knowing and this experience46 and this thought have all been present in one lesson, the children will never forget to ask for it “again”! So we practice, quite concretely in one fourth grade, what Steiner described as follows in his Speech Eurythmy course: “And we could go through the entire alphabet, and we would have spoken the entire secret of humankind in the sound gestures; the human being in the cosmos, the human being in his house, in his bodily shell … and by the time we arrived at Z, the wisdom of humanity would be standing before us, for the etheric body is the wisdom of the human being.” 47 In the ninth grade, we approach these gestures on a new level. Now it is very much a matter of awakening understanding, applying understanding to the essential nature of the sounds. One possibility is to investigate and ponder in a practical way the series of sounds in the alphabet with respect to its lawfullness. Let us take the first nine letters of the alphabet as an example. Step 1: We remain standing when we hear a vowel; we move in any direction whenever we hear a consonant. Step 2: We see a first emerging ‘sequence.’ It is possible to build a triangle after each pause. If we look at the quality of the
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consonants we see that the two trinities are very different. In the first one: occlusive/sibilant/occlusive follow; the second trinity has the sequence: sibilant/occlusive/sibilant. Can we test in the walking how a sibilant moves? It flies! And how does an occlusive move? It stamps and doesn’t really go anywhere, its path is very short. According to these sequences, we get two very different triangles: an obtuse triangle BCD and an acute triangle FGH. A feeling can be particularly acute when the sensing person is at rest, and this would be particularly noticeable and familiar to children, whose life of feelingsensing is at the flowering stage.
Figs. 44 and 45
The students know these formal elements from the ‘peace and energy’ dance in the sixth grade. There is something satisfying about their reappearing as ‘laws.’ It is always pleasant to meet old acquaintances in new environments. Feeling memories emerge: Yes! This is connected with me. Energy and peace have to do with me: To stand and ponder, not to struggle, to overcome myself—all of this is a part of me, and yet —to the extent that it also common to others— not just me . The laws of speech connect us all in our inner beings. This is a big thing! I feel it in my bones, my heart, my foot! For the ninth grader these experiences can be developed simply by working on the alphabet. But one shouldn’t ask them direct questions, but simply practice these series.
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If we attempt to test further how “the divine image can truly be recognized in everything through immediate life-praxis,” we can form a circle, as we often do in tenth or eleventh grade, and do the E-V-O-E exercise. It begins and ends with E, “the sound fixating the ether in the etheric body,” i.e., that sets us as an ego being into our existence. It is followed by V , related to F. In September 1924, Steiner described the F as the wisdom of exhalation. Thus we travel from the singular to things wisdom-filled. We not only recognize the other being, but through the O that follows we form a loving connection with it. And we return to the E feeling enriched. The greeting has transformed, graced and strengthened us. Something like it happens in the greeting E-V-O-E. In his lecture of September 22, 1912, Steiner described how one can encounter concretely the ‘greeter’ in this greeting process, although he cautioned: “With boys and girls, one shouldn’t do it too often, for boys and girls will fall in love as a result.”48 Each handshake says, ”We seek each other out and we have found each other.” Eurythmy raises the encounter to the highest human level, which is supra-personal. There remains the question of the third quality, the law that “in the future, human beings won’t be able to rest in their happiness as long as others are unhappy.” Here, in a way, we are dealing with an archetypal practice field. There is never any lesson, even in the first grade, without a recognition of the community, without working to create art forms of and for the community. The king’s castle is built by the children’s wakeful hands and feet, the gods’ high castle is built through the stamping of the rods in the rod-verses. The wind and the water elements or the armies in ballads receive their expressive power from the common activity. Yet only in the upper grades, can we follow in full consciousness the urge to work within this process of “absolute brotherhood, absolute unity of humankind.” We now turn back to the circle as archetypal form. Anyone who has gone around a circle, going faster and faster, knows that this is one of the hardest exercises in form-walking. Some groups never manage to go beyond a very measured tempo, either out of fearfulness or because they are trying too hard. Some students always break the circle, always spill out,
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and others never produce anything. But the technique for forming in a group of twelve people a harmoniously swinging circle, this is high school work, real higher level work. For what is the precondition of success? That every single person retain the totality in his/her consciousness, i.e., in his/her thinking, feeling and doing.
