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EurythmyA Creative Forcein Humanity
Experiences from Pedagogical Practice
Sylvia Bardt
Eurythm
ySylvia
Bardt
AWSN
APublications
The Associat ion of WaldorfS choo l s o f Nor th Amer i c aPub l i c a t i on s Of f i c e65-2 Fern Hi l l RoadGhent , NY 12075
1
Eurythm
y A
Creative F
orce in Hum
anity
2
3
Eurythm
y
A Creative F
orce in Hum
anity
Experiences from
Pedagogical P
ractice
by
Sylvia Bardt
4
Printed with support from
the Waldorf C
urriculum Fund
Published by:
The A
ssociation of Waldorf Schools
of North A
merica
Publications Office
65–2 Fern Hill R
oadG
hent, NY
12075
Title: Eurythm
y: A C
reative Force in Hum
anity
Experiences from Pedagogical Practice
Author: Sylvia B
ardt Translator: M
ado SpieglerE
urythmy C
onsultant and Reader: M
ollie Strube Am
osE
ditor: David M
itchellProofreader: A
nn Erw
inC
over: Hallie W
ootan©
2008 by AWSN
A
5
Table of C
ontents
Introduction by Mollie A
mos .........................................................
7
Foreword by V
irginia Sease ............................................................. 9
Preface .......................................................................................... 11
Introduction to the Being of E
urythmy
• M
ovement .........................................................................
13
• N
ew A
rtistic Impulses at the B
eginning of the 20th C
entury ........................................................... 14
• T
he Origin of the N
ew A
rt of Movem
ent .......................... 17
• T
he Threefold A
rt of Eurythm
y ......................................... 18
• A
rtistic Creation and A
rtistic Know
ledge in Eurythm
y ...... 20
•
Em
bodying the Spirit—Spiritualizing the B
ody ................. 25
• Teacher Preparation ...........................................................
26
• A
ge-Appropriate E
xercises with C
hildren ........................... 30
• Letter and W
ord ................................................................. 35
Eurythm
y in Preschool .................................................................... 41
6
The C
urriculum—
a Work of A
rt
•
Correspondences betw
een the Developm
ental Phases
and the Eurythm
y Curriculum
.......................................... 45
• First and Tw
elfth Grades ...................................................
48
• Second and E
leventh Grades .............................................
57
• T
hird and Tenth Grades ....................................................
65
• Fourth and N
inth Grades ...................................................
74
• T
he Bridge Years
Fifth/Sixth/Seventh/E
ighth Grades ....................................
82
Sphere and Circle as M
oving Gesture .............................................
94
Education of the M
ovement O
rganism through E
urythmy:
Ages Tw
elve to Fourteen ................................................................. 100
Thoughts on Teaching E
urythmy in the H
igh School ..................... 116
The Professional Picture of the E
urythmy Teacher .......................... 127
Endnotes .........................................................................................129
Eurythm
y Training Centers ............................................................ 133
7
Introduction
by
Mollie A
mos
For over fourteen years Sylvia Bardt has been visiting South and
North A
merica bringing eurythm
ists and teacher trainers the art of W
aldorf education.In this book Sylvia takes the vantage point of eurythm
y and shows
how through eurythm
y the curriculum can be w
oven together into a w
hole and colorful tapestry, full of life. The developm
ent of the child from
kindergarten through elementary and high school stands at the
forefront of her work and form
s the basis for all the exercises.A
lthough Sylvia hails from G
ermany, her w
riting expounds the universality of education and eurythm
y, 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 w
orld.
Peterborough, NH
Novem
ber 2008
8
9
Forew
ord
by
Virginia S
ease
The research upon w
hich this book is founded was the product of
its author’s many years’ experience teaching the art of eurythm
y in all grades. T
he book can also provide a clear overview for those w
ishing a general introduction to this new
art of movem
ent, which is know
n alm
ost as widely as W
aldorf pedagogy itself throughout the world.
It is a sign of the 21st century that in the ‘civilized’ Western part of
the world, hum
ans are increasingly forced to curtail their original joy in m
ovement through the w
idespread use of machines and m
echanical m
eans. No m
atter how m
uch we appreciate these aspects of technological
progress, many people are left w
ondering about the effects of impoverished
movem
ent upon future generations. At the end of the 19th century,
as an answer to this hum
an condition, Rudolf and M
arie Steiner gave eurythm
y to humanity. Its practice has one precondition: “T
his new art
of movem
ent can be performed only by those w
ho acknowledge and live
in the conviction that human beings consist of body, soul, and spirit.”
In no earlier age was it m
ore important that hum
an beings, in order to save their original hum
anity, not only understand their native threefold nature but also live it and exercise it.
Whereas the entire W
aldorf school curriculum is built upon the
threefold division of the human being in body, soul, and spirit, eurythm
y offers yet m
ore possibilities to experience, through continued practice, the
10
laws of the threefold nature in their m
ost subtle connections. Anim
ated by this fundam
ental idea, Sylvia Bardt describes the eurythm
y curriculum
and its enactment. She show
s very clearly how children and adolescents
can find, through eurythmy, an access to them
selves and to the world.
Particularly beautiful is her presentation of the correlations between
stages of life in regard to eurythmy teaching. T
hus the reader can come
to conclusions about the meaning for hum
an 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 eurythm
y as visible speech and visible music,
adolescents experience their own universal nature, w
hich connects them,
as humans, to all other hum
ans. May m
any more children be accom
panied by the teaching of eurythm
y and by watching eurythm
ic performances
along their road in life. I speak for myself and for m
any others who love
eurythmy in thanking the author for having m
ade this book accessible.
D
ornach, Switzerland
January 1998
11
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 w
indow to w
indow;
golden chains from star to star, and I dance.
– A
rthur Rim
baud
The art of eurythm
y attained its greatest expansion through the work
with children and adolescents in w
hat are now 700 W
aldorf schools all over the w
orld. In various courses taught by me—
for beginning teachers, craftsm
en 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 m
ovement. T
hese questions led to this book. This presentation w
ill attem
pt to trace connections between eurythm
ic work in the schools and
the sources to which eurythm
y owes its origin.
The contents and the m
ethods of eurythmy for various ages and in
various life situations can be derived from anthroposophical anthropology.
I do not, however, intend to give a system
atic, comprehensive description
of the eurythmy curriculum
. Instead, by “hanging garlands from w
indow
to window
,” I hope to stimulate new
thoughts about eurythmy as an
artistic-pedagogical method.
12
It is my hope that as m
any of my colleagues as possible w
ill feel encouraged to put their experiences dow
n in the same w
ay, and thus stretch “golden threads from
star to star.”T
his work w
ould not have happened without m
any years of friendly cooperation w
ith Rosem
aria Bock, w
hom I thank gratefully.
13
Introduction to the B
eing of Eurythm
y
Movem
entM
ovement belongs to the hum
an being’s very first sensations. In the m
other’s wom
b, the developing child feels the mother’s breathing, her
heartbeat, her walking as beneficent rhythm
s. Her speech too reaches the
child in the form of m
oving waves and subtle ripple effects.
Before the nursing baby fixates on an object, before it can m
ove itself by grabbing, sitting up, let alone standing, it reacts prim
arily to the objects m
oving in its surroundings. Its own m
ovement im
pulses are shaped by the sense of the m
oving environment.
When young children later observe the flow
ing water, the bird in
flight, the wind’s rushing, w
hen they experience that all of nature speaks to them
, they move tow
ard all of these joyfully and move w
ith them,
imitating w
hat they see and hear. The adults’ w
ork, other children’s play, cars driving by, everything calls for the children’s im
itation. And they feel
delighted when rhythm
too becomes part of the surging m
otion: when
clapping, singing, hopping and dancing organize the movem
ent.E
urythmy takes up all these im
pulses which constitute the child’s vital
force. They appear in poetic and reflexive form
, leading to natural dance m
ovements. It thus m
akes sense that the first formal ‘instruction’ given
to children should be a movem
ent class. It begins with the three-year-
old. Natural m
otions, ‘read’ or picked up from hum
ans and from nature,
are brought into formed, m
eaningful images. T
he child can plunge into these im
ages and constantly transform itself into them
. It can feel itself as a butterfly, a sun, the w
ind, 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.
Adults need to re-learn this flexibility, by seeking in them
selves the m
ovements of nature and then taking hold of them
and forming them
in a new
way. Speech and m
usic also are alive in the element of m
ovement;
they resonate within hum
an beings and around them: T
hey are forces that create m
ovement. R
udolf Steiner expressed this harmony betw
een inner and outer w
orlds in the following verse: 1
Suche im eignen W
esen: Seek in your ow
n being:U
nd du findest die Welt;
And you shall find the w
orld;Suche im
Weltenw
alten: Seek in the W
orld-process:U
nd du findest dich selbst; A
nd you will find yourself;
Merke den Pendelschlag
Pay attention to the pendulumZw
ischen Selbst und Welt:
Betw
een Self and World:
Und dir offenbaret sich
And there w
ill be revealedM
enschen-Welten-W
esen; H
uman-C
osmic-B
eings;W
elten-Menschen-W
esen. C
osmic-H
uman-B
eings.
New
Artistic Im
pulses at the Beginning of the 20th C
enturyT
he world of art opens itself to us in m
elodic form and m
oving color: m
usic and poetry, sculpture and painting, theatre and dance. In ourselves w
e 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 tw
o art forms are connected. H
uman beings–-
and this is a sign of our universality—feel the desire and the ability to
unite in artistic form dom
ains that appear separated in their imm
ediate environm
ent. We can be m
usicians or poets, sculptors or painters; but w
e can also—once w
e have found the proper artistic form—
be all these things at once: “H
uman-C
osmic-B
eings.” T
he architecture of the human body show
s us in distilled form the
connection between the hum
an being and world. If w
e consider the hardest part of our organism
, the teeth: Whereas in the anim
al world around us,
teeth generally have extreme form
s, we note that our ow
n constitute a harm
onious—actually hum
an—totality. W
e find in the molars and pre-
molars the rum
inant’s gesture; in the canines, the predator’s gesture, in the incisors, the rodent’s gesture. T
hus, the entire animal kingdom
is virtually contained in this “H
uman C
osmic B
eing.” This presents hum
an
14
15
beings with the justified challenge to seek, out of their ow
n being, for further universalities.
The quest for the balancing pendulum
, the balancing between hum
an being and w
orld in the realm of art appears ever m
ore urgently in the soul of individual artists at the beginning of the 20th century. W
e may select
from the m
ultitude of such seekers the painter Vassili K
andinsky (1866–1944) and the m
usician Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951). In his book O
f the Spiritual in A
rt, Kandinsky w
rites: “Schönberg’s music leads us into
a new realm
where m
usical experiences are not acoustic experiences but purely soul experiences. T
his is where the m
usic of the future begins.”2
These w
ords characterize the novelty in the artistic impulse of those
years. The correspondence betw
een the two artists 3 show
s that they w
ere both intensively, and independently from each other, involved in
creating a theatrical total work [G
esamtw
erk, a word coined by R
ichard W
agner—translator’s note]. In 1908–1909, K
andinsky was w
orking on T
he Yellow Sound, for w
hich the music w
as written by com
poser Thom
as von H
artmann (1885–1956). 4 A
t that same tim
e, Schönberg was w
riting his play w
ith musical accom
paniment, T
he Lucky Hand (D
ie Glückliche
Hand
). Both artists turned to a neighboring art and tried to do new
things by blending different arts.
Also at this sam
e time w
e encounter the preliminaries to the birth of
the new art of E
urythmy. From
its very beginning, this art stood under the sign of concordances. D
uring a lecture series Steiner gave in Ham
burg on the St John G
ospel, he asked young Russian artist M
argarita Voloshin:
“Would you be able to dance that?” She said yes, and, not pursuing the
subject, merely answ
ered that whatever a person feels can be danced. 5
There the snippet of a conversation ended. T
he time w
as not yet ripe for Steiner’s veiled proposition to develop a dance form
that would allow
the artistic expression of far-reaching thoughts through m
ovement.
Yet the very brief conversation did not remain fruitless. Years later,
Margarita V
oloshin painted images from
the Gospels. She represented
repeatedly and in very expressive fashion the theme of the M
iraculous Fish H
aul (John 21, 4–12). 6 We can experience the birth of eurythm
y as an archetypal picture. O
ut of hidden depths, out of the water, the
16
element of stream
ing life, solid forms, nourishm
ent, fish in abundance are draw
n. Whether they are practitioners or spectators, hum
an beings now
adays are not yet able to grasp and apply the fullness of forms, the
formative potential of eurythm
y in a way adapted to the tim
es.
Luckily, Steiner was able to pick up a few
years later the suggestion he had m
ade to translate spiritual scientific representations into artistic m
ovement. In 1911, on behalf of her 18-year-old daughter, a m
other asked for a thoughtful and healing kind of m
ovement that w
ould be in agreem
ent with the artistic im
pulses coming from
anthroposophy. H
appily, Steiner’s
pursued the
question and
developed som
ething com
pletely new w
ith the gifted young wom
an, Lory Smits (1893–1971).
Eurythm
y was born as “visible speech,” as “visible song.”
7
Steiner did not connect eurythmy w
ith any existing dance school. G
reek temple dance, although w
e know very little about it, m
ay be seen as one source of eurythm
y. Other sources are hum
an speech and song.
Fig. 1 – Magarita Voloshin’s T
he Harvesting of the Fishes
17
Steiner described it in the following m
anner: The connection betw
een speech and eurythm
y is that “whenever w
e form a w
ord, we com
press the air into a particular form
. Those w
ho can observe supersensibly the form
s emerging from
the human m
outh see forms in the air; those are the
words. If one copies them
, one has eurythmy, w
hich is a visible expressive gesture, just as the form
of air in speech is an invisible form in w
hich the thought penetrates, creating w
aves that make it possible to hear the
totality. Eurythm
y is the translation of air-gestures into visible limb-
gestures, expressive gestures.”8
The O
rigin of the New
Art of M
ovement
When w
e exclaim “A
h, how beautiful!” the soul opens up, it surrenders
to a strong impression. H
ere too, the mouth opens into an A
. What could
be more im
mediate than for the arm
s to open up and thus, through a bodily gesture, bring soul experience to expression as an “A
h!” If, on the other hand, w
e exclaim: “A
las, what a pity!” ( W
ie 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. Sim
ilarly in aber and abwehr
the A rem
ains open, yet the nuance of separation surrounding the sound m
ust be expressed differently in movem
ent. For instance, the hand may
turn out, in a stiff ‘tree trunk’ gesture ( sich einstämm
en). Each sound has
its archetypal gesture, which m
ust be infinitely differentiated depending on w
hat it being said.O
ver the years, Steiner developed gestures for all sounds. There are
in eurythmy a m
ultitude of arm-m
ovements, as w
ell as foot- and leg- m
ovements. R
hythmical stepping, different foot positions have expressive
potential, in particular the walking of spatial form
s. We can thus form
straight and round form
s, individual and group forms, geom
etric and poetically free form
s.B
y contrast with other dance form
s, the performer in eurythm
y m
ostly faces front, so that the face always rem
ains turned to the audience. T
his produces a new, qualitatively very different understanding of space,
which dem
ands a very wakeful consciousness. T
he expressive force is fundam
entally different depending on whether I ‘rise into’ a m
ore
18
spiritual space behind myself or w
hether I move forw
ards toward the
spectator. This offers eurythm
y 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 m
ood and meaning.
At the beginning, m
usic was used prim
arily as a kind of addendum,
for preludes and postludes. But increasingly Steiner shaped it into a tone-
eurythmy, taking into account the law
fulness of beat, rhythm, m
elody (m
elos) and harmony as w
ell as tones and intervals.W
e thus have in eurythmy an art of m
ovement com
bining in rhythm
ical fashion music, speech, color and m
oving sculpture (eurythmos,
beautiful rhythm) blending them
on a new level and, in a broad sense,
creating a ‘total work’ (gesam
twerk). It is an autonom
ous 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 w
ork of art (Gesam
tkunstwerk).
The T
hreefold Art of Eurythm
yEverything that lies hidden in eurythm
y was present in the very first
indications given by Steiner. From the beginning, one could perceive the
unity between w
hat would take form
as a stage art, what w
ould flow into
a modern pedagogy, and w
hat would take form
as hygienic movem
ent and therapeutic eurythm
y.Lory M
aier-Smits reports that, at the start of the first eurythm
y course, Steiner em
phasized: “This new
art of movem
ent can be executed only by som
eone who acknow
ledges and lives with the certainty that the
human being consists in body, soul and spirit.”
9 This m
ade clear from
the outset that it was not just another artistic reform
-movem
ent, but that it w
as born from and for the hum
an being. Had this threefold quality
not been part of the essential nature of this art form, the precondition
of an acknowledgem
ent of the threefold human being w
ould not have been present at its baptism
. A few
examples w
ill show how
, from the
beginning, Steiner saw eurythm
y in its threefold effectiveness.W
hen introducing the gestures for the consonants, Steiner connected them
with a great variety of im
ages and situations. Describing and
19
practicing the first five sounds, he said: “If at some point you deal w
ith 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 summ
arized this group as having “an enlivening, stim
ulating effect. You should prescribe these for people who are tired,
listless and sleepy. Doing them
will w
ake them up, w
ill stimulate them
and trigger their interest.”