Fig. 46
Going back to sound gestures: In the twelfth grade we seek the letters in their respective cosmic homelands. In conversations and through practice, we find the R in Taurus, the T in Leo, the M in Aquarius and the Z in Scorpio. There are many ways to find these with the students, which can’t possibly all be described in the space of this book. Once a path has been followed over several weeks, intuitions come up, as they did in the fourth and ninth grades, but now expanded: Cosmic forces live in speech, speech lives in me, cosmic forces live in every human being. Speech connects us with other human beings, but also with the creative forces of the zodiac. We should not be afraid to perform the
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zodiac movements quickly, in agile, flowing motion; and in the process also moving quickly and nimbly in our consciousness through the entire circle. Out of this zodiac work, the desire awakens to reconnect twelve-fold circle. with the cosmos, to be a gate for cosmic forces in the planetary world, to be completely here, completely comp letely in the other other,, completely above a bove ourselves. In this way, the student can experience: I am a contemporary human being (Ich bin ein Zeitgenosse ), ), I am a human being among other human beings, I am a cosmic being. In a first artistic step, this exercise can be raised further in connection with the work on the planets. For instance: • the sun’ sun’s movement as encompassing circle in all spatial direction: top/bottom, front/back, right/left, all-encompassing wisdom, white, AU • the moon’s movement as movement come to rest, silence, concentrated force, mirroring, violet, EI • the Four-Headed Four-Headed Beast as a four-fold human being—Lion, Eagle, Bull and Angel in harmony with the sun and moon, establishing the human being on earth, establishing it in space and time. The spatial forms interpenetrate and turn inside out. Doing this can awaken the consciousness of a sublime community to a very high level of cooperation. Wee can practice an introductory form leading to the work on W cosmic poems. Which texts to choose for one or another class depends on the individuality of the class. What is generally valid is work on the movement of forces in circle. If it is successful there is no need to refrain from using the many different proposals from the students. They are what allows us to ‘read’ whether the quality of this very challenging chal lenging exercise in community has truly been experienced.
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The Professional Picture of the Eurythmy Teacher The eurythmy teacher in a Waldorf school has in many respects a particular position. (S)he teaches a special subject, currently without equivalent in any other school system. The art of eurythmy, which is still very young and in the formative stage, needs to be supported by the entire school community—with teachers, parents, students and school board—securely and with solid skills. At the same time, eurythmy and its representatives the eurythmy teachers, must be incorporated in the school as a whole. They all must be trusted, and hired on the basis of their sound knowledge of the subject. Teaching in schools requires training in eurythmy, sealed by a diploma from a recognized training institution (see listing in Eurythmy Training ). Additionally, general pedagogical training is recommended. Centers ). Possibilities for the latter are varied. Regarding work in the school, one can generally assume that one teacher will cover all the grades from 1 through 12. In many schools, one needs to add classes in the kindergarten and courses for parents and teachers. The teacher’s role thus goes beyond the school age. Personal artistic practice is part par t of the teacher’s teacher’s preparation. It is also a part par t of the teacher’ss responsibility, teacher’ responsibility, since it makes it possible to contribute to festivals f estivals and performances. Once the eurythmists are in place, administrative duties in the school’s school’s self-management await them, which they can take up in very individual fashion. Anthroposophical training allows the eurythmists to be valuable contributors to Collegium work. The eurythmists can contribute greatly 127
as organizers of festivals, performances and class plays, to name only a few activities. Almost every Waldorf school also needs a curative eurythmist in collaboration with the school doctor. They work together with both individual children and small groups. Therapeutic eurythmy is prescribed for a number of illnesses, but also for constitutional factors which can create psychological, learning and social difficulties. Therapeutic eurythmy training continues for one and half years following the fouryear foundation course. Aside from from schools, eurythmy and curative curative eurythmy eurythmy are also offered offered in a wide range of institutions: anthroposophical training institutions, clinics, sanatoria, therapy and medical practices, curative homes, special education schools and day-programs. In many places, there are also eurythmy classes clas ses open to the community community.. After World War II, eurythmy began to be introduced in a few businesses and in apprenticeship training programs p rograms in Europe. Although these developments have been slowed down by the shortening of the workweek and other economic difficulties, there have been some successes and future prospects for eurythmy in the workplace.
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ndnotes
E
1. Rudolf Steiner, Truth-Wrought Words . GA 40, Dornach, 1991. 2. Vassili Kandinsky in Of the Spiritual in Art. 3. Vassili Kandinsky and Arnold Schönberg, Briefe, Bilder und Dokumente einer aussergewöhnlichen Begegnung , ed. Jelena KahlKoch, dtv Kunst, Munich, 1983. http://www.schoenberg.at/4_ exhibits/asc/Kandinsky/letters–e.htm. 4. The text of Der gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound) is reproduced in the correspondence between Schönberg and Kandinsky; see note 3. 5. Margarita Voloshin reports on this conversation in her autobiography, The Green Snake , Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart, 1997, p. 200. 6. A reproduction of the The Harvesting of the Fishes appeared in 1932, in the portfolio Das Licht schien in die Finsternis , Eugen Fink Verlag, Stuttgart. 7. Magdalene Siegloch, Lory Maier-Smits. Die erste Eurythmistin. Die Anfänge der Eurythmie . Goetheanum, Dornach, 1993. 8. Rudolf Steiner Das Künstlerische in seiner Weltmission (The Arts and Their Mission), Lecture, Kristiana, May 16, 1923. GA 276, Dornach, 1982, p. 130. 9. First day of the course, September 16, 1912, in Bottmingen. Cf. Steiner Die Entstehung und Entwicklung der Eurythmie (The Birth and Evolution of Eurythmy ). GA 277a, Dornach, 1965, p. 19. 10. Ibid., p. 38. 11. Ibid., p. 39. 12. Ibid., p. 38.
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13. Ibid., p. 38ff. 14. Rudolf Steiner, “Menschengeist und Tiergeist,” Lecture, Berlin, November 17, 1910. In Antworten der Geisteswissenschaft auf die grossen Fragen des Daseins . GA 60, Dornach, 1959, p. 114. 15. See note 10. 16. Rudolf Steiner, Lecture, Munich, early September 1912 in Die Entstehung und Entwicklung der Eurythmie , op. cit., p. 18. 17. Rudolf Steiner, Conferences with Teachers of the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart , vol. 2. GA 300, 2 (German version), Dornach, 1975, p. 294ff; (English version). 18. Rudolf Steiner, Okkulte Untersuchungen über das Leben zwischen Tod und neuer Geburt (Occult Research on Life between Death and a New Birth), Lecture, Bergen, October 11, 1913. GA 140, Dornach, 1970, p. 358. 19. Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophische Leitsätze, Der Erkenntnisweg der Anthroposophie (Leading Thoughts in Anthroposophy ), Das Michael Mysterium. GA 26, Dornach, 1989, p. 14. 20. In Agrippa von Nettesheim, De Occulta Philosophia. Drei Bücher über die Magie . Nördlingen, 1987. Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486– 1535), German writer and physician, reputed to be an alchemist and magician. Originally a physician to King Maximilian I, he began to take a lively interest in theosophy and magic, pursued in teaching positions all over Europe. The Inquisition sought to stop the printing of De Occulta Philosophia (1550), a defense of magic by means of which mankind may come to a knowledge of nature and of God. It contains Agrippa’s idea of the universe with its three worlds or spheres. He denounced the accretions, which had grown up around the simple doctrines of Christianity, and wished for a return to a more personal religion. His works published in 1550 have been reprinted frequently over the centuries. 21. Rudolf Steiner, Gegenwärtiges Geistesleben und Erziehung (Spiritual Life of the Present Time and Education ), Lecture, Ilkley, August 9, 1923. GA 307, Dornach, 1973, p. 88 (English version). 22. Ibid., p. 86.