11 At the point w
hen this art was being born,
he thus mentioned its healing and educating potential.
On the Sunday of the founding w
eek of eurythmy, Lory M
aier-Smits
reported doing eurythmically the first com
plete word. It w
as no mundane
word, but the exclam
ation “Hallelujah,” w
hich means: “I cleanse m
yself from
everything that hampers m
y seeing the highest.”12 W
hat weight
this carried when spoken and brought to eurythm
ic expression at the (official) birthplace of eurythm
y! It became the petition of every person
doing eurythmy: M
ake me a gate through w
hich speech and music can
become visible. M
ake me selfless and strong. Let not m
y own w
ill, my
own feelings, m
y caprice be satisfied, but the will, the feeling and the sense
of the Highest. T
hus appears the deep Christian origin of eurythm
y.M
arie von Sivers perceived the depth of this mom
ent and noted: “H
err Doktor, by rights, this should be a source of vast strength!” To
which Steiner answ
ered: “Of course! D
id you think we w
ere just here to dance? W
e also want to help heal sick people.”
13 This thread of healing
was picked up the next day of the course. Sound- and w
ord-gestures led to new
forms. T
he walking of form
s in space is also effective and full of possibilities. Steiner m
entioned that the spiral is not simply a nice
expressive version of particular circle dances, but can also be put into action therapeutically. If done rhythm
ically in the right way, curling
inward strengthens the hum
an ego and counteracts anemia. If the spiral
curls outward from
inside to outside, it can help counteract selfishness and excessive full-bloodedness.
The new
movem
ent-art, eurythmy, w
as 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 eurythm
y consists in giving expression to a speaking quality
20
in movem
ent that is curative, educative and purely artistic. The artistic
means of eurythm
y, namely pure m
ovement, the feeling and the character
of the movem
ent, point to the fact that this three-way conversation is
the comm
on wellspring of this archetypally hum
an art, which uses as its
instrument the hum
an body.
Artistic C
reation and Artistic K
nowledge in Eurythm
yIn order to approach the being of eurythm
y from as m
any sides as possible, w
e need to take an apparent detour and follow the w
orking m
ethod of two m
en to whom
European spiritual life ow
es a great deal: M
ichelangelo and
Galileo.
Their
lives w
ere im
mediately
adjacent: M
ichelangelo died on February 15, 1564; Galileo w
as born on February 18 of the sam
e year. Michelangelo built the D
ome of St Peter’s in R
ome.
It is a powerful heavenly vault m
agically produced on earth, looming high
above the church, above the entire city, a masterpiece of artistic balance.
Galileo recognized and calculated the law
s that Michelangelo had used
in his building. He com
prehended in his intellect what M
ichelangelo’s creative genius had applied intuitively, and he form
ulated the scientific law
s that became one of the foundations of m
odern life and now belong
to the comm
on fund of human culture. N
o one can graduate from an
institution of higher learning without know
ing Galileo’s Law
of Falling B
odies and that of the Pendulum.
It is by using Michelangelo and G
alileo as examples that Steiner
speaks of the process of artistic creation and of the ensuing process of com
ing to know and form
ulate the laws that govern the w
ork of art. He
points out that
human beings perform
without any interm
ediary the exchange w
ith the spirit that allows them
to incorporate into physical m
atter laws w
hich they have yet to discover. They do this
without interm
ediaries, i.e., not through reasoning, not through concepts, altogether not through the intellect. H
uman
beings are so constituted that they can embody in the m
aterial w
orld that which lives in them
as an outflow of the spirit
working w
ithin them before they can grasp it intellectually.
This is true of all artistic creation. T
his fact is of interest to
21
us because it shows us that in hum
an physical life, there is a ‘som
ething,’ an inborn capacity to execute the laws of any
particular organ prior to understanding these laws. So w
hen w
e 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 w
e observe in reality: A
human instinct purified and raised into the spirit allow
s us to create im
mediately (out of the spiritual w
orld) what w
e later discover. Just as anim
als create instinctively, for instance the w
onderful structure of the beehive, in the same w
ay the human
being creates instinctively, out of the spirit, before the spiritual w
orld is reflected in the intellect. 14
If we trace the w
ay in which Steiner brought into existence the art
of eurythmy, w
e can see a creative artist at work. H
e performed the
movem
ents for each sound in very poetic, eloquent manner. T
hus, when
demonstrating the P
, he reached down from
his chair and “pulled up around him
self, like a mantle of stars, a fullness of color and light. It w
as an inim
itable gesture, full of dignity and grandeur.”15 H
e also gave very sober, concrete indications. T
hus, 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 ow
n head, your forehead. You learn to perceive this pillar, this verticality as an I (ee). …
The w
eight rests in the ball of the foot, not in the entire foot! Now
shift the head of the pillar behind the foot point; this w
ill teach you the sensation of A
.… B
end the head in front of the pillar point and you will
have the sensation of O.…
”16
In the act of creating eurythmy, Steiner w
as thus proceeding like an artist. H
e only provided laws and explanations after the archetypal
forms of the art had been created. W
hen eurythmy w
as later brought to the public at large, he gave introductory talks to the perform
ances and provided explanations. W
e thus can say that from this point of view
, he w
as like Michelangelo and G
alileo—and the D
ome still stands!
Two
examples
from
our century
may
help us
expand our
understanding of dormant or aw
akened creative forces in the human
being. The first is a painting by E
mil N
olde (1867–1956): Herm
it in
22
Tree. We have a cool blue-green area, the garm
ent of a man sitting in
the branches of a tree. Black hair, black eyes, w
arm reddish brow
n beard. T
he high forehead radiates in warm
ochre. With his lum
inous, somew
hat bent forehead and dark eyes, he looks inw
ard as it were. H
is right hand is held like a m
irror, the palm of the hand facing him
. Thum
b and hand radiate the sam
e warm
yellow as the forehead. H
e is peaceful, radiant, turned inw
ard, at peace with him
self in his entire character…. R
eddish black and brow
n, green and blue also appear in the sky, the foliage and the branches in the background w
here colors are more distant, denser
and more natural.
Another im
age by Nolde represents C
hrist and the Children. Slightly
bent forward, the m
ain figure turns his back on the viewer. In a blue-
green garment, he bends lovingly tow
ard the children in red and yellow
garb. The children’s side of the painting is lum
inous and light; indigo and strong dark violet occupy the facing side of the painting, w
hich is
Fig. 2 – Emil N
olde’s Herm
it in Tree
23
the world of adults. Trustful and joyful, the children com
e to Christ.
Form and color create a harm
ony built of contrasts. A chord is sounded,
a consonance. C
hrist and the Children w
as painted in 1910, the Herm
it in 1931. W
hat is it about these paintings that makes them
so eloquent for us in connection w
ith eurythmy? In both cases, the m
ain figure is in a state of active rest, in harm
ony with itself and at the sam
e time involved in a
conversation with itself or w
ith the environment. B
oth figures are similarly
constituted of colors familiar to us as from
the eurythmic gesture for M
, and both m
ove in an M gesture. N
ot only do the external forms a im
itate this sound, but in their inw
ard being, they sound the M, especially C
hrist bending dow
n to his surroundings and taking it up into himself. In his
first lecture of the Speech Eurythm
y Course, Steiner spoke of the M
sound as a statem
ent that “things are in harmony. T
here is a very close fit, as in the end of the w
ord Leim (glue).” In these im
ages by Nolde, the
harmony has taken the form
of a painting.Steiner covered the w
hole arc from artistic creation to know
ledge of the artistic law
s in manifold w
ays reaching into modern tim
es. As
we have seen, his intuitive know
ledge of the inner forces of color, form
Fig. 3 – Emil N
olde’s Christ and the C
hildren
24
and movem
ent flow im
mediately into artistic creation, and only then are
processed conceptually. We are challenged to w
ork with the results of his
research and to make them
our own as m
uch as possible. Em
il Nolde’s tw
o im
ages can encourage us to take another look at the eurythmy figures, to
study them m
ore closely through intensive practice, through eurythmic
wakefulness in our encounter w
ith the world, and w
ith the world of art.
On M
arch 1, 1923, when the first W
aldorf school entered its fourth year, Steiner spoke about the eurythm
y gestures at the Teacher’s C
onference. “Students felt that the wooden figures of eurythm
ic gestures should be presented during the pedagogical w
eek. I will provide such
a series. It is needed. While they are also im
portant for a psychological physiology, W
aldorf teachers should work w
ith them in order, m
ore generally, to know
better the human organism
. What w
e can learn from
these gestures provides a foundation for general artistic perception, for know
ledge of the inner human organism
.”17
Fig. 4 – Eurythmy gesture for “M
”
25
The eurythm
y figures—colored, tw
o-dimensional w
ood figures—do not reproduce just one m
oment, one stage of the sound. R
ather than being sim
ple replicas, they are real images of truth (W
ahrbilder) in that they show
, not one mom
ent, one stage of the sound, but simultaneously
the origin, the existence and the disappearance of a sound. They challenge
us to live into them. W
e must ‘put them
on,’ for only then do we recognize
each individual sound in its multiform
unique existence.
Em
bodying the Spirit—Spiritualizing the B
odyW
hat does it mean to dem
and that we observe a thing in such a
way that w
e slip into it, that for a short while, w
e experience ourselves as this ‘other’ facing us, that w
e understand it in its ‘movem
ent-form’
(Bew
egungsgestalt), its color, its stance. This describes the process that all
teachers must undergo w
ith 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 w
akeful imaginative consciousness, translated
into movem
ent, if they want to know
the temperam
ents, the disposition, the boundaries of the children and seek an answ
er to the question: “What
in this child is old (what com
es from the past) and w
hat in this child is the future?”
We m
ust learn to read the children. The w
riting that tells us about a person takes m
any forms. In his B
ergen lecture of October 11, 1913,
Steiner described the child still surrounded by forces that cast light on the tim
e preceding the descent to earth incarnation. “The struggles endured
in the spiritual world, preceding birth and determ
ining the destiny, play around the child’s aura, form
ing images of trem
endous scope and w
isdom.”
18 These forces do not all dissipate in later life. In each person,
we find unused forces of m
ovement, ‘saved-up’ forces that rem
ained unspent w
hen the child stood up and learned to walk. T
hese are our m
ost 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 m
ovements that reveal so m
uch about a person, become, as
it were, transparent for w
hat the child wants and needs in order to realize
its intention on earth.
26
How
shall we bring out and school these surplus forces of m
ovement
slumbering in each one of us? W
hen we do eurythm
y, we are dealing w
ith m
obile life forces; we m
ove our physical body according to those laws.
This in turn changes the physical body. A
nd how do w
e do eurythmy?
Much of it is done through im
itation, repetition over extended stretches of tim
e. Children do it. B
ut so do the adults. This sleeping eurythm
y contributes to our health, it enriches our form
ative forces. We can also
do eurythmy dream
ily, through empathy: this too can be beneficent
and is often very beautiful. And finally, w
e can try to do the gestures in as w
akeful a fashion as possible. In the latter case, what w
e do can be repeated, taught, learned. W
e can then bring out completely new
capacities in the person. T
hus we can say:
• E
urythmy done prim
arily out of the force of imitation heals
what in us is old, the past.
• E
urythmy perform
ed 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 PreparationEvery eurythm
ist must at som
e point ask the questions: How
shall I teach this art? H
ow can I process it for m
yself and with other people?
We need to identify som
e leading thoughts, find something like a land
map or a star m
ap, drawn from
a higher perspective and showing as m
any roads and directions as possible. E
urythmy m
ust lead the individual to the hum
an in him/herself. W
e must find connections in the here and
now w
ith our spiritual origins. Steiner described an approach to this task in w
ords that can serve as guidelines for us, even though they were m
eant for anthroposophic w
ork in general:
Anthroposophy is a path of know
ledge, intended to lead the spiritual in the hum
an being to the spiritual in the universe.
27
It arises in the human being as a com
pelling heartfelt necessity. Its entire justification m
ust be seen in its ability to satisfy this need. O
nly those individuals can accept anthroposophy who
find in it something they feel com
pelled to seek from the depths
of their feeling (Gem
üt).A
nthroposophists can only be human to the extent that
they experience a vital need to answer this question about the
being of Hum
anity 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, w
e can take quite literally the saying: W
e want to lead the spirit in hum
anity to the spirit in the cosm
os; we w
ant to guide our movem
ents in such a way that they are
related to cosmic m
ovements. W
e 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 w
ill help us even in the m
ethod of our teaching.T
here lives in all human beings, in all our students, no m
atter how
young or old, a compulsion to m
ove, and to move eurythm
ically. The
way w
e teach—im
plicitly, without explanations—
must justify w
hat we
are doing. Only so w
ill the unique and incomparable beauty of eurythm
y be accepted and acknow
ledged.E
choing the leading thoughts again, we can say that eurythm
y can be accepted only by those w
ho find in it something they urgently seek from
the depths of their feeling disposition. H
uman beings can be eurythm
ists only if they carry that particular question about the being of hum
anity and of the w
orld, a need as vital for them as hunger and thirst. If w
e allow
this quote to guide us in our work, w
e plunge (or rise) into realms w
here joy and inspiration flow
into all our doing.Let us look at a basic eurythm
y exercise, which is for m
any eurythmists
a daily archetypal exercise (Ur-Ü
bung). The hum
an figure is organized in six geom
etric positions:
1. Arm
s horizontal at shoulder height—feet closed
2. Arm
s at larynx level—feet slightly spread
28
3. Arm
s at heart level—feet open w
ide enough to form a
pentagram4. A
rms and legs spread—
fingertips and toes are aligned vertically, and a m
ore or less quadrangular figure appears5. A
rms raised so that the connecting line betw
een them touches
the cranium6. A
rms parallel vertically, creating a very thin rectangle, feet closed
as in 1.
Fig. 5 – Series of eurythm
y forms given by Steiner (after A
grippa von Nettesheim
)
29
Steiner adapted for eurythmy these positions draw
n in the 16th century by A
grippa von Nettesheim
, 20 who had first assigned them
to his students. A
t first, Steiner kept to the pure geometric form
s. Later (1924) he loosened the rigid form
and transformed it into an exercise for the
modern hum
an being. Reading the connection to the hum
an being, he gave a sentence for each position:
1. I think speech.2. I speak. 3. I have spoken.4. I seek m
yself in the spirit.5. I feel m
yself in myself.
6. I am on the w
ay to the spirit within m
yself.
How
different the exercise now becom
es! Now
, clear thoughts connect w
ith limb m
ovement, thinking is led into w
ill movem
ents. Only now
does the totality of thinking, feeling and w
illing appear. A clear, w
arm
sensation, a sense of well being grow
s out of what w
as until now “just an
exercise.”
Fig. 6
30
In a different manner w
e can study the relationship of thinking and w
illing activity in the eurythmic exercise. W
e seek the soul. The spirit
radiates in/for us. The “seeking” com
es to a focal point, and, as a result of seeking, som
ething “radiates” in us. Both w
ays lead inwards. T
he form
consists of two spirals, the form
such that at any mom
ent its direction m
ust change in order for the inward sw
eep to attain its goal.T
he gesture
acquires a
will-full
character. To
the first
form,
moving forw
ard, a second form is attached, m
oving backwards. T
his (choreography) requires clear representations, clear thinking activity and strong w
ill-imbued actions. If w
e 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. T
he soul radiates for us.” The w
ords spoken in connection w
ith 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-A
ppropriate Exercises w
ith Children
We have noted in passing that w
hen he founded the field of eurythmic
exercises, Steiner offered them to adults. W
e can experience in our own
practice how deeply the serious and regular perform
ance of these exercises form
s us in our humanity, through a veritable schooling. W
hat does it m
ean to work w
ith children in this manner?