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23. Rudolf Steiner, Heileurythmie (Curative Eurythmy ), Lecture, Dornach, April 13, 1921. GA 315, Dornach, 1973, p. 28. 24. Ibid., see p. 121: “I seek in the inner.…” 25. Rudolf Steiner, Die Eurythmie als sichtbare Sprache (Eurythmy as Visible Speech ), Lecture, Dornach, June 24, 1924. GA 279, Dornach 1979, p. 57ff. 26. Rudolf Steiner, The Impulse of Spiritual Powers in World Historical Events , Lecture, Dornach, March 11, 1923. GA 222, Dornach 1976, p. 14. 27. Rudolf Steiner, Gegenwärtiges Geistesleben und Erziehung (see note 2), Lecture, Ilkley, August 10, 1923. GA 307, Dornach, 1973, p. 103ff. 28. Eurythmie als sichtbare Sprache , op. cit. p. 248. 29. Dante, Alighieri. Divine Comedy , London: Penguin Classics, 1950, p. vv. 30. In So viele Tage wie das Jahr hat. Gedichte für Kinder und Kenner , collected and edited by James Krüss, Bertelsman, Gütersloh, 1959. 31. In Wahrspruchsworte , op. cit., p. 121. 32. See note 21. 33. Rudolf Steiner, Die Methodik des Lehrens und die Lebensbedingungen des Erziehens , Evening Lecture, April 10, 1924. GA 308, Dornach, 1986, p. 73. 34. Gegenwärtiges Geistesleben und Erziehung, p. 34. 35. See Akasha Research: The Fifth Gospel , Lecture, Berlin, January 13, 1914. GA 158, Dornach, 1975, p. 185. 36. Rudolf Steiner, “Der neue baukünstlerische Gedanken,” in Wege zu einem neuen Baustil . “Und der Bau wird Mensch,” Lecture, Dornach, June 28, 1914. GA 286, Dornach, 1982, p. 76. 37. Rudolf Steiner, “Die Prufung der Seele,” in Vier Mysteriendramen . GA 14, Dornach, 1962, p. 192. 38. Lory Maier-Smits comments in Die Entstehung und Entwickelung der Eurythmie (Origins and Development of Eurythmy ). GA 277a, Dornach, 1965, op. cit., p. 46.
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39. Rudolf Steiner, Die gesunde Entwickelung des Leiblich-Physischen als Grundlage der freien Entfaltung des Seelisch-Geistigen (Healthy Development of the Physical Body as a Foundation for the Free Unfolding of the Soul-Spirit), Lecture, Dornach, January 2, 1911. GA 303, Dornach, 1978, p. 205. 40. Rudolf Steiner Meditativ erarbeitete Menschenkunde , Lecture, Stuttgart, September 16, 1920. GA 302a, Dornach 1977, p. 26. 41. The basis for this is in Steiner’s indications, commented by Armin J. Husemann, in Der musikalische Bau des Menschen. Entwurf einer plastisch-musikalischen Menschenkunde , Stuttgart, 1993. 42. Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophische Menschenkunde und Pädagogik , Address, Stuttgart, March 27, 1923. Reprinted in GA 304a, Dornach, 1979, pp. 57–59. 43. Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmie als sichtbare Sprache . GA 279, Dornach, 1979, p. 238. 44. Steiner’s suggestions to Tatiana Kisseleff reproduced in facsimile in Die Entstehung und Entwickelung der Eurythmie , op. cit., p. 59. 45. Rudolf Steiner, “Was tut der Engel in unserem Astralleib?” Lecture, October 9, 1918, in Der Tod als Lebenswandlung . GA 182, Dornach, 1976, pp. 140–143. 46. In the German language there are two forms for the English ‘‘to know”: können = to know how to do something and kennen = to know a person, a concept, a piece of music , and so forth. 47. Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmie als sichtbare Sprache , op. cit., p. 54ff. 48. Seventh Course Day, Bottmingen, September 22, 1912, p. 40.