With children betw
een the seventh and the fourteenth year, we
must w
ork in such a way that thinking gets rightly connected w
ith the w
ill. But things can go astray in education. Steiner explained that
human beings develop m
orally to the extent that, on earth, they have the opportunity to connect their thinking w
ith their will. T
his connection is natural in anim
als (insofar as animal thinking has a ‘dream
y’ quality), but in hum
an beings it must becom
e a moral deed. 21 H
ow then can w
e approach our assigned task of schooling these capacities in an authentic, child-appropriate m
anner? What can the child do, w
hen living out of the forces of im
agination and imitation, to bring about a confluence of the
streams of thinking and w
illing? At first, the child does it prim
arily by
31
guiding the old head forces into the young limbs; w
hen it learns to walk,
it ferries the past over to the future.In the first seven years, no m
ovement consciously guided by the w
ill is possible or m
eaningful. We plunge w
ith the child into images, the
child is ‘imaging’ in its carefully guided lim
bs. We can rightly say that
in preschool a process of ‘limbifying,’ an em
bodiment of the spirit, takes
place. There is as yet no threshold of consciousness, no active w
ill to dam
the stream of im
ages. Thus the lim
bs are built up with spirit, form
ed and shaped by the im
ages of movem
ent streaming directly into them
.E
urythmy has such an im
mediate effect of building up the body
because there is no ‘filter’ to block it. The life-filled spiritual im
age of the Sun, the M
oon, the Dw
arf or the Horse pours into the child’s soul
and body, forming and creating it. A
four-year-old demonstrated to m
e how
unbounded the work of im
ages is in these first seven years. In the Frog-K
ing play, we had com
e to the point where the crafty frog m
ust be throw
n against the wall. W
e enclosed him into a careful O
, and then with
a K and a T
from the w
ord klatschen (clap), we clapped him
with our
hands against the wall. For the four-year-old, im
ages are still so powerful
that this particular child couldn’t throw the frog, but becam
e the frog. W
hat did he do? He threw
himself at the w
all—so hard that w
e had to rush and put som
e ice on a big bump before the now
-released King’s Son
could stand in front of us.A
t that age, there is no practicing, no remem
bering, no knowing
in the later sense; when w
e do eurythmy in preschool, w
e live in the im
mediate presence of the spirit in physical activity. If adults—
teachers or parents—
have trained their observation, they see how w
onderfully the thinking forces from
heaven flow at that age. Steiner described it
thus: “The stream
ing of the forces of growth from
the head downw
ards is predom
inant in the young child until the seventh year. The entire bodily
organization starts out from the head-organization. U
ntil the seventh year, the head does everything; only w
hen thinking becomes em
ancipated at the change of teeth, does the head too get released from
this powerful
descending force.”22
32
The gesture expressing m
ost purely the incarnation of the spirit in the first seven years can be draw
n as follows (left). A
fter the fourteenth year, this gesture w
ill completely reverse itself (right)
In the early grades, we stand betw
een 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, how
ever, becoming visible. T
he will
impulse, rising into the life of dream
y imitation, im
aginal forming, and
copying, appears at first like an intrusion or an obstacle rising from below
. It sets obstacles to earlier m
ovement, leading to w
hirling, swinging,
moving form
s, which are in contrast to the alm
ost holy smooth flow
of the first years.
Now
our concern must be to allow
these whirling m
ovements
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
movem
ent. Starting school is a huge step! Now
the children no longer gather around the eurythm
y teacher like chicks around the mother hen.
Each child has his or her ow
n place and cannot stand anywhere else.
To the outside observer, this is merely a subtle difference; but for the
teacher’s consciousness, it is mom
entous and must be experienced w
ith utm
ost alertness.W
henever 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
Fig. 7
33
accompanied by the verse “I am
hidden—I am
here!” When they do
this, children experience themselves as alternately round and dream
y or w
ide-awake and happy (see chapter: Sphere and C
ircle as Moving G
esture). T
he same m
ovement, w
hen done in the first grade, evokes, together with
dreaminess and w
akefulness, a first stirring of the active, ascending will:
“I can stand on tiptoes, go down slow
ly—and now
I stand quite firm!” If
I don’t want to w
obble, I must do som
ething about it. This big novelty is
a first exercise in independence in the first grade.D
uring the ninth and tenth years of life, we need to practice m
ore and m
ore the starting point of a movem
ent, 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 w
ill must be brought
together in practical ways. If one m
isses this turning point in the ninth and tenth years, catching up later is possible but only at great cost.
Let us remem
ber that, when a young child w
alks through the room,
he or she always m
oves in one direction—from
back to front, from
invisible to visible, from spiritual w
orld to earthly life. One m
ight say: T
he child was ‘being w
alked’; his activity was passive, it happened as if
by itself. But, “if I m
ust walk backw
ards, I must consciously develop the
activity, overcome m
yself, i.e., call upon something above m
yself (Über-
mir).” In order to offer the child a field of practice allow
ing it to build a strong and healthy relationship w
ith the self and the world, it m
ust learn to practice w
alking backwards.
At this age, one com
ponent of the curriculum is the biblical story of
Creation treated as the evolutionary history of the hum
an ego, and also as the teaching of historical epochs. T
he curriculum aim
s at teaching the m
ovement of the E
go into the World. T
he eurythmic ‘I’ is to w
alk the path from
spiritual world to earthly w
orld and back. Here w
e see how
eurythmy flow
s out of the being of humanity. For the choreographic
form of the w
ord ‘I’ is a straight line going out into space and returning on itself.
By contrast, w
henever we w
alk a circle or any other closed form, w
e express a relationship w
ith space, with the w
orld, with the ‘W
e.’ One new
developm
ent at this age is that children start to walk the circle frontally,
which is a w
ay of practicing the idea: “I am a form
ative part of the
34
whole.” W
alking the circle and many other spatial form
s always frontally
connects spiritualizing of the body (walking backw
ard) and embodim
ent of the spirit (w
alking forward).
Let us consider from this point of view
an exercise for the seventh-eighth grades on the w
ords: “I will—
I cannot—I m
ust do it.” These
words actually describe in general the existential situation of that age.
How
then shall we do the exercise? T
he first path brings us backwards,
actively—from
here to something in the spiritual realm
. The second path,
forward, ‘drops’ m
e down into the earthly front space. H
aving, as it were,
‘pulled myself up’ by m
y own hair like B
aron Münchhausen, I apply all
my force in all directions, by w
alking the circle. The m
ovement parallels
the soul’s experience: I will experience m
yself, overcome m
yself; but I am
unable to handle either the strength of my body, or m
y inner weakness,
yet I must attem
pt it, and act.W
e finish the exercise by clapping; this, as it were, underlines the
gesture. For every time I touch m
y own body, I trace eurythm
ically speaking—
an E and “the E
fixes the ego in the etheric.”23 T
his allows the
overcoming-of-m
y-own-w
eakness 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 m
ust look elsewhere to see the effects of the ascending and
descending forces in the higher grades. Help does not com
e principally from
outside; instead, a qualitative element in the m
ovement itself is
increasingly at work. Starting from
ninth grade, we speak of the possibility
for the movem
ent to make dynam
ics visible. The line’s expressive pow
er speaks in space through form
and direction. Its strength determines its
qualitative expressiveness. A line m
ay start softly and end powerfully,
which expresses a different m
ood than the same line started boldly and
running out to a whispered ending.
After the birth of the astral body, i.e., w
hen the soul becomes
individualized, the student can perform an outw
ardly identical gesture tw
ice, in ‘polarized’ versions. The ‘I’ appears expansive and radiant in
the first version, and shrinking, wilting, the second tim
e around. In one case, the m
ovement is filled w
ith spirit, it describes an ascent leading to
35
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 form
ed in a conscious manner, it requires
thorough preparation by the teacher, especially in the Middle School
years. The quality of the m
ovement is connected w
ith rhythm. W
e can follow
the way the tw
o streams are expressed, not just in the ascending
and descending direction of the walking but also in the length of steps.
The short step aw
akens me; the long step m
akes me sleepy. U
ntil the ninth year, each step is an im
age. There are (long, slow
) giant-, dragon-, season-steps and (short) dw
arf- or ant-steps. (Children yaw
n when they
spend too much tim
e with giants.) T
he raindrop falling is short, the fog rises slow
ly. 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 w
aking and falling asleep, rising and falling. It practices in its ow
n body living and being lived in, being an ego and being the w
orld at the same tim
e. A
new life appears in the m
iddle sphere: a strong, half-awake, half-dream
ing life. A
ll movem
ent must start from
this central point, from the hum
an being’s living breath. It m
ust flow dow
n into the feet and up into the arm
s. The feet m
ust be able to glide, float, stumble or fall according to
the demands of the w
ork of art. The ‘language’ of the feet requires long
cultivation before we com
e to the point of really “speaking with our feet”
in eurythmy, instead of just m
umbling along. 24
Letter and Word
We have com
e to the point in the development of m
ovement and
its differentiation where w
e must explore the m
eaning of the spoken and heard w
ord. “God does eurythm
y, and in so doing, produces the human
form as the outcom
e of eurythmy. To the extent that hum
an beings return to the form
s of the divine creative word, they continue the w
ork of the gods.”
25 How
literally should we take these w
ords from Steiner?
Much of w
hat he said in the first lecture of the Speech Eurythm
y Course
can already be found in things he had said a year earlier, speaking as a
36
pedagogue. For instance, “All vow
els sound at a deeper, inward register,
whereas consonants objectify form
s.”26 V
ocalizing in eurythmy brings the
body almost to rest. T
he sensation of the word’s spirituality stream
s into the body, form
ing, warm
ing, creating. A true em
bodiment of the spirit
takes place. All consonants are m
ovement and sensation; the spirit of the
sound is, as it were, shaken out, rolled, w
aved. In the process, the body is burned through by the spirit. C
learly ‘consonanting’ spiritualizes the body. T
his 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 sim
plicity. We take an elem
entary approach to the sound and the gesture of consonants and vow
els. There is a very narrow
threshold on w
hich it is decided whether at night the w
ords, the sounds and the m
ovements reach the real sphere of truth (w
e might call it the
angelic sphere). W
e can see this in the following exam
ple from a first grade. A
s a way
of tuning the children’s souls and bodies at the beginning of a lesson, I often ask: W
here shall we seek our strength today? T
he answers tell
me unm
istakably the mood of the class. A
t the beginning of the year, suggestions alw
ays 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 pow
er than a stone, a mountain,
the moon or the flow
ers, for the airplane is manm
ade and the flowers
are created by God. W
e can then say: We have m
uch heavenly power,
much hum
an power, and also, if w
e so choose, much devil’s pow
er. But
the devil’s power m
ust 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 grow
th. Ultim
ately, we m
ay find a starting verse like the follow
ing:
I will be still.
I shall listen.I shall learn in the w
orld.I w
ill listen to what the heavens,
What the earth tells m
e.
37
Now
the image carries the speech: V
owels and consonants are linked
in the word and w
e must fulfill their task of form
ing, spiritualizing and enlivening the body. T
his speech, strengthened and working into the
body and the spirit, will then have acquired the w
inged power allow
ing us to converse at night w
ith beings of the higher worlds.
In curative eurythmy, w
e work w
ith 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 w
ith the extensive experience of im
age- and concept-free speech. Let’s see, for instance, how
we approach the alphabet in the fourth grade.
We w
alk from A
to G and then ask, “W
hat does H look like?”
The answ
er must com
e from the light-filled open space created by G
and it m
ust prepare the ground for I. The H
-gesture is ‘demanded by’
the alphabet. A too looks different depending on context: If w
e work
the series backwards from
G to A
, we end w
ith an in-breath, whereas
A placed at the beginning of the series has a gesture of w
onderment.
Which stories hide in the sequence LM
NO
? We experience successively
divine wings, hum
an breath, curiosity and O—
how good to have all
these things! If we succeed in practicing in this w
ay, a deep satisfaction takes over the class. W
e tie in directly and actively with the gods’ w
ork, w
ith the formative forces active in the universe.
Working on the sam
e themes in the ninth grade is very different.
The plunge into the original pow
ers of sound is a more w
akeful one. W
e discover anew the m
any different laws w
ith which w
e had interacted practically: T
he consonants are trace movem
ents of the outside world
and the vowels are the lively expression of the inner w
orld. When w
e w
ork eurythmically w
ith foreign words or w
ith entire poems, w
e develop a m
ore wakeful relationship to our ow
n movem
ents and speech. For instance:T
he same m
eaning can be expressed by different words
in different languages. Thus bud (E
nglish) can be translated as kalyx (G
reek), poppek (Serbo-Croatian) bim
bo (Hungarian)
bottone (Italian), silmu (Finnish) K
nopp (Norw
egian). Or soul
(English) is Seele (G
erman), psyche (G
reek) ame (French),
anima (Italian).
38
These differences spark the children’s interest, an interest for the
world w
hereby children perceive with w
onderment how
different the gesture of the G
erman Seele is, w
ith its long strong E caught betw
een the m
ysterious S and the embracing Ls; and the Italian anim
a—focused
on the central I, an open A at both ends and joyfully breathing N
and M
. This aw
akens interest for the self, insofar as I experience my ow
n m
ovement, m
y own form
ative gesture, the extent to which I can really
succeed in being true to the form of the w
ords.T
here are many m
ore exercises to awaken new
perceptions; they can excite even a blasé fifteen-year-old. T
he feeling that the same old hat at
last makes sense touches even children of that age for w
hom eurythm
y 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. A
t first, the image of the sound
moved in the bodies. N
ow the essence of the sound is m
ade visible in the body; for instance, the character of the letter F m
ust be reproduced through the arm
and the entire countenance. The bony, aw
kward form
s of the students resist becom
ing transparent for the spiritual meaning of
a sound.C
ontinuing the work, w
e can penetrate in an artistic process whereby
we can bring to expression in our lim
bs (the material of spirit) the ideals,
thoughts, sound-images (the m
atter of the word). In the upper grades,
the processes of embodim
ent and enspiriting now becom
e fused. At the
core, arising as the source of art, we have the geom
etric figure of the rhom
bus, born from the m
eeting of two triangles.
Working w
ith the eleventh grade, we m
ight start as follows: W
e attem
pt to explore a new quality through m
ovement. C
an we m
ake visible in ourselves light and darkness? C
an we light up the darkness in
the direction of blue? darken down the light in the direction of yellow
? T
he second step consists in expressing these qualities not only in my
own body but also w
orking with others as a group. T
he color is created in m
y inmost being and expressed through the body; the body ‘paints
it’ so vividly and soberly that this ‘painting’ can be seen and judged (objectively).
39
We also w
ork with the qualities of the past (back and dow
n), future (front and up) and present. A
t the center of the work, and of this entire
field, we m
ight use Marie Luise K
aschnitz’s poem Future:
Endlich A
t last Sagt euch los vom
Grauen.
Speak yourselves free of the dread.Zw
ar in Asche sinkt die W
elt, True, the w
orld sinks into ashes,doch G
eschlechter werden bauen
but future generations will rebuild
was vor unserem
Blick zerfällt.
what crum
bles before our eyes.
Ehe noch des Unheils Ende
Even before the evil endedund ein neuer Stern erschien,
and a new star appeared,
muss im
Herzen sich die W
ende, m
ust the heart prepare the turning,m
uss ein Wille sich vollziehn.
must the w
ill be fulfilled.
Nur G
eglaubtes lässt sich finden. W
e can only find what w
e believe.N
ur Gew
issheit wird den Stein
Only conviction w
ill give birth heilger K
räfte neu entbinden. to the stone of sacred forces.
Stund um Stunde sind verkettet
Hour after hour is linked
Ehe uns die Zukunft rettet.
Before the future saves us.
Müssen w
ir die Zukunft sein!
We are the future!
We m
ight, instead, choose to use the Sanskrit poem:
Look to this day,For it is life,T
he very life of life:In its brief course lieA
ll the realities and truths of existence,T
he joy of growth,
The splendor of action,
The glory of pow
er.For yesterday is but a m
emory,
And tom
orrow is only a vision.
But today w
ell livedM
akes every yesterday a mem
ory of happiness,A
nd every tomorrow
a vision of hope.Look w
ell, therefore, to this day!
40
From the very first gesture, the poem
opens up; the expanse of the w
orld must becom
e real for me. Endlich! (A
t last!): Here, w
e make a
great E, em
bodying the spirit of the world w
ithin us. In this sense, we
apply to the poem things w
e had previously practiced experiencing their qualities m
ore strongly. To wrestle to ascend into these struggles, students
are plunged body and soul into the true meaning of the w
ord. At the
conclusion of the poem, this w
restling can be sealed: Reaching above m
y head w
ith 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 m
y way.’ T
he zodiacal fishes grow out of the text (see chapter First and
Twelfth G
rades), admonishing us to see ourselves as m
ediators between
heaven and earth.
At these points in the H
igh School, no matter how
often we fail, w
e experience again and again that the rustle and w
hisper of daily speech can be transform
ed, here and now, by the individual, into the sound of the
trumpet, and m
ore beautiful yet, into the sound of the orchestra when
we travel the entire w
ay together, as a group. Fig. 8
41
Eurythm
y in Preschool
We all know
how existentially crucial eurythm
y is for the child in the first seven years. For the child to cover her face w
ith her hands means, for
the sense of life, “I am hidden, in the dark, no one sees m
e!” Movem
ent and being are one, the child rejoices w
ith her hands; she is angry with her
feet; when the soul m
oves, she claps and stamps. Little people m
ake no distinction betw
een their inner feeling and reality. Just as inner and outer being still flow
into each other, so too their body and the surrounding w
orld. For the child, objects are beings. The table ‘hurts’ just as the child’s
forehead does. Only gradually do children experience the hum
an sphere and the outer sphere as separate.
We assum
e that what w
e feed children makes a difference for their
sense of taste and well-being. T
he same is true of the clothes w
e put on them
. Do w
e pay the same attention to the im
portant questions as to w
hether and how our m
ovements around the children m
atter? Great
things are revealed in human m
ovement. Stance and gait reveal a friend’s
state of mind and health. C
onsciously or not, we read in the tilt of a
head modesty, pride, aggressiveness or attentiveness. A
nd how strong
the acoustic impression m
ade by sounds! Not only can w
e hear who is
walking dow
n the hall, but we can even sense if the person is excited,
angry or tired. Adults can read m
ovements. C
hildren feel them, im
itate them
. They absorb them
much deeper, because they lack the protection
provided by being able to interpret them. T
hey have an imm
ediate impact
on their soul and feeling life.B
ut whenever w
e take something in, it gets transm
uted into form!
Nutrition is one exam
ple of this fact: Whether it is too little food or
42
an unbalanced diet, everything has an effect on the formation of the
organs. Why should it be different w
ith the ‘ingestion’ and ‘digestion’ of m
ovements? It only differs to the extent that the absorption of m
ovements
is deeper yet, more closely linked w
ith the person’s soul. It doesn’t just affect the body, but affects strongly the highly fragile structure of the child’s soul-life. T
his is true of all movem
ents, for children live incessantly in m
ovement. W
hereas we adults ponder and listen quietly, children
‘think’ with their hands and feet; they are constantly active and can only
listen without m
oving for very short periods of time.
All
games
are learning
opportunities: jum
ping, skipping
rope, skating, balancing, running fast. T
hese games are alw
ays successful if the children participate in them
with their w
hole being, joyfully. The body
becomes active, healthy and untiring. N
othing else happens when w
e do eurythm
y with preschool children. W
e hop, we stam
p, we run fast
and light-footed, together or alone, just as we do w
hen we play. T
he eurythm
ic impulse, the contents of the m
ovement isn’t just on the body:
It is primarily located in inner experience.
Eurythm
y can start more or less like this: W
e open arms and legs
wide and jum
p happily: “Yes, yes, yes, here we are!” Joy, openness radiate
throughout the movem
ents. Then w
e reach up to the sun to gather strength. W
e clasp our arms to our chest, then relax and reach above
our heads. We m
ake a eurythmic O
, we take the sun in our arm
s, The
eurythmists speaks: “Let’s get a lot of strength from
the sun,” or “We
look for strength in the earth.” The sentence is sim
ilar, gestures too, now
narrow, now
wide. B
ut when she says, “Let’s get a lot of strength from
the earth,” instead of form
ing a sunny O (above our heads), w
e reach down
to the ground with a strong D
gesture and a vigorous explosive sound. If it is storm
y outdoors, and the children come in w
inded, they may w
ish for the pow
er of the wind.
This gathering-in of forces can be repeated in every lesson, along
with the alternation of contraction and release. Every tim
e the same, yet
every time new
, according to the children’s needs.T
he eurythmist w
orking with young children is called upon to be
wide-aw
ake in soul, flexible and absolutely sincere. The soul coloring
43
is passed along to the children’s souls and bodies through the teacher’s gesture. T
he child’s surrender to the environment facilitates the w
onderful capacity w
e call imitation, upon w
hich all learning rests. The child is
open to all the movem
ents in her environment, takes them
all into her spirit-, soul- and physical-constitution by reproducing them
. This places
us before a mom
entous responsibility to perform our ow
n movem
ents in a m
eaningful manner, carried aloft by the spirit, never allow
ing them to
become m
echanical. Allow
ing the children to move in a m
anner copied from
technology would be like giving them
stones instead of bread.W
e grasp the world w
ith our hands and feet. We w
ant to induct the children in their use, hum
anely, subtly, with em
pathy. How
can we
do this? Not w
ith sermons, but w
ith an image: W
e are walking through
the woods, stepping on soft m
oss, then on pine needles, now on stones,
and now w
e come to a brook and jum
p across it and at last we com
e to the m
eadow. N
ow w
e go down, skipping happily. T
he images m
ust be strong, experienced inw
ardly. They can be accom
panied by a verse, or the sound of bells, w
ooden sticks, a harp or a recorder. In any case, the adult m
ust participate! The adult’s ‘m
antle of movem
ent’ must be w
ide and enveloping enough for all the children to be carried along in it.
We w
ant to ride. We call the horse, “C
ome, com
e, come!” W
ith our arm
s we form
a loving O. W
e stroke the little horse, “Ai, horsey, A
i, Ai,
Ai.” T
he eurythmic gesture for the sound A
i, in which one hand or arm
glides in front of the other, is self-evident for the children w
ho pick it up gaily. “A
i, what a beautiful coat you have.” T
hen we sit up, close our fists
on the reins and off we go: “M
y white horses, they love to go slow
, with
measured step along the w
ay.” Slowly, knees raised, feet extended like
hooves, we are both rider and horse. W
e clearly experience the children pulling inw
ard through these images, healthily, in harm
ony with the self
and with one’s actions.
How
easily said: a human being in harm
ony with his deeds! A
nd how
rarely we adults m
anage to be in harmony w
ith ourselves and with the
world in our thoughts and deeds! W
e have before us an archetypal model
of humanity.
44
We have such an im
age before us at Christm
as when w
e celebrate the birth of the C
hild and of Christianity. From
this anniversary a stream
of life flows over the entire year. In our education of the young child’s
movem
ent, we m
ust dedicate our entire attention and responsibility to this enchantm
ent of Beginning. If w
e connect the movem
ents with that
which contributes to hum
an skill and strength, with speech and w
ith contem
plative music appealing to the feelings, then the highest forces
truly come to inhabit the grow
ing body, connecting heaven and earth in the hum
an being. If this is successful, we are entitled to hope that
there will be an E
aster, a resurrection in the child’s future biography. The
person will be able to spread w
isdom and blessings into old age.
45
The C
urriculuma W
ork of Art
Correspondences betw
een the Developm
ental Phases
and the Eurythmy C
urriculumIn his treatise on Plant M
etamorphosis, G
oethe wrote: “A
ll forms are
similar, and not a one resem
bles the others. And thus the chorus points to
a secret law.” T
his describes from another point of view
the fundamental
gesture at the root of pedagogy. The secret law
s 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 hum
anity, differentiated in each individual.W
hat 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 m
otto, this one by Schiller can also be of help: “D
o you seek the highest, the greatest? The plant can teach you. W
hat the plant is w
ithout applying her will, this you m
ust 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, w
ood and stone, or through w
ord and movem
ent—all this leads us to A
rt.Yet if the m
aterial of this art is not just a component of the w
orld but a w
orld all to itself, if this material is the hum
an being, the whole hum
an being in his/her tem
poral and spatial form, then the artistic creation is
not music, painting, sculpture or poetry, but the art of education. T
he true art of education, as understood by W
aldorf pedagogy, builds on the idea of transform
ation, of metam
orphosis. At every age, it asks one
question: What is now
the highest, the greatest? Which food, w
hich m
aterial and which m
ethod does the child need now in order to develop
46
this highest capacity out of his own w
ill? In this manner, the W
aldorf curriculum
represents a totality. It is a work of art, to be ‘read’ from
the developm
ent of the growing person and aim
ed at his/her formation in
the most com
prehensive 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 m
aterials. Just as the human being is an
articulated being of spirit, soul and physical body, so too we m
ust determine
the subjects to be taught in such a way that they are articulated yet w
ell related to each other. H
ead, heart, hand—science, art and religion—
are connected and in balance if the teaching is anthropologically sound. In order to do justice to hum
an beings developing in the stream of tim
e, the curriculum
has to be a fine-tuned composition.
In the first years, one needs to work especially out of the w
ill, external activity and im
itation. Middle childhood dem
ands 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 sw
eep, differentiated according to age. T
his articulation is also at work in the com
position of individual subject m
atters. Indeed an attempt is m
ade to match individual lessons
with the hum
an archetype, its roots, leaves and flowers, i.e., w
ill in the realm
of action, feeling in its multiplicity and intellect. W
hen teaching foreign
languages in
the early
grades, w
hether Spanish,
Russian,
Chinese, or French, the children speak and sing, and auditory m
aterial is introduced through m
ovement. In the m
iddle grades, the children start to w
rite; using the foundation of those early years, they practice gramm
ar 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, autonom
ous intercourse with the language—
appropriate to individual and age-related capacities—
is now possible. T
his construction based on the totality could be follow
ed in detail for all subjects.If w
e now train our gaze to the teaching of eurythm
y, it becomes
clear that it plays a mediating role. E
urythmy builds bridges betw
een the subjects and w
ithin each subject matter (see below
). But in the person
47
too, eurythmy is constantly building bridges, betw
een doing, feeling and thinking. If one of these soul activities is m
issing, movem
ent ‘falls out’ of eurythm
y and it turns into simply dance or gym
nastics. E
urythmy m
ediates between the subjects to the extent that the them
es of the m
ain lessons, which are m
ost markedly related to the children’s
developmental age, can be elaborated eurythm
ically. For instance, we
might think of fairy tales in the first grade. In eurythm
y, fairy tales get picked up in the form
of playful, circular movem
ent. Fractions in the fourth grade are picked up in the form
of differentiated spatial forms and
stepping series, helping the child to literally embody know
ledge. In sixth or seventh grade physics, the first law
s of mechanics translate into the rod
exercises practiced in eurythmy. U
sing 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 betw
een the rod and the outstretched arm.
Or again, the rod gets throw
n and caught in a beautiful rhythm, alone or
in groups. Precision and empathy, not arbitrary w
illfulness, are required. W
hen the tenth grade works w
ith rhymes and m
eters in poetry, eurythmy
embarks on the independent elaboration of poem
s. Spatial forms for
a sonnet are contrasted with form
s for blank verse. Adolescents are
challenged to apply their personal sense of style, prepared in the learning of literature and com
position, and to express it in the body.E
urythmy takes up the them
es 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 movem
ent a kind of quintessence of the m
ost diverse subjects.W
e shall select one motif to throw
light on this Gesam
tkunstwerk
(unified work of art) concept. W
hereas we m
entioned earlier the unity of life-stage and teaching m
aterial, we shall now
attempt to show
the com
positional unity of the curriculum. It is not just by approxim
ation 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 hum
anity, then the respective sections m
ust have a well-proportioned relationship to
each other. It can’t be just a matter of piling things upon each other.
48
There m
ust be an attempt to build a vault, an arc reaching from
the first to the last grade. A
nd if these are fitting, it should also be possible to dem
onstrate a correspondence between the second and eleventh grades,
and similarly betw
een the other ages.
First and T
welfth G
rades
First Grade
The m
ost important thing is to learn to ‘read the child.’ A
nd a really practical know
ledge of the human being oriented tow
ards the body, the soul and the spirit helps us learn to read the children. T
his is what
makes it so difficult to speak about ‘W
aldorf pedagogy’ in general. For W
aldorf pedagogy is not something one can learn or discuss, but is pure
praxis: One can only narrate through concrete exam
ples how this praxis
is exercised in this or that case, for this or that need. 27
What do w
e read in the gait of a three-year-old child? Is its step heavy because it is still aw
kward, or can w
e observe softness, roundness? The
child bounces like a little ball; on the whole she already know
s her way
and can be quite coordinated. Yet in the detail she is not yet secure, still bum
ps into things, hurts herself, awakens to her ow
n movem
ents from
impact w
ith the environment. W
hile the child is round and heavy, her gestures have som
ething featherlike. This quality disappears over the next
two years. T
he goal of greater accuracy appears in the movem
ent body. T
he child discovers balance and educates it further. What delight w
hen the little boy m
anages to stand on one foot! What jubilation w
ith the first jum
p! Jumping from
a chair into the adult’s arms com
es early, with
joyful trust; it is a leap into the process of shooting up. It is a mom
entous developm
ental step when, on her ow
n, the child jumps from
a stool or a stair and m
anages to maintain her balance!
And now
to the schoolchildren! Goal-oriented, they w
alk up to the teacher on the first day of school. D
uring their admissions interview
, they happily skip on one leg. A
nd with a little luck they catch the ball.
They are fam
iliar and at ease in their body. Exercises of ‘body-geography’
49
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.A
s we can see, the child’s m
ovement inform
s us about her maturity,
its developmental steps. T
he movem
ents give us many clues about the
relationship between the spirit and the physical body. H
ow short a step
then to using movem
ent to engage in a conversation with the body, to
nurture and educate it! This eurythm
ic education of the movem
ent 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, w
e attempt
to awaken soul im
ages through movem
ent images. T
he connection betw
een inner image and external im
age can be established by the magic
of imitation w
hich children still control when they first enter school.
Here is one concrete exam
ple:T
he children stand in a circle. In a natural but measured voice,
the teacher calls: “Sun, sun come forth!” D
oing so, he form a generous
O-gesture filled w
ith life. The arm
s are rounded high above the head, w
arm, colorful in their m
ood. The children’s arm
s follow suit: Sm
all suns appear, alm
ost filled by the head. Many of the children’s arm
s touch their heads, because the head is big and the arm
s are still short. Many hands
rest on the head, little arms get quickly tired. Som
e 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 im
portant to discern: Is the child tired? Is she getting sick? O
r is the connection between spirit-soul and body
still weak? It is good for the class teacher to observe eurythm
y classes w
ithout teaching them, and use this opportunity to ‘read’ the children.
Precisely there, seemingly sim
ple gestures allow the teacher to read quite
clearly how sm
oothly the children have slipped into the instrument of
their bodies. A loving w
ord, an approving nod or a stern glance can help along m
any a developmental step. T
he children need for their practice to be accom
panied by many people. T
hey learn from their environm
ent. A
t that stage, the children always stand in a circle during eurythm
y class. Everybody sees everybody else. E
ach child knows w
here he or she belongs. T
his makes for security, poise and confidence. T
his very habit
50
allows free m
ovement to unfold. T
he assigned place in the circle acts like an authority. T
his is empow
ering, because it is economical. W
ith habit, it takes less tim
e to get the class in good order.T
hrough the power of im
itation, the children are completely oriented
to the teacher. They live pow
erfully in the periphery. At that stage, the
mood, the atm
osphere (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. T
he children still hang from golden threads.
The gestures flow
out of an overarching image into each single child.
There it becom
es singular movem
ent, individual style, even self-will.
Right and left also are super-ordained in the universe. O
ne theme of the
first grade is the discovery: Where in m
yself is the right, where is m
y left hand?
With m
y two feet
The earth do I greet
First comes the right
Then com
es the left,First the busy oneT
hen the nimble one.
With m
y two feet
The earth I greet.
Universal law
s become the child’s possession. H
ow strongly the
imitation of m
ovement penetrates the children is expressed not only in
their bodily motions, but also in the w
ay they move through space. M
uch
Fig. 9
51
of what w
e do in the first grade lives out of the images and m
ood of the fairy tales, w
ith archetypal forms like the circle, the straight line, the
spiral. If we think of the spiral staircase in Snow
White’s castle tow
er, or the narrow
steps across the brook in Little Brother and Little Sister, or of
the castle courtyard through which the anim
als canter, or the vault of the sky in w
hich birds are circling. The children m
ove individually and freely, but w
ithin the great image and law
of the general forms.
There is another angle from
which to consider the fact that the child
‘moves tow
ard 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. T
his occurs in a great variety of finger games and foot
exercises which hum
anity had used since time im
mem
orial to educate its young.
To bend and stretch, to wriggle and reach, to point, to hide, all these
actions and the quality of movem
ent they represent are practiced to the accom
paniment of various verses.
My fingers, they are nim
ble and fast,Som
etimes dark,
(make a fist)
Sometim
es light.
(spread out)
They can stretch,
And they can crane,
(spread out)
And they can hide quickly.
(hands behind the back)
He is the sm
allest and cutest. (little finger)
He is the sm
artest.
(index finger)
This one doesn’t like to get up
Fig. 10
52
Except to get a ring.
(ring finger)
This one is the strongest
And w
e use it a lot.
(thumb)
But the other fingers
Must keep him
warm
and safe. (closed hand)
The hum
an being lives on earth in space and time. W
e saw how
pow
erfully the instinct for movem
ent grows from
the periphery, from the
child’s environment. Space plays an enorm
ous role—the child’s m
emory
is still bound to space. If the path we follow
through the woods and
meadow
s crosses a brook, it goes without saying for the first grader that
all the children must jum
p at exactly the same spot w
here the teacher did. It can take a w
hile 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 w
ill be transformed. Ten-year-olds all
jump at the sam
e mom
ent, no matter w
here they stood when the teacher
mentioned the brook. T
he word directs the m
ovement, not the im
agined event in space.
This should be sufficient to suggest the w
orking style, the color of that age in relation to eurythm
ic movem
ent. We shall now
turn to the conclusion of eurythm
ic work in the school, in tw
elfth grade.
The Tw
elfth Grade
To the casual observer, the tall figures crossing the schoolyard suggest a depressed, subdued m
ood. Their steps are sluggish in their heavy boots.
Their shoulders are slouched. B
ut suddenly there is the sound of raw
joyful shouts, an awkw
ard leap. The tw
elfth graders are intensely involved in conversation, busy w
ith the experiences of the latest lesson. Posture and m
ood are clearly influenced by the individual soul disposition. It is im
portant now to take the students at their m
ost fundamentally individual.
This personal space, this sphere of individuality is, how
ever, sacrosanct, inviolable, inaccessible to anyone else. H
ow shall w
e understand the contradictions?