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urythmy Training Centers
E
(partial listing)
U.S.A.
School of Eurythmy Spring Valley 285 Hungry Hollow Road Chestnut Ridge, NY 10977 Tel: 845-352-5020 Fax: 845-352-5071
[email protected] www.eurythmy.org
Im-Pulse Eurythmy P.O. Box 90425 Austin, TX 78709-0425 Tel: 512-426-5974
[email protected] www.impulse-eurythmy.org Eurythmy Training at Rudolf Steiner College 9200 Fair Oaks Blvd. Fair Oaks, CA 95628 Tel: 916-961-8727
[email protected] [email protected] www.steinercollege.edu
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GERMANY
Eurythmeum Stuttgart Zur Uhlandhöhe 8 70188 Stuttgart Tel: 49-0711-2364230
[email protected] www.eurythmeumstuttgart.de
Alanus Hochschule für Kunst und Gesellschaft Fachbereich Eurythmie Johannishof 53347 Alfter Tel: 49-02222-93210
[email protected] www.alanus.edu
Reifestudium Berufsbegleitende Eurythmieausbildung Alanus Werkhaus Johannishof 53347 Alfter Tel: 49-02222-4103 Fax: 49-02222-938842
[email protected]
Schule für eurythmische Art u.Kunst Argentinische Allee 23 14163 Berlin Tel: 49-030-8026378 Fax: 49-030-80908263
[email protected] www.eurythmie-berlin.de
Eurythmie Witten/Annen Institut für Waldorfpädagogik Annener Berg 15 58454 Witten Tel: 49-02302-79673-0
[email protected] www.wittenannen.de
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MerZ-Theater Hannover Bühne und Schule für Eurythmische Kunst Brehmstr. 10 30173 Hannover 0511-815603
[email protected] www.merz-theater.de
Eurythmie-Ausbildung Nürnberg Heimerichstr. 9 90419 Nürnberg 0911-337533
[email protected] www.eurythmieausbildung-nuernberg.d
4.D raum für Eurythmischec Ausbildung und Kunst Mittelweg 11-12 20148 Hamburg Tel: 40-41331644
[email protected] www.4d-eurythmie.de
HUNGARY
Akademie für Eurythmie Budapest Nagymezo u. 30. T.e. 1065 Budapest Tel: 36-01-312-2730 Fax: 36-01-312-2730
[email protected]
EGYPT
School of Arts Sekem Academy P.O. Box 2834 El Horrya, Heliopolis Cairo, Egypt Tel: 20-55-2880550 Fax: 20-55-2880550
[email protected] www.sekem.com
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ISRAEL
Jerusalem Academy of Eurythmy Moshar Bet Zait 99 90815 Jerusalem, Israel Tel: 972-2-5344639 Fax: 972-2-5344679
[email protected]
NETHERLANDS
Euritmie Academie Den Haag Riouwstraat 1 NL-2585 GP Den Haag Tel: 31-70-3550039
[email protected] www.euritmie-denhaag.nl
S WITZERLAND
Akademie für Eurythmische Kunst Baselland Apfelseestr. 9a CH-4143 Dornach Tel: 41-61-7018466 Fax: 41-61-7018558 www.eurythmie.ch
Eurythmeum Elena Zuccoli Hügelweg 83 CH-4143 Dornach Tel: 41-61-7064431 Fax: 41-61-7064432
[email protected] www.eurythmie-zuccoli.ch
Eurythmée Lausanne Case Postale 569 CH-100 Lausanne Tel: 41-21-8062168
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FRANCE
Eurythmée-Paris 1 rue Francois Laubeuf F-78400 Chatou Tel: 33-13-0534709
ENGLAND
London College of Eurythmy Rudolf Steiner House 35 Park Rd London, NW1 6XT Tel: 44-20-7723 4400, extension/208
[email protected]
Eurythmy West Midlands at the Glasshouse Arts Centre Ruskin Arts Centre 10 Kohima Road Dr. Stourbridge DY8 3SA Tel: 44-1384-442563 Fax: 44-1384-442563
[email protected] www.eurythmywm.org.uk
Camphill Eurythmy School Botton Village Danby/Whitby North Yorkshire YO21 2NJ Tel: 44-1287-661257 Fax: 44-1287-661254
[email protected] www.camphilleurythmy.org.uk
Peredur Eurythmy West Hoathly Road East Grinstead RH19 4NF Tel: 44-1342 824109
[email protected] www.peredureurythmy.com
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A USTRIA
Bildungsstätte für Eurythmie Wien Tilgnerstr.3 A-1040 Wien Tel: 43-15-048352
S WEDEN
Eurytmilärarutbildningen R. Steinerhögskolan 15391 Järna Tel: 46-8551-50770 Fax: 46-8551-50685
[email protected] www.steinerhogskolan.se
NORWAY
Den norske Eurythmihoyskole Prof. Dahls gt. 30 N-0260 Oslo Tel: 47-22-443290 Fax: 47-22-436629
[email protected] www.eurytmi.no
FINLAND
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Eurytmiakoulu c/o Antroposofinen Lütta Undenmaankatu 25a 00120 Helsinki Tel: 35-896987698 Fax: 35-896802591
[email protected]
R USSIA Institut für Musikalische Plastik und Drama Nikolai Konowalenko Povarskaja 20 RU-121069 Moskau Tel: 70-95 2915039 Fax: 70-95 3124008
UKRAINE
Eurythmie-Ausbildung Kiev c/o Kunstschule Turchaka Tiraspolskaja 49 Kiev Tel: 38-44-5526059
[email protected] Eurythmie-Ausbildungsprojekt Odessa Reichensteinerstr. 18 4144 Arlesheim, Switzerland Tel: 41-61-7013640 Fax: 41-61-7011802
BRAZIL
Nucleo de formagáo en Euritmie Rua Romilda Margarida Gabriel 178 / Apt. 802 045-30-090 Sáo Paulo Brazil Tel: 55-11-30792776 Fax: 55-11-30792776
[email protected]
SOUTH A FRICA Center for Creative Education Iziko Labantu be Africa PO Box 280 Cape Town ZA-7800 Plumstaed
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Cape Town Eurythmy School Empire 15 ZA-7800 Hout Bay
J APAN
Eurythmieausbildung Tokio Eurythmie Haus Okubo 2-10-2-102 Yamazaki-Bil. Shinjuku-ku Tokyo Tel: 169-0072 Fax: 0081-44-95 42 156
A USTRALIA Aurora Australis P.O. Box 18 KEW 3101 Victoria Tel: 61-3-94971979
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Other Titles on Eurythmy Available from AWSNA Publications LEAVING R OOM FOR THE ANGELS : EACHING E URYTHMY AND THE A RT OF T
by Reg Down ISBN 1-888365-00-5 6 x 9 inches
E URTHMY FOR
240 pages
THE E LEMENTARY G RADES
by Francine Adams ISBN 1-888365-07-2 5.5 x 8 inches
94 pages
ALLEGRO
Music for the Eurythmy Curriculum by Elisabeth Lebret ISBN 1-888365-08-0 8.5 x 11 inches
50 pages
ANDS C OME UNTO T HESE Y ELLOW S
by Molly von Heider ISBN 0-945803-30-3 8.5 x 11 inches 227 pages Rudolf Steiner College Press
E URTHMY R OOM D ESIGN
by Reg Down 8.5 x 11 inches
11 pages
B ASIC P RINCIPLES OF E URYTHMY
by Annemarie Dubach-Donath
8.5 x 11 inches Mercury Press
279 pages
E URYTHMY
Making Movement Human DVD produced by Hagen’s Recording Studio
E URYTHMY FOR THE Y OUNG C HILD
by Estelle Bryer ISBN 0-9722238-5-1 8.5 x 11 inches WECAN Publications
119 pages