In the first grade, we lived in the periphery, in space, in im
itation; that is an aspect of the circle. T
hese central forces must be understood as
53
the individual ego-activity. This is w
here the work m
ust take place. In the eighteen-year-old, the hum
an form is largely developed. T
his instrument,
like any instrument, m
ust be tuned and coordinated with its user. T
his is not an external process, but one that m
ust lead to the outside. Founded on an inner im
pulse, inner motivation, arm
s and legs, hands and feet get coordinated. In the first grade, right and left w
ithin the circle and in my
own body need to be exercised. N
ow this im
itation from the inside out is
taken up with the verse “I think speech.”
The students take up six positions. T
hey sense, at first without any
corrections, the most varied relationships betw
een arm and leg m
ovements.
The lim
b is always stretching out, tracing different configurations. “W
hen w
e teach eurythmy to adults and w
e start them out on this exercise, they
are sure to find their way into eurythm
y. When the gestures are practiced
in sequence, this exercise is one of the best curative exercises to help harm
onize the soul in all cases where it so dissipated that this condition
is expressed physically in a variety of metabolic illnesses.”
28 These w
ords of Steiner can strengthen us as w
e work w
ith adolescents. This inner
disintegration affects all of us nowadays. Praxis show
s that twelfth graders
can become com
pletely absorbed by this very demanding exercise.
Once again: T
he essence of the exercise is precise position, not fluid m
otion. Quietly holding a position enables clear, strong consciousness
and wakeful sensations. E
urythmists construct six very different positions
according to strict geometric law
s; however, instead of the im
petus com
ing from the periphery to the person, these positions are form
ed out of the person’s ow
n body-form. T
his transforms thoroughly the larger
meaning (G
estus) of the movem
ent. A
circular form is created through and out of the hum
an being. T
his can start around the eighteenth year. We find in the tw
elfth grade curriculum
many indications based on this new
quality of the circle, sim
ply by translating contents in movem
ent. Faust wants to find out
what it is “that inw
ardly holds the world together.”
This is a central them
e of the twelfth grade. In religion class, the
theme is a survey of w
orld religions, in biology, the human being as crow
n of creation. T
his Gestus can now
be both content and method. ‘M
ethod’
54
in this case means: W
hat gets done is determined by the m
usic, the text, w
hatever medium
‘constitutes’ the work of art. T
his also determines the
style of the work. It m
ust 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 them
e of birth and death in its m
any representations (Conrad Ferdinand M
eyer’s Chorus of the D
ead, C
hopin’s Funeral March, N
elly Sachs’ Chorus of the U
nborn). What are
the forms, the colors, the spatial gestures related to this them
e?W
e interrogate the formative forces surrounding us and w
e seek them
in the zodiacal cycle. This investigation m
ust be done in speech, which
provides peace and spaciousness. The ascent into this conversation can be
facilitated by the season. At C
hristmas w
e deal with the C
apricorn; in the course of a class conversation, students gather everything related to the C
apricorn: the sign, the season, the month, the quality of that m
oment
in the year: dying, shrinking, cold in nature. But also, C
hristmas: joy,
rejoicing, the birth of the Most H
igh. The sun is at its nadir. N
ow, the slow
ascent has started. From
the outside, we isolate the C
apricorn’s qualities: H
e stands up high, on a tiny ledge, he leaps with great surefootedness;
he seeks wide view
s, high overlooks; he is shy. We notice qualities of this
constellation that run in polarities.
Contraction
ExpansionN
adir of the sun
Turning of the sunShyness
Courage
Small platform
B
ig leap
We can find polarities in colors also. C
lenching is black, spreading is w
hite, although it shouldn’t be ‘frozen’ as typical of a final stage, but strong, w
ill-full activity. The quality of the C
apricorn—an active w
andering
Fig. 11 – The sign of C
apricorn
55
between polar opposites—
is red. Mixed in the right proportion, these
colors produce the almost holy color of hum
an incarnation (Inkarnat = peach blossom
, constituted of red, white and black).
Through conversation, w
e can find the eurythm
ic posture suggested by Steiner for the zodiacal sign of the C
apricorn: left hand closed at the forehead; right hand forw
ard, opened
at the
end of
the outstretched
arm, looking out. T
he legs are spread as if ready to jum
p, 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 inw
ard quality and an outw
ard one, a front and a back. T
he step corresponding to the sound originating in these gestural qualities, L is very easy to do and not very big. M
any students follow
this guided yet autonomous
path. In doing it, an intuition can surface that the build of our body is related to forces of w
hich the visible planetary bodies are m
erely an external expression. Some years w
e can go through the w
hole zodiac with the students. T
he insights must be authentic in
order to work w
ith them and apply them
artistically, as for instance in the follow
ing verses from D
ante’s Divine C
omedy. If the all-encom
passing factor, the new
found oneness is to become a them
e for artistic work, the
circle as ideal form m
ust emerge in the tw
elfth grade. It is not an easy form
. 29
Eternally w
andering in light,T
he sun is on the way
And it appears in every position
On the arc of the sky.
When it aw
akens in the sign of the Capricorn,
Full of radiant power
When day and night are equal,
Fig. 12
56
Like the intuition of spring,W
hen green breaks out, young and jubilantO
ut of the tender bud’s sheath,W
hen the Creator’s great becom
ingN
ewly creates the entire realm
,T
he sun pours onto earthIts strongest force of formC
reating, forming and building,
It radiates life far and wide,
All tem
porality containedIn the im
age of eternity.
The circle turns tow
ards the sun, facing to the front, fast and light-footed, unhesitating! T
his requires from every single person a w
ide-open consciousness: I m
ust attend to myself, to the people in front of m
e and in back of m
e, to the circle which w
e all run, and to the center that holds us all!
When w
e awaken in the sign of A
ries, full of radiant force, the circle changes; there is w
akefulness, something erupts, w
ith an almost attack-
like quality.
This sign, the sym
bol of Aries, is form
ed 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. T
here must be distance.
The
conclusion of
this eurythm
ic exercise
can be
formed
by com
munal w
ork determined by the qualities of the text. T
he theme of
this work cannot be m
erely the result of fancy, but must be relevant.
There is a radial quality. W
hat is weaving betw
een the text and the class? To w
hat extent are the individuals and the group able to reach for the generality, and how
narrowly bound w
ill they remain to their
singularities, their weaknesses and com
forts? Fig. 13 – The sign of A
ries
57
After tw
elve years of eurythmy, one m
ay succeed in concluding the w
ork in the sign of the circle, the sign of the sun, which enables our life
on earth.
Every verse moved in the first grade—
insofar as it had been brought in w
ord and image and reinforced through im
itation—every one of
these verses can now be interpreted eurythm
ically, In the twelfth grade,
everything starts with the individual person.
Day after day from
the cosmos,
Stars give me m
y life. I w
ill gladly give thanks to the world through m
y deeds.
Second and E
leventh Grades
Second Grade
We turn tow
ard an inner tier of the curriculum’s vault, the relation
between second and eleventh grade.
Swallow
Song
The sw
allows, the sw
allows
They fly in all directions.
The sky is their blue hom
e,T
he sun shines in and out,A
nd when the sun show
er comes
They jubilate in it,
Shake their wings,
Catch pearls of rain.
Fig. 14 – The sign of the Sun
58
And w
hen the evening bells ring,T
hey are all dry again,A
nd whistle by like hurricanes
Around the house and the church steeple
And call each other to the race:
To bed, to bed, to bed!T
he sun touches them w
ith its last raysA
nd darkness falls on golden spaceA
nd silence, silence, silence—T
hus is God’s w
ill.
– Martin Lang
All the children ‘fly’ in a circle, arm
s outstretched. Then they stop
and create a big L gesture. T
he gesture is ‘placed’ in front of them, at
head level, then their arms sink to their sides in a flow
ing motion. E
ach child builds its ow
n heavenly vault and stands in its midst. A
gain and again, w
e repeat this L. A new
strong movem
ent starts. We are no longer
swallow
s! We are raining! A
large R flow
s over our backs and down our
heads. We w
alk in silence, tiny steps, as befits raindrops. All the children
turn around. “We the sw
allows, w
e the swallow
s”… quickly, every child
changes from raindrop to jubilating sw
allow. W
e laugh at the swallow
s, w
e leap higher and higher, as high as the sky. All the children are involved,
sometim
es in the form of thick, dark rain clouds, som
etimes as drops and
swallow
s.D
ifferentiation starts
in the
next lesson.
We
form
different groups: sw
allows, raindrops, church spires. N
ow the entire poem
can be interpreted as a eurythm
y play with m
any changes from anim
ated m
ovement to quietude, alternating betw
een one group of children and the rest of the class. It all ends w
ith a big B. A
rms 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 m
oment isn’t prolonged to excess, it is a delight for
all involved. After the vigorous m
ovement, a healthy life-sense reigns.
Another exam
ple can lead us still deeper into the work w
ith the second grade. It is late sum
mer, the sw
allows are gathering on telephone
59
wires. W
e speak about them, exchange observations. T
hen we repeat
our swallow
play—alw
ays, always changing. Yet today other birds fly
through: What m
ight they be? Some children fly, the others look on:
What is it? A
n eagle! But it hardly beats its w
ing (the child’s face looks severe, om
inous). Is it a sparrow w
hich constantly interrupts flying to hop on the ground and shake its w
ings? Is it a parrot with his screechy
calls? Anim
als provide an inexhaustible theme—
autonomy, supported by
imaginative unity. W
e often have in front of us ‘masters of the beasts,’
children who quite strongly step into an anim
al’s essence, completely
alive in the animal’s T
hou.In the second grade, the circle, several circles, becom
e dominant.
The protective, concealing sheath still gives order and security. W
e observe very closely w
hich children are often (perhaps too often) ready to dem
onstrate for the group, and which ones rarely are. It is part of the
normal developm
ent at that age to make oneself the center of interest in
a healthy fashion. When m
ost of the children can take this in stride, the second grade is ready for an exercise w
ith profound pedagogical effects: a kind of D
ionysian round, which is one of the exercises described by
Steiner:
I and You / You and I / I and You / Are W
e !
There is an intensifying repetition up to the W
e. Then the w
ords get reversed: “You and I / I and You / You and I” and w
e are back where
we started. Silence/rest follow
s the vigorous movem
ent, the mutual
encounter. The children m
ove across the space diagonally and in pairs, com
ing together, then separating. At the W
e, they cross paths. As in the
text, the second part of the movem
ent mirrors the first.
In the first grade, the main effort w
ent into creating of a healthy unity, to create, am
ong other things, a strong home for the class spirit.
Com
munity w
as the biggest concern. In the second grade, we m
ust work
harder on differentiation. The I and You exercise draw
s out the individual but quickly restores him
/her to the whole. T
he single person has the main
60
role, but each person is most im
portant! We notice here a strong social
and therapeutic effect. We learn to understand w
hat Steiner meant w
hen he described the exercise as being effective against am
bition and envy.Let us consider the stories that are told in that class. T
he theme is I
and Thou w
rit-large! The hum
an being as an Ego betw
een the Thou of
the angel and the Thou of the anim
al. We have both qualities in ourselves:
something of the saint and som
ething of the clever sly fox and greedy w
olf. We take up and choreograph sacred festive texts. Sim
ple spatial form
s walked by individual children and by the class as a w
hole, large festive arm
gestures can be connected to a beautiful Silesian Christm
as carol. T
he children stand in two circles, but since all the children w
ant to participate, w
e are distributed through the room. T
he circle turns into a square. E
ach child walks its ow
n path, yet the form as a w
hole is cohesive.
Von seinem ew
gen festen Thron
From his eternal m
ighty throneIst Er herabgestiegen,
Descended H
e,D
er eingeborne Gottessohn.
The inborn Son of G
od.Er w
ill verborgen liegen H
e will lie hidden
In einer Krippe schw
ach und klein, Sm
all and weak, in a crib,
In Windeln eingehüllet
Swaddled in cloth.
Der allen Sternen gibt den Schein
He w
ho gives stars their radiance,D
er Erd und Him
mel füllet.
He w
ho fills heaven and earth. H
allelujah, hallelujah! H
allelujah, hallelujah!
Accom
panied by the text or by the melody, the path evolves into
the form. T
hus in the second grade, the comm
unity gets formed. O
ut of m
any single activities by the existing group: the group is transformed
into a comm
unity.
Eleventh G
radeIn the follow
ing text by an eleventh grader, we see again the them
e I and You, in a strikingly new
form. It opens up to the listener after
repeated reading or speaking, when the I and T
hou is revealed as its key
61
You will lose your gods,
Your dreams of certainty in this life,
Your hope,Your w
aiting for God’s guidance.
We are alone at first.
Destiny w
as put into our hand.W
e are responsible for every deed.W
e must seek a new
God
Who w
ill of us make a w
orld and out of the w
orld an ‘I.’
We m
ust find the one,T
he one waiting for us
Wanting to be experienced.
He is the goal
of all our life.
Either w
e go underor w
e flower in eternal light.
Yet only to our childrenw
ill we be able to transm
it som
e hope in God’s guidance.
But w
ho is a child?
– Marco W
alker
Fig. 15
62
Young, dark, serious eyes gaze with a grave sm
ile. A few
weeks ago,
the hair now shorn w
as shoulder length. The text, w
ritten by an eleventh grader w
as handed to the teacher with a gesture of indifferent abandon.
The class starts. W
e stand in a circle. The goal of our attention is conscious
posture. How
do I stand? Is my head, w
ith its vault of the skull, erect and aw
ake, well centered above the body? C
an I feel my shoulders, the
wonderful space around m
y head, neck and shoulders where a connection
is established with m
y comrades? T
his shell, this supposedly empty space?
This ‘nothing’ in ourselves is getting m
ore and more interesting!
We observe: W
hat happens when w
e all move to the m
iddle? How
do w
e carry our heads? Are w
e carrying them at all, or do w
e ‘lose our head’ w
hen we w
alk? We all know
this ‘headlessness’ from our daily lives. H
ere in the eurythm
y class, we can experience on a sm
all scale how to rem
ain clear-headed, how
not to run like a chicken without a head. W
e can experience this sim
ple encouraging pace in almost archetypal, fashion.
Now
we direct our attention to our w
alking. We loosen the foot, a stream
rises up to the head across the back; in the loosened step, the front takes along the head. T
he front carries the head, and the stream of m
ovement
flows back dow
n our front to the foot. Observing, describing, studying in
action, we w
ork on this walking, w
e get reacquainted with this w
alking, w
hich is after all quite familiar.
Further practice makes clear that the stream
of walking doesn’t just
flow over the person; it also flow
s through the earth! The foot placed in
front gives a backward im
pulse and enlivens the back foot for the next step. In this fashion, each step connects m
e with the self and w
ith the earth.
Fig. 16
63
Walking is an open secret, and in the eleventh grade, w
ith the students approaching their eighteenth years, there is som
ething deeply satisfying about m
y own w
alking. Now
students can work independently
and wakefully on the m
ystery 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-know
ledge and self-education. O
ften we can sense som
ething 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 exam
s and graduation requirem
ents, but rather on the Way, B
eing, the Practice. We m
ust strive to satisfy this readiness. For eurythm
y, this means seeking the w
ay which
this particular class must follow
. Is it moving colors? C
olor in lyrical literature? Is there som
ething for us, say, in Hebbel’s N
ightsong?
Quellende, schw
ellende Nacht,
Welling, sw
elling night,Voll von Lichtern und Sternen:
Full of lights and of stars:In den ew
igen Fernen, In the eternal distance,
Sage, was ist da erw
acht? Say, w
hat awakened there?
Herz in der B
rust wird beengt,
Heart in the breast becom
es tight,Steigendes, neigendes Leben,
Rising and ebbing life,
Riesenhaft fühle ich’s w
eben, G
igantic the pulse I feel,W
elches das meine verdrängt.
Pushing aside my ow
n.
Schlaf, da nahst du dich leis, Sleep, there you enter as softly,
Wie dem
Kinde die A
mm
e, A
s the nurse to the child,U
nd um die dürftige Flam
me
And round the pale flam
eZ
iehst du den schützenden Kreis.
You draw the sheltering circle.
We cam
e up with the m
iracle of sleep, the mystery of tim
e, in which
“there is nothing,” in which the soul expands. T
he answer of the starry
world sinks into the opening soul. A
t the end, consolation, protection and w
armth. T
he gestures must breathe, they m
ust become colors.
Already the first flow
ing and swelling L can radiate a sacred m
ood. The
students no longer stand in a circle; each of them has found his/her place
64
in the room, each of them
alone with the poem
. Not im
itation, but the personal quest, the personal start-out-on-the-w
ay is contained the theme!
The sw
elling gestures become a m
otif, two expanding Ls, rhythm
ically articulated, then a rest, a breath, night. A
second time, tw
o 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 w
ork on the inner qualities of the words and m
ovements.
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 w
ork in the circle. Every person in the room tries things out.
The teacher m
ust not be simply an observer. T
he mood of the w
ork is greatly augm
ented when the teacher too, rather than being an outsider,
mixes in sincerely w
ith the seekers and practitioners.W
e practice and discuss stylistic issues in relation to walking. H
ow
do we select the pace? W
here do we m
ove? Where do w
e stop? Which
path should we w
alk in order to make m
ore visible for ourselves and for the spectators the nocturnal quality of the piece? N
ot everybody will be
active: As in ordinary life, som
e people will alw
ays imitate.
Do w
e want to have a perform
ance? 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 w
ork should remain a ‘study,’ and w
e should feel satisfied, without
conveying any sense of ‘resignation.’ This is im
portant, for at that age, young people are very thin-skinned. T
houghts are perceived; feelings are realities. W
e constantly work w
ith these in eurythmy. C
onsequently, as a teacher, it is particularly im
portant to monitor one’s ow
n feelings. In the second grade, the them
e was I and T
hou. In the eleventh grade w
e seek metam
orphosis. Experience show
s clearly that this theme lends
itself to intensive solo work. W
hen conditions allow, it is w
onderful to let as m
any students as possible do solos if they so wish. A
ppropriate free choice can be practiced. T
he question is not whether som
ething will be
done, but rather what w
ill be done. To be independent means w
orking w
ith a will that is increasingly m
y own and increasingly free.
65
How
differently the work proceeds now
! We m
ust find texts. Who
will start alone, at w
hich spot? Who w
ill draw the m
ovement and
demonstrate it? W
ho wants to start w
ith the teacher? Can som
eone find the sound-gestures in order to understand the poem
in greater depth? As
in life, very different courses will be em
barked on.A
t that age, young people see themselves and others very clearly.
Working artistically through eurythm
y means using the body as an
instrument, m
y own feelings, m
y own thinking as artistic m
edia: 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 im
ages and stories of being betw
een angels and animals. In eleventh grade, w
e no longer have im
ages, but the experience of the Ego and of the W
orld, through m
ovement. T
he artist in the human being can set to w
ork, with
the brilliance that characterizes that age.
Third and T
enth Grades
Third G
radeH
ad there never been any angelsH
uman beings w
ouldn’t live either;For in the hum
an being, an angel residesLike the clapper in the bell.
Each bell sound announces
That the tw
o ally themselves;
Yes! Your angel sings, the beautiful one,A
nd your heart bell tones.
These w
ords by Anna Iduna Z
ehnder describe poetically the mood
we experience am
ong third graders. Especially by the end of the year, w
e can ring these bell-tones of the heart. A
t the beginning of the lesson, we
hear two notes, played on a flute or a xylophone: It is a M
ajor Third,
always the sam
e interval. This is like a friendly nod, a greeting w
ith
66
lower arm
s and hands waving through the room
, a smile m
atching the m
ovement.
In the next lesson again, two sounds greet us as w
e enter at the beginning. T
hey sound different, more inw
ard, like a wafting, arm
s and hands fluttering tow
ards the child. The sounds are alw
ays turned inward;
the corresponding gestures move close to the child, w
afting toward the
body, sometim
es near the eyes, even when the teacher doesn’t dem
onstrate it in that w
ay. This is the M
inor Third.
The children soon learn to distinguish betw
een the two intervals and
to perform them
, almost by them
selves. Spontaneously, as if determined
by the sound, the circle grows a little sm
aller for the Minor T
hird; it m
oves outward w
hen the Major T
hird appears in sound and movem
ent. Inner life turns into spatial m
ovement. Inner life is expressed in arm
-m
otions.In the first tw
o grades, we built upon the bell, the circle, the m
usical Fifth. N
ow w
e live within it. T
he image, the sound of the Fifth, of the
circle, of the sheath, carry us forward and yet in the m
usical 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 metam
orphose. 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 m
ovement.
The gesture of the T
hird is also present in the Main Lesson. T
he teacher tells the story of C
reation: unity of the world subdivided into
nine units: day and night, water and earth, A
dam and Eve, etc., until
the expulsion from Paradise. O
ther Old Testam
ent stories tie in with it.
The children follow
evolution through these images of hum
an history re-experienced in the M
ajor and Minor T
hirds.T
hen comes the house-building M
ain Lesson. Due to the variety in
the world, w
e can use the elements to build our ow
n house: stories about m
ountain, water, w
ood, warm
th, air and light… H
uman beings assem
ble into their houses m
any components of the w
orld. This throw
s some light
on the eurythmic investigation of space. In autum
n, we pick up house
building motifs.
67
Du hast, o G
ott, des Jahres Lauf O
God you crow
ned the yearG
ekrönt in Deiner M
acht: In your pow
er:D
er Felder Samen gingen auf,
The seeds of the field w
elled up.Es glänzt der Erde Pracht.
The splendor of the earth is shining.
Du hast das ganze Jahr erfreut,
You brought joy to the whole year,
Du liesst den Regen fliessen,
You allowed rain to pour dow
nD
ass aus der dunklen Erd’ erneut So that, in the dark earth ripened
Die H
alme konnten spriessen.
The stalks could sprout.
Nun w
ogt das reife Korn im
Tal. N
ow the w
heat ripples in the valley.N
un gibt es keine Not;
There is no hunger anyw
here;N
un jauchzt und singt man überall;
Now
all sing and rejoice;D
enn du gabst uns das Brot.
For you gave us bread.
– E
lisabeth Gräfin V
itzthum
One w
ay to give form to this poem
is as follows: T
he children stand in tw
o concentric circles. Upon further exam
ination, we notice that they
actually form m
any squares. A big job now
lies ahead of the children: A
lthough the circles must be preserved, each child m
ust follow his/her
own angular and sm
aller path. It is no longer possible to dreamily follow
the general m
ovement.
Fig. 17
68
The form
s are such that the children always return to their ow
n square; it gives them
a satisfying sense of security and order. We can then
make it m
ore 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.H
ow nice, w
hen every lesson brings something new
, when every tim
e things get m
ore difficult; at that age, children need and enjoy that! The
children are changing fast, and we m
ust keep abreast of these changes in our eurythm
y teaching in order for our methods to m
eet them. Im
itation goes a along w
ay, yet the exercises must becom
e bigger and more diverse
if they are to lead to autonomy.
The sound-gestures are com
pletely alive from the im
ages dreamily
absorbed and imitatively felt. T
he O w
as the golden sun, or—a bit
darker—the full m
oon; bright red and small, it w
as the poppy in the m
eadow or the rose in the garden.
A w
hole new w
orld, a completely different—
more energizing—
approach appears when the teacher says: “W
ith my hands I am
calling a nam
e. I clap – – ! Whose nam
e is it?” A slew
of suggestions come
up; reality and wishful thinking m
ingle: Gisela w
ho would so like to be
called upon and Tim
both raise their hands. A little abstraction is needed:
The nam
e must be recognizable in the rhythm
. At last, Jonas recognizes
himself.A
nother step forward is taken w
hen a name is spelled out. It m
ay be the end of the year before the m
ajority of the children can read in eurythm
y. The path ferries them
over from the im
age of things to a kind of ‘m
oving symbol.’
The path follow
ed by humanity in its evolution from
spoken to w
ritten word is m
ore or less completed in the third grade. A
gain, the children have the pleasure of success: W
e can speak with our arm
s—it is
like a new language. E
nglish, Russian, G
erman, and now
Eurythm
ican! T
hese sequences nurture the ninth year of life!Fun, orderly spunk and jokes are m
oods that the children expect.
69
Hum
orous material m
akes it especially easy for the children’s awakening
and growing independence.
Der R
iese sitzt am B
rückenhaus, T
he giant sits at the toll-gate,U
nd will den Z
oll erheben. W
ants to collect the toll.D
er Meister Zw
irn im W
anderflaus M
aster Yarn in his traveling coat W
ill ihm den Z
oll nicht geben. W
ill not pay him the toll.
‘Zoll hin, Z
oll her! Den zahl ich nicht,
‘Toll here, toll there! I shall not payG
anz sicher nicht. I w
ill not pay.W
as haben denn wir Schneider
Important w
e the tailors are!’ 30 A
uch gross für ein Gew
icht’!
The giant of our im
agination 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; M
eister Zw
irn (Master Yarn, the tailor). W
henever the sound I appears, all the children point at them
selves; at “traveling coat,” I stroke the coat w
ith cozy relish. I won’t pay! A
gain the I of the Giant, the O
for the small
coin. Only occasionally does the teacher accom
pany the gestures: They
are completely legible from
the picture, so that the children who have
‘slipped into’ the story have no trouble remem
bering the lines.B
ut on another day, the giant actually appears! He m
ight be the teacher or a H
igh School student! Now
the giant’s gestures and the tailor’s are com
pletely different. The strings of im
itation need to be w
ound back. What laughter w
hen a tailor moves the giant’s sound, or the
giant absentmindedly hops along w
ith the little people! From session to
session, ever-anew, independence is practiced verse by verse in a kind of
‘soul-calisthenics.’T
he environment is no longer a part of the child, it no longer flow
s into the child, w
ho now starts to stand apart from
the world. In the third
grade, this separateness is merely a delicate, im
aginative shading; in the next grade, it becom
es a central motif.
To the extent that there is a correspondence between the third and
tenth grades, the latter brings out a new w
akefulness. It represents an intensification of w
hat was experienced in the third grade: T
here is a new
relationship to the world.
70
Tenth Grade
Ich bin mir selbst ein unbekanntes
I am to m
yself an alien land,
Land, und jedes Jahr entdeck ich neue
and each year I discover new
Stege.
paths.
Bald wandr’ ich hin durch m
eilenweiten Som
e days I wander through vast
Sand
sands
und bald durch blütenquellende and through gardens overflow
ing
Gehege.
w
ith flowers.
So oft mein Ziel im
Dunkel m
ir A
nd every time m
y goal disappeared
entschwand,
in darkness,
verriet ein neuer Stern mir neue W
ege. a new
star appeared to show m
e the
way.
– C
hristian Morgenstern
Morgenstern’s lines set the m
ood for this age. When young people
16–17 years old move, it often feels as if they are w
earing gloves, top boots and oversized coats. To the ear, they are barely audible, brooding and dream
ing alone or in groups, or else we hear colorful voices, not
always ‘speaking’ perhaps, but in any case very audibly expressive.E
urythmy, visible speech and visible song can seem
to present them
with unw
arranted expectations at that age. It takes too much courage to
reveal oneself through movem
ent. One w
ould like to hide, one dresses up. T
he students clearly feel that eurythmy pierces through their disguises.
When hum
an beings move in eurythm
y, they reveal themselves w
ithout m
akeup, honestly. The eurythm
ic expression of that age group confirms
unambiguously w
hat Steiner described: Education through eurythm
y is an education for honesty, for truthfulness. Tenth graders feel that. T
hey seek refuges, hiding places; they pull back, m
ortally wounded, until they
feel stronger, more secure.
In this situation, students meet the teacher in a new
way: N
ow
teachers address them like adults (in G
erman, w
ith the polite Sie, as opposed to D
u). Everybody addresses them differently, even those w
ho long taught the child in the low
er grades. This fact in itself can occasion
long conversations.
71
Eurythm
y makes it possible to bypass the debates by w
orking with
personal pronouns. How
should I walk to express ‘I’? “I w
alk” is very different from
“You walk.” T
his is particularly true since ‘I’ is used as a substantive; it is the m
ysterious word w
hich only I can use to speak about m
yself, this inexchangable ‘I,’ which I alw
ays know as long as I am
in good health. M
any years may pass, I m
ay be in a foreign country, have fainted, or be in pain, yet I alw
ays know that I am
this I.W
hat can we do to m
ake visible in space the ‘mem
ory of the I’? Students w
ho have connected the points of this investigation and are gaining som
e degree of self-understanding find that the straight line retracing its steps is the form
for ‘I.’A
nd what about ‘You’? I know
the ‘You’ well, from
all sides. In fact, I surround it, yet alw
ays remain aw
are of m
yself in the process. This produces the spatial form
of the loop. There is
in the form som
ething protective, but also something a bit unfree.
How
different the qualities are that live in the third-person pronouns: he, she, it and their plural form
s! These pronouns are m
ore vague, more
indeterminate, also m
ore comprehensive. T
his quality can be expressed by a curved line curving backw
ards. 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. 19
Fig. 18
Fig. 20
72
Students who arrive to class ‘hungover’ m
ay leave forty-minutes later
spreading an aura of satisfaction, of unspoken ease. A kind of practical
self-knowledge has been born. For m
ore than one person, this kind of w
ork represents a significant step toward autonom
y.If w
e work on texts from
this point of view, the w
ork finds new
motivation. “I am
for myself an alien land.” H
ow satisfying for us to have
the straight-line ‘I’ out of conscious recognition of what it represents. A
new
beginning takes place. Eurythm
ic work is of a piece w
ith the person’s being. Sensations experienced in various degrees of truth strengthen the students and carry them
along!Let us rem
ember the third grade: A
delicate germination of the
questions “Who am
I? and Who are You?” w
as answered in the stories
of Creation. Six years later, the young person is addressed differently.
Again, the question appears: W
ho am I? W
hat does it mean that people
now offer m
e this new form
of address, or even impose it on m
e? For the young child, the answ
er came from
the outside; in the tenth grade, it m
ust come entirely out of deeply intim
ate experience.In the third grade, the M
inor and Major T
hirds resonated as a soul experience com
ing in from a distance. H
ow 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 w
ith each other—clever argum
ents and thoughts are expressed, totally contradicting the deeds. Strong feelings hide behind crude or absurd actions. T
hinking, Feeling and Willing risk
drifting apart.W
e can feel these soul qualities in art. We practice to find the style
of the spatial form expressing it. If w
e are dealing with an expression
shaped by the will, the person needs to be aw
ake, active at every mom
ent. A
round form is different at every instant: If it rem
ains unchanged, it soon becom
es straight. Will-form
s are round, they change directions w
ith every step. This results in m
any different kinds of practices. How
different the form
must be w
hen thoughts are being expressed! Clarity,
goal-directedness reveal
qualitative changes
in intellectual
activities. Feeling oscillates betw
een the poles of seething will and controlled
thinking. This produces the follow
ing forms:
73
Fig. 21
In the will, round form
s
In thinking, the straight lines
In feeling, the union of round and straight
Speaking becomes im
portant in all subjects, including eurythmy.
In many classes, profound questions appear, pointedly dealing w
ith the them
e of thinking/feeling/willing. H
ow can w
e do this in art? By
practicing! Never one-sidedly. Just as poem
s can rarely be represented entirely through straight lines, so too there are few
life situations in which
cool thinking will be sufficient. W
e are constantly being challenged to establish lively connections. W
e see this in the greatest work of art, the
human figure. T
he pole of thinking is at home in the head. T
he pole of w
ill is at home in straight lim
bs. Anatom
ically also, the middle sphere is
a middle sphere, a m
ixture. In the human figure w
e find the incarnation of the phenom
enon expressed by Steiner in his Ecce homo. 31
In dem H
erzen webet Fühlen,
In the Heart - the loom
of Feeling,In dem
Haupte leuchtet D
enken, In the H
ead - the light of Thinking,
In den Gliedern kraftet W
ollen. In the Lim
bs - the strength of Will.
Webendes Leuchten,
Weaving of radiant Light,
Kraftendes W
eben, Strength of the W
eaving,Leuchtendes K
raften: Light of the surging Strength:
Das ist der M
ensch. Lo, this is M
an.
The urge to m
ove when dealing w
ith the soul activities of thinking, feeling and w
illing can serve as the motto of this age group: It is a kind of
74
threshold beyond which students discover their Z
eitgenossenschaft (their ow
n place in historic evolution).
Fourth and N
inth Grades
The w
idely separated age groups revealed their unity to us when w
e looked at them
from specific points of view
: periphery and center of the circle for the first and tw
elfth 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. W
e are here, w
e work hard, w
e are human. In m
ost schools, the classes are now
divided for eurythmy: T
he children need more room
and they need to be under the clearer observation of their teachers. T
hey had the teacher’s attention previously, but at this age it is im
portant for the children to feel noticed. N
ow attention and w
atchfulness must shape the teaching
methods in different w
ays.If w
e remem
ber the way children learned to spell in third grade, w
e observed an im
itative plunge into movem
ent-images, w
ith a very gentle em
phasis on awakening and encouraging nascent autonom
y. First name
and simple im
agery were form
ed consciously by the child. By the end
of the year, the entire alphabet stood before us, most of the children
were m
ore or less able to move w
ith it, they knew it intellectually and in
their bodies (see chapter on Thoughts on Teaching Eurythm
y in the High
School).In the M
ain Lesson, the next step is Gram
mar and Syntax. H
ow
can we m
ake the transition in eurythmy from
sound to word? H
ow can
we m
ove Gram
mar? W
e look for a ‘big’ word, an encom
passing word:
Universe, Sky, G
od. Each child attem
pts to walk in such a w
ay that one sees clearly that it really is a big, overarching w
ord. We w
alk in circles: E
ach child forms his ow
n universe, his sky, his god!T
he next methodical step can involve asking the group: “W
ho will
draw w
hat he/she walked on the blackboard?” W
e pass from doing to
75
seeing, from activity to sign to abstraction. T
his mom
ent—the first tim
e the children consciously perceive the role of the blackboard in the teaching of eurythm
y—is very im
portant and satisfying for the child. The dream
y doing is aw
akened, or, put differently, the warm
th of the movem
ent is cooled by the narrow
chalk line. Now
we have a circle on the blackboard.
We spell W
-O-R
-L-D. Som
ething is weaving and w
aving, it feels strong, alive, heavy yet full of light. T
he sound gestures of the word are full
of life, meaning and feeling ever-new
. The children feel deeply satisfied.
They feel latently that w
hat we are doing is im
portant, it is fitting. We
make im
portant things visible. I can do it alone. Eurythm
y is not just for little kids. E
urythmy is true.
This w
ay of working w
ith meaningful form
s is expressed in walking.
We look for spatial form
s that express something concrete like house or
mountain. W
e find that a spiral in various sizes and open in front fits the purpose. W
hen looking for verbs, we ask ourselves: Is it an active verb? If
so, we w
alk it backwards in the space. T
his requires strength and effort, and is m
uch more w
ork than walking as usual. So, forw
ard for passive w
ords, actions that don’t require much w
ork on my part. A
ctive and passive are treated like qualitative values, different from
the way they are
comm
only perceived.For instance, “I sleep” is straight forw
ard, “I work” is straight
backward. B
ut what about “I live”? T
his should last long, it sometim
es takes w
ork, yet at other times it’s easy—
so we m
ust move from
front to back and into the distance. T
he form leads us to the horizontal.
Now
we can bring speech to light out of a deeper layer. T
he m
ovement has truly been raised to the surface w
hen it can become visible
speech. The children them
selves can find a form for a verse, e.g., the
following M
iner’s Prayer:
Es grüne die Tanne,
May the pine green,
Es wachse das Erz,
M
ay the iron grow,
Gott schenke uns allen
M
ay God give us all
Ein fröhliches Herz.
A
happy heart.
– Volksgut
– Folklore
76
Steiner called this kind of formative w
ork “Apollonian.” A
pollo is the carrier of the spear of light. H
e brings the light of thinking. We
connect with him
in our very body, the ‘body’ of space and our own
bodies. Fourth graders become “A
pollonites (devotees of Apollo).” W
hat is required is not subjective taste but a general law
. What a tall order!
The children accept it. Joy and pleasure in one’s ow
n proficiency can accom
pany this work.
Space, with its qualities, begins to play a new
role. It would be
irrelevant to work on A
pollonian forms in the round. A
circle has neither front nor back, neither left nor right. W
hat lives in the circle is the turning, w
hirling, expanding, contracting. It is a breathing form, a vortex, cosm
ic. W
hen one steps out of the circle, one stands frontally, turned toward the
world. In real life, fourth graders like to face us, m
eaning that they are testing us: W
ho are you? How
far can I go? This is w
hy we m
ust show
them w
here to go, in spiritualized yet concrete eurythmic form
s. This
is also why, w
hen we w
ork in this manner w
ith the children—joyfully,
thoroughly and strongly—a sense of contentm
ent sets in.C
hildren increasingly lose the sense of security, of harmony that
comes from
feeling that I am at one w
ith the world. T
his loss often leads to insolence, prankishness and m
uch that is questioning, and questionable. Q
uite literally, the ten-year-old children sense that the world deserves
to be questioned. They ask: W
hat happens if I am dishonest? W
ill it be noticed? W
hat does death mean to m
e? Who are these people, these
adults, around me? Q
uestioning and grieving appear. We m
ust console and attem
pt to answer the questions—
tactfully!
Fig. 22
77
Eurythm
y can do this. It can address the child and say: Yes, I know
that your world is failing, it is indeed so; there are sim
ilar experiences to be found in m
usic. Listen, but also listen with your feet. O
nly full notes are played, the children step slow
ly, without tum
bling, without stam
ping. B
eautiful! Each step is as long as the child sees fit. Its frequency m
atches the sound. T
hen come tw
o steps, then four, then eight in the same bar.
When they w
alk slowly, the entire class gets dream
y; with footsteps
corresponding to eighth notes, the children become m
erry. And now
for a change! T
hings are just as in life: to sleep, to wake up, happiness,
change; these things give color to life, but they must be m
astered. Those
who can do it are ‘life-artists.’ W
e practice together:
Sixteen children live in a comm
on form, each of them
completely
involved, with all their strength. T
he law of m
usic, the beat, acquires the qualities of rhythm
due to constant changes. Again, w
hat determines the
form is the A
pollonian 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.
Fig. 23
78
Children in their tenth year cross a big divide to a new
shore of life. A
nd they must take big steps in the realm
of movem
ent if eurythmy is to
be of real help in developing the art of living. Frontal walking of form
s, gram
matical form
s, 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 w
ork on alliterations constitute im
portant new accents. “It is a m
atter of bringing the child’s thinking into the right connection w
ith the willing, and w
ith acting in the realm
of Will. It is crucial. A
nd it can fail.”32 If this connection is successfully
made, new
capacities and a new readiness em
erge in the ninth grade, even if, on the surface, the joy of m
ovement seem
s to have diminished.
The N
inth Grade
The fourth grade is at the threshold of Low
er and Middle School.
The ninth grade is the gate to the H
igh 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 ow
n active work.
Pleasure and displeasure, noise and somber brooding spread. W
e must
acknowledge these m
oods, but not take them at face value. W
e should not jum
p to conclusions when the ‘eurythm
y-is-no-fun’ feeling arises, yet w
e must take seriously the fact that feelings now
play a determining
role, that they want to appear, and that w
e must therefore count on them
and w
ork with them
. The trigger of the m
ovement m
ust come from
the m
iddle realm, the realm
of feeling. But how
shall we do it? T
his middle
is vulnerable, it wants to hide, it specifically does not w
ant to reveal itself. T
he 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 m
ake a big push in the direction of positive thinking. W
e gather everything that we have learned up to this point in
eurythmy and w
e write it on the board:
• Sounds, vow
els and consonants•
Tone, interval, pitch•
Rod exercises, rhythm
and beat
79
• Soul gestures, foot and head positions
• Form
s to express substantives and verbs•
Exercises for presence of m
ind and comm
unity•
Geom
etrical exercises
An astounding diversity appears: W
e have done a lot. We can w
ork autonom
ously with the things w
e ‘know how
to do.’ We, that is the
students, design forms to m
atch texts of our own choice. T
he choice of texts clearly expresses the ninth graders: T
here is fun stuff, humor,
aphorisms, sparse expressions, but also very sensitive lyrics for instance
Goethe’s poem
An den M
ond or Eichendorff’s M
ir war als ob der H
imm
el. A
nd the students themselves contribute m
any eloquent poems.
Every day, a form designed by one of the students gets draw
n on the board and then discussed together. Should the form
be walked? Is it
beautiful to look at? Does it ‘w
ork,’ meaning: Is there a fit betw
een the content of the poem
and the spatial form? H
ow did the student com
e up w
ith this form? V
ery often the answer w
ill 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 w
as done out of feeling—the teacher m
ay walk the form
for the students to judge. For the next session, the student com
pletes and corrects the form
; on most occasions it needs to be sim
plified in order to be executed. C
ontentment settles on the class. Sensitive m
atters have been thought through and form
ed, so that they can be put into the practical realm
. The group becom
es more and m
ore knowledgeable, the
forms w
e design more and m
ore appropriate. This influences the w
orking style as a w
hole. Now
forms prepared by the teacher for a fast m
usical piece are considered critically and alterations suggested. A
ctivity and inw
ard participation are stimulated by the w
ork already done.W
hat more can w
e do to be true to the task of linking acquired capacities w
ith the newly found feeling life? C
onnecting movem
ent with
one’s most intim
ate feelings is the task of this age group. How
wonderful
the word m
ove in its double meaning: I am
moved—
I move. W
e really m
ust succeed in getting the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old to move in a
sober way. T
his can proceed as follows:
80
Try to walk a line, w
ith a clear beginning and a clear end. Next,
perform the sam
e movem
ent in such a way that the beginning is clear,
but the end fades out. It won’t go? Try it. T
here is no helping it, the arms
must be included. Feeling m
ust somehow
be included. Graphically, the
two paths look as follow
s:
A new
style must be developed. Feeling is called upon as a technique
for movem
ent. We now
are in the situation where w
e start from scratch
again. Dynam
ics is the magic w
ord at that age, dynamics as m
ethod and as style. N
ow an unfurling spiral looks quite different depending on w
hether it expresses liberation or torm
ent. Outw
ardly the spiral may look the
same, but the activity of the feeling ranges from
the tender to the strong. In draw
ing, students have learned from the cross-hatching technique that
it is possible to express many subtle nuances of the transition from
light to darkness. T
his possibility must now
be used in space, with one’s ow
n body. T
his is difficult, it calls upon the whole person. T
his age requires dynam
ic, dramatic im
pulses—ballads, w
itchcraft and devilry—but also
catchy aphorisms like this one by Friedrich N
ietzsche
Wo G
efahr ist, da bin ich zuhaus. W
here there is danger, I am at hom
e.D
a wachse ich aus der Erde.
There, I grow
out of the earth.
The students first encountered the developm
ent of spatial forms in
the fourth grade; semantic law
s were expressed form
ally in reverential sobriety. N
ow, after puberty, w
e have again the shaping of spatial forms,
but from the intim
ate experience, out of my ow
n dreams, or to gain an
overview. T
his is no longer Apollo—
now D
ionysus is at work. H
e must
be effective and yet reined in by the young person. So, if in the fourth
Fig. 24Fig. 25
81
grade the external impulsion of the m
ovement w
as experienced, in the ninth grade they experience the inner im
pulse.H
ow does chaos happen? W
hat happens when a group of sixteen-
year-olds is loud, when they go w
ild? In musical term
s: It is a badly tuned polyphony, not built according to law
s. There is yelling, hitting—
even in the absence of m
eanness or specific anger.In tonal eurythm
y, we take hold of this life reality. W
e have shaped tones and m
elodies eurythmically since the seventh grade; the intervals
—w
hat happens between the notes—
have also shaped the movem
ents. N
ow w
e are looking for chords; out of the development of the person,
a consonance, i.e., the simultaneous sounding of several notes, m
ust be form
ed, sometim
es forcefully. Chords are very pow
erful, they can be overpow
ering. This pow
er can be ‘mastered’; w
hen I master m
yself, I can give the chord a form
. And chaos becom
es music! W
e practice finding chords of at least three notes. D
oes this chord carry me aw
ay? Does it tear
me apart? D
o I jump out of m
y skin, sometim
es literally so? The chord is
then a dissonance. What if the sound then leads m
e through a minor key
to myself, into m
yself, held by the Third or the Fifth, w
hich lies around m
e like a mantle, a protection and consolation? O
r does the sound radiate out beyond m
e, pull me increasingly into the surrounding m
oods, so that the interval of the Fifth is experienced like an anchor, a soothing stop after the big ‘flying-aw
ay’ Third? Intervals change, depending on
the environment in w
hich they live. Many a student m
ay come to the
conclusion: I too am changing, influenced by m
y surroundings.Steiner threw
light on this situation in the following w
ords: “And
then, something rem
arkable occurs. We have prepared som
ething, which
in the healthy developing person must follow
puberty, the independent understanding of w
hat one already possesses. All the things one had
understood in pictorial form now
arise in full clarity out of intimate
wellsprings. I look at m
yself in the passage to the intellect. This is an
understanding by the human being of the hum
an being as such. There
thus occurs a meeting betw
een the astral body working m
usically and the etheric body w
orking sculpturally. Something ‘clicks’ in the person,
and through this connection, I gain a healthy awareness of m
y own
82
being after puberty. And thus connecting the tw
o sides of my nature, I
as human being have the first true experience of inner freedom
, the first true understanding of som
ething which until then I had only seen from
the outside. T
he highest achievement one can prepare in the developing
child is that at the right time of life, by understanding itself, it com
es 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 w
hile the children perform very subtle
postures. This verse, originally given for class teachers and m
ostly studied in eurythm
y classes, works like a very fertile seed. A
seed was sow
n in the fourth grade and it can grow
into the independent work of the H
igh School, w
here it appears as newly discovered independent w
ork.
Steadfast I stand in the world.
(left leg)
With certainty I tread the path of life.
(right leg)Love, I cherish in the depth of m
y being, (left arm
)H
ope shall be in all my deeds,
(right arm
)C
onfidence I impress into m
y thinking. (head)
These five lead m
e toward m
y goal,T
hese five give me m
y life.
(reverence)
The B
ridge 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 sound-im
ages through imitation. C
oming from
the outside, a nourishing world
of sound forms and shapes the person. E
nsouled gestures, ensouled m
ovements arise.
We
described how
, starting
with
the fifteenth-sixteenth
year, som
ething turns around in the gestures: gradually, the word begins to
echo from the person’s intim
ate being. With the ninth grader, m
ovement
first takes its origin in the space of the soul. The ninth grader’s m
ovements
are secretive, shy, but increasingly individual in form. Slow
ly we w
atch
83
the appearance of independent expression, expression of one’s own soul,
expression of the work of art.
Betw
een these two polarities of m
ovement, there lie four highly
significant years, which assum
e a mediating role. T
hese four bridge years betw
een the age of eleven and fifteen in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades, constitute the M
iddle School. These years bridge betw
een the stages of im
itation and autonomy. T
his is the context in which w
e can understand Steiner’s form
ula about eurythmy being “soul-gym
nastics.” W
e could also speak of a “soul-calisthenics.”T
he origin of movem
ent moves deeper and deeper into the child. T
he stream
of movem
ent was living in the periphery, out of the periphery—
we m
ight think of the finger games in the first grade. B
y the fifth grade, attention is increasingly draw
n to the entire body.In M
ain Lessons, the children have experienced in story-form the
procession of humanity through cultural epochs to the present tim
e. T
hrough stories which the child hears, texts w
hich he speaks, images he
paints, he lives for a while in the O
ld Indian, the Persian, the Egyptian
and the Greek cultural epochs, and sim
ultaneously experiences his own
evolution. There is great pleasure in the sense of life: I am
here! When the
Ancient C
ultures Main Lesson does its job, the child acquires security,
feels secure in life.E
urythmy m
akes it possible to approach these past cultural worlds
briefly, in a few w
ords 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 m
ove when w
e dive into the culture of the Old Persians,
these men w
ho placed at the center of their life the love of earth, agriculture, cattle-raising? Steps m
ust become forceful. W
e can hold a staff, use it to guide vocal gestures—
movem
ents must becom
e strong, earthy, firm
yet loose.
Carry the sun into the earth!
You, Man, are placed betw
een light and darkness.B
e a fighter for the light!Love the earth!
84
Transform the plant
Into a luminous jew
el;Transform
the animals;
Transform yourself.
The clothes are red-brow
n, strongly expressive, stern, not flowing.
The children m
ight make m
atching headgear for themselves. H
ow
differently one’s movem
ents feel when instead of m
y everyday head I w
ear a Persian one!A
completely different m
ood appears with the E
gyptians! Measured,
but well form
ed movem
ents. The space is a plane, w
e must m
ove like a bas-relief, only a tw
ist in our carriage can achieve this. Fingers closed, eye and head neither raised nor bow
ed, everything steady and controlled. It takes an effort to enter this w
orld of clarity and seriousness. More than
the Chaldeans, the E
gyptians lived with the stars; calculation of their
path was an intrinsic part of life. W
e want to try and catch in our stern
geometric gestures the forces of the stars. M
inutes last long when w
e w
ork like this!Thou sw
eet well for the thirsty in the desert.
It is closed to the one who speaks,
It is open to the one who rem
ains silent.W
hen the silent one comes,
He w
ill find the well.
Fig. 26
85
Astral forces, divine forces still live in us. W
e are stars, I myself am
a star. Its rays shape m
e, I form it. T
he pentagram is an inexhaustible them
e in the fifth grade.
The hum
an being is the star on earth. Accordingly, for one fifth
grade, the five-pointed star illuminated the C
hristmas season in m
any different w
ays by. One child began, four m
ore followed, until the five-
pointed star appeared. Then w
e did it with ten people, then fifteen and
by the time vacation arrived, the w
hole class was participating, thirty-five
children in all, seven children for each leg. All the teachers w
ere invited to w
atch the ‘lighting’ of the star, but also its slow burning out, until there
was only one star, then four, three, tw
o children … and then, the last
child stepped back with a deep breath.
When w
e work w
ith the pentagram w
e can see clearly that the musical
Fifth—the skin and housing of the children—
is built and present in all its beauty and perfection. W
e can read this perfection in the physical body. A
well-balanced, beautiful child’s figure stands before us. W
e are now
in the age of joy in movem
ent. Musicality, agility and charm
are easily aw
akened and educated.
Sixth Grade
In the sixth grade, we turn our attention to the “M
aster in the House.”
To put it provocatively: He needs to be rem
inded where he com
es from,
we w
ant to teach him again, very concretely and very unconventionally,
how to pray. M
usically speaking, this means getting connected w
ith the sound of the octave. T
he 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 O
ctave. Each rising octave raises us closer to this origin, the
descending octaves lead us back downw
ards. 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.W
e can soften the distress of the time in w
hich the children are grow
ing if we succeed in allow
ing the most sublim
e to be present in daily life through activities and m
ovements. W
e don’t want to cultivate an
otherworldly culture. E
urythmy m
ust be a path of practice for the here
86
and now. W
hen we recognize w
hat we are doing, w
e see that the far and near are connected to the teaching of geom
etry. We ‘catch constellations’
by drawing them
. In the sixth grade, the children have their first geometry
lessons using ruler and compass. W
e connect with it in eurythm
y and so prolong the w
ork of the fifth grade. The m
ain concern now is not
the endpoint of any particular movem
ent, the finished form. R
ather, w
e are doing a kind of moving geom
etry. We w
alk circles, lemniscates,
spirals, always from
the point of view of transform
ation. The children
like to show off quick reactions and presence of m
ind. We m
ight give the follow
ing instructions:
• W
alk the circle clockwise.
• W
alk it counterclockwise.
• M
ake sure that when you com
e back to your starting point, the
circle is as small as possible. D
o the same thing again but after
half a turn the circle m
ust be small; then turn it big again for
the end.
Next:
• W
alk a horizontal lemniscate alw
ays facing forward.
• W
alk the lemniscate and at the sam
e time change its
orientation.•
Without changing orientation, allow
the rounded end to
shrink until it contains only three people.
This is m
oving geometry. Every child is called upon to think along, to
participate in the forming.
Steiner attributed much value to the faultless w
alking of large, lawful
forms, indeed, w
hen he offered one large symm
etrical form for a festive
opening, the so-called TIA
OA
IT, he recom
mended it to eurythm
ists as a help against “disheveled thinking.” T
he gestures of the sounds correspond to the form
of the group. The open angle of the A
, the vertical of the I and tw
o perpendicular lines in space for the T, close w
ith the round O,
formed by the arm
s and legs. This is m
ovable geometry, carried by the
meaning of the verse. T
he following form
for the TIA
OA
IT com
es from
Steiner himself.
87
This form
al principle of a spatial form proceeding logically and
returning to its original source can be elaborated very meaningfully w
ith tw
elve-year-olds. This form
is carried intellectually by its inner logic. We
elevate to an art form the consonance of thinking, feeling and deed w
hen w
e combine it w
ith a text. The follow
ing text by Michael B
auer displays again the character of the O
ctave. Speaking of love, the divine, the text is connected w
ith the lawfulness of the form
unfolding in space. The octave
and the ground tone sound at the same tim
e.
Prayer for Love
O G
od, give me love in abundance
That I m
ay be like the fountain by the road!M
ay giving flow out of m
y heart,A
s from the fountain standing by the road!
And m
ay I give to all, whether good or bad,
Just like the fountain at the edge of the road.A
lso may I be ready, by day and by night,
Just like the fountain, standing watch by the road.
O G
od, I beg of you! G
rant me the abundance of love.
Fig. 27
88
Seventh Grade
On a daily basis, living w
ith thirteen-year-olds is not always
harmonious. T
here is plenty of moody dram
a. We w
ant to learn how to
read the children’s movem
ent-habitus. We should pay particular attention
to the origin and the quality of movem
ent, and we note the uncom
fortable fact that dram
as must be played out. It cannot be otherw
ise; in fact we
should feel alarmed if there w
ere no chaos! How
, then, is inner movem
ent connected w
ith bodily movem
ent?W
e place in our mind’s eye the children’s m
ovements: T
hey come
closer and closer to the body. They are no longer carried from
outside. Legs, hands and feet are alm
ost deaf, as if opaque, walled off. U
pon closer observation w
e 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. T
he hum
an 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 m
ovement—
operating in earlier years have come as far as they can go.
There ensues a sense of heaviness and confinem
ent.From
the soul’s point of view, som
ething else is happening: a fine vibration of the feeling soul. Personal feelings, pressing feelings live in the
Fig. 28
89
child; they want to, indeed they m
ust be expressed. A tender inner force
fights off strongly formed, ponderous lim
b forces. Betw
een these two
streams, a conversation m
ust now start. C
onversations are encounters pregnant w
ith 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 w
e can equate the outside world and the
physical body—it leads to rum
ination and escapism—
in our time, the
escape into addiction to music and drugs. W
hen 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 rem
oves itself from
the harmonious chord in w
hich it was living until then. B
ut soul seeks sym
pathy, it wants to connect w
ith soul and spiritual elements in its
environment, it w
ants to be loved, understood; conflicts also belong to the stream
of sympathy. It is now
decisive whether soul can m
eet soul, spirit can m
eet spirit, so as not to be lost in a vacuum.
Every rhythm includes both antipathy and sym
pathy. The flow
ing aw
ay and the encapsulation live in the alternation of short and long. In eurythm
ic terms, w
e can see attitudes of antipathy and sympathy
when w
e practice openness and closure, front and back, flowing out and
protectiveness in their many variations.
Now
rhythmical w
alking and the postures of antipathy and sympathy
take an imaginative quality. W
e can contrast what is fighting w
ithin the hum
an soul:Fiery thinking
antipathy, no!T
imid hesitation
no!
Girlish bickering
no!
Fearful complaining
no!
Will not end suffering
no!W
ill not make you free.
no!To m
ake allies
sympathy, yes!
Never to bend
no!
To show strength
yes!
Calls the gods’ arm
yes!To the rescue.
yes!
90
The second strophe, w
ith the repeated “Yes,” fires up sympathy. T
he foot positions of “Yes” (a half circle traced in the front space) and “N
o” (half circle described in the backspace)—
illustrate the text, show w
hat the soul experiences w
hen we hear the w
ords. The m
ovement, w
hich takes place after the spoken w
ord has died, takes place in the between-
space, in the inaudible realm!
So much rem
ains unspoken at that age! Criticism
and questions often rem
ain mute. T
he art of every educator lies in hearing the unspoken! M
usically, this means that the age of intervals has begun. C
hildren no longer should hear one sound after another, but rather the space betw
een them
. That w
hich cannot be heard must be taken in, suffered and
enjoyed.In
the first
grade, the
children m
et the
musical
Fifth in
the glockenspiel. In the third grade, the T
hird was the first touching of one’s
own inner space. T
he octave led and accompanied us in the sixth grade
as a bridge between heaven and earth, god and m
an. Now
we go on,
listening to the intervals and investigating on our own body. Feelings of
sound are linked with qualities of m
ovement.
The self-sufficiency of the Prim
e note, is followed by the painful,
tormenting questioning of the Second in the turning of the upper arm
. T
he lower arm
and hands hang as if deaf, the movem
ent very close to the torso. T
he Second affects the person very much, it com
es close to the bone! In this interval, the situation of the person going through puberty is expressed in all its passionate pain and questioning. T
he movem
ent itself, the turning of the upper arm
starting from the clavicle, can barely
be performed by the students of this age. B
ut it is still worth practicing
it.T
he sound of the Fourth, a rousing, astringent, form, reaches all the
way dow
n to the root of the hand. The path of the intervals flow
ing into the intim
ate space leads to the Fifth. Com
ing out of it, we find the Sixth,
an interval which children of that age alw
ays smile about. Pleasure verging
on silliness can be experienced with the Seventh. T
here is no restfulness there, everything dances and w
iggles, until at last the new hom
eland, the
91
Octave unites all the sounds and m
ovements in its greatness and m
ajesty. T
his is like the path from birth to death.
The practice hearing of the intervals teaches about a w
ide path of evolution. W
e must repeatedly give the students the opportunity to
connect with the intervals through listening, i.e., through a com
pletely internalized path. Inside and outside m
ust remain connected through
sound; then the art of movem
ent-eurythmy helps the hum
an 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 w
ords for the thirteen–fourteen-year-old.
Eighth G
radeA
great arc comes to an end, the tim
e of learning as a group is ending. In the eighth grade, visible links can be found w
ith the other ‘end-years,’ fourth grade and tw
elfth grade. These are the concluding years of
respectively the Lower School, M
iddle School and High School.
In the fourth grade, we experience frontal w
alking of forms as
the expression of the child’s new relationship w
ith the world. O
nce a fourth grader said that w
alking turned to the front ‘felt good’—w
hich w
as saying that it corresponds to “my life-situation”! W
hat feels good for the fourteen-year-old in the realm
of movem
ent? If we w
ere to ask eighth graders, m
any of them w
ould answer, “N
ot moving at all, let m
e be!” or “W
alking fast, lots of action!” Now
movem
ent must have its ow
n character, contour and expression. U
ndoubtedly, the so-called difficult classes are often kept im
mobile, out of a disciplinary concern, a fear of
arousing the spirits of movem
ent 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 gym
nastics’ cannot always be still and orderly.
Concretely, w
hat to do? What does it m
ean that movem
ent should have character? In the context of the ‘I’ sound, Steiner described the difference in the m
ovement depending on w
hether it is performed out of
feeling or out of the character of the sound.
92
“The
third thing
(besides m
ovement
and feeling)
is that
the eurythm
ists should be able to take things so far with their feeling that
when for instance they do an I, they should reach out w
ith 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 m
uscles feel like a kind of constant prickliness T
his gives the movem
ent character.”34
Here belong hum
orous poems requiring a great deal of m
ovement 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 w
alking at an even gliding pace! W
hen one stops after intensive movem
ent, the residual force of w
ill keeps shooting into the body; tense muscles,
blocked movem
ent can be experienced. The students are challenged
bodily; they sweat, they m
ake an effort. Effort is tension, m
uscle tension is character in m
ovement. Tension belongs here and cannot be done aw
ay w
ith. We need this ‘character’ if w
e practice the following excerpt from
Shakespeare’s M
acbeth where the w
itches chant:
Round about the cauldron go:
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stoneD
ays and nights has thirty-oneSw
eated venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charm
ed pot.D
ouble, double toil and trouble;Fire burn and cauldron bubble.Fillet of a fenny snake,In the cauldron boil and bake;Eye of new
t and toe of frog,W
ool of bat and tongue of dog,A
dder’s fork and blindworm
’s sting,Lizard’s leg and how
let’s wing.
For charm of pow
erful trouble,Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.D
ouble, double toil and trouble;Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
93
This requires fast transform
ations in the forms and in the im
pulse of the m
ovements. T
he student must explore: “A
m I m
oving myself in
my bones and m
uscles, or is something of a m
oving nature streaming
into me?” H
ere we have the parallel w
ith the twelfth grade. T
his inner im
pulse, 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 aw
ay. I am the one
deciding whether m
y muscles are tense or loose! Freedom
, ‘read from the
body’ and experienced now, appears in the curriculum
, a main m
otif of biography. In the tw
elfth grade, this seed can grow to a hopeful tree. It
will then bear fruit all life long.
So we w
ork in the sacrosanct realm: the intim
acy of the individual. O
ne consequence is that the choice of the texts to be worked on m
ust be chosen individually for each class.
94
Sphere and C
ircle as Moving G
esture
The
circle and
the sphere
appear in
many
forms
and guises
as educational tools, for instance as toys. From tim
e imm
emorial,
independently of country, race or language, children have played and still play w
ith hoops and balls. The ball in particular is a great educator.
Small children touch it; it gets rolled, pushed, throw
n and caught. In m
any variations, the sphere appears, holding many potentialities for play;
it is a mysterious thing. K
epler described it as in the highest sense perfect. H
e said, “The sphere represents the T
hree in One. T
he Father is the center, the Son is the surface, the Spirit is the equal distance from
center to circum
ference, the radius.”35
In each movem
ent class in the simplest arm
movem
ents and in w
alking around the shadow of the sphere, w
e encounter the circle. It is not by accident that there should be so m
any circular motions. T
he unconscious educator of hum
anity works w
isely. Our task is to becom
e ever m
ore conscious as educators. So we find inform
ative a description by Steiner given in D
ornach (1914) to architects and farmers: “T
here is no denying that by sim
ply saying ‘I’ or our ‘Self,’ human beings now
adays can’t think anything m
uch yet. Many epochs of hum
an history will have
to pass before we have a fully conscious representation of w
hat we say
when w
e pronounce the words ‘I’ or ‘Self.’ B
ut we can experience the
Self, the I, in the (circular) form; specifically, if w
e go from the purely
mathem
atical knowledge of a form
to a feel(ing) for the form, w
e shall experience the ‘I’-ness, the Selfhood in the circle. To feel the circle m
eans to feel the Self. To feel the circle in the plane, the sphere in space m
eans to feel selfhood, the ‘I.’ If it is clear to you that, basically, for the person w
ho really feels things in a living fashion, w
hen looking at a circle, the feeling
95
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. W
henever we feel this, w
e learn to live in the form
.”36
Hum
anity has
been unconsciously
educated w
ith the
help of
spherical images. T
his was the case, for instance, w
ith images of balls
in fairy tales ( The Frog Prince or T
he Crystal B
all ) but also games using
balls, marbles, snow
balls, soap bubbles and many other spherical shapes.
In eurythmy teaching, w
e use balls made of copper or w
ood. They m
ake it possible to perform
beautiful exercises with rhythm
and in group work.
Unconsciously, the young child also encounters its developing ego. T
he task of adults in our tim
e is to illuminate this path lying in the tw
ilight. W
e want to touch consciously w
hat in earlier times w
as instinctive. Instincts now
adays are drying out in the sand like water. T
he humus of
consciousness must be laid dow
n for something new
to prosper.I put these thoughts about the sphere as a foundation for m
y attempt
to show the transform
ations 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 eurythm
ic work from
a methodical-didactic
point of view. T
he question then is: How
does the element ball and circle
get transformed in eurythm
ic work over the years?
At the kindergarten age, eurythm
y occurs within the sphere as in a
golden sheath. The king’s castle, the sky, the m
ountain and hiding places all surround the child, they build som
ething like a colorful spherical w
orld around him. T
he young child is always the center of the w
orld sphere. T
he child bends his body, surrounds himself w
ith his own arm
s, m
akes himself into a ball: “I’m
hidden.” And w
hen he says, “I am here,”
he jumps out of the sheath, arm
s 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 eurythm
y takes place in the circle. It develops out of a grape, out of ‘hen and chicks,’ and m
oves to the castle yard, the cycle of the sun. A
ll movem
ents in space are circling movem
ents. A
ll arm gestures are such that they are suspended from
above, from
the heavenly vault. As if their arm
s are suspended from golden threads,
96
the children do not get tired when they succeed in ‘playing w
ith these golden threads.’ T
hey are then in the action, in the bell, in the ball. They
are Rum
pelstiltkin dancing around the fire, they do not just pretend. O
utwardly and inw
ardly 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 w
here the child herself is standing. It is not yet som
ething one can oversee as a whole, it is alw
ays the path ahead of the child. T
he child walks around the w
orld, around the garden, around the house, follow
ing her own nose. Slow
ly the circle opens up—to enfold
a new space. T
he lemniscate appears, in w
hich two spaces are hidden.
The crosspoints of the lem
niscate and the rounding of the circles become
strong experiences for the child. Now
the ‘You’ appears, the encounter w
ith the other person. In the process, the ‘I’ is reinforced. Insofar as it m
ust remain an ‘I’ and not get lost in the ‘You,’ it m
ust 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. N
ow its relationship to space and the environm
ent changes fundam
entally. As does the child’s relationship to the surrounding
world, so his/her soul life changes. Slow
ly, the world penetrates the circle,
the child is more and m
ore standing at the periphery, looking in and questioning. H
e/she also offers the world resistance, asserting his/her ow
n
Fig. 29
97
will. In regard to eurythm
ic movem
ent, forms are now
walked frontally
(facing forward), so the circle can now
be behind the child, or the side or in front. C
onstantly, a new relationship m
ust be found to the form.
Until now
we encountered tw
o forms—
the enveloping circle and the circle as a plane form
. They are like seeds from
which a m
ultitude of forms
can develop, as soon as the child learns to walk frontally. Front/back and
right/left take on new m
eaning. And in this m
ovement, liberated from
the circle, m
ore and more com
plex forms w
ill appear. They all reckon
with the possibility of sharing w
ith an audience (facing forward) w
hat has been achieved.
If we follow
the buildup, it becomes clear that things are m
ore com
plex. The qualities of sphere and circle are connected w
ith the person in m
any new w
ays. They becom
e anchored deeper inside of the person. In the tw
elfth year, the child is on the threshold of puberty. She becom
es heavier, she risks not only falling down to earth, but indeed
becoming sw
allowed up by the w
orld’s gravity. In the sixth grade, we still
have in front of us well proportioned, beautifully built young people.
One w
ould like to call to them: C
ome, com
e down! B
ut always rem
ember
how beautiful you are, rem
ember your origin! W
e must accom
pany the birth of the new
feelings arising day after day. Harm
ony and order must
intervene in the chaos of often overwhelm
ing emotions. T
his means
that the visible circle that had been practiced until now m
ust resonate! Its sound m
ust penetrate all movem
ent, inwardness m
ust awaken, and
inwardness m
ust answer. T
he circle must not only becom
e form, it
also must becom
e 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 hum
an being working on itself. T
he interval of the future, which w
e first intuit, m
ust be practiced in the twelve-year-old. T
he students plunge deeply and gladly into this gesture and its experience.
The greatness and significance of this phase of childhood w
ould in itself be obvious from
the admonishm
ent to work w
ith the octave at that age. W
hen it sounds, we w
alk a circle, the shadow of the sphere. W
hen it resonates, w
e form the organs of our souls w
ith our arms, a sphere,
the raising up of the circle. Here w
e unite the form and the gesture of
98
the circle and sphere. We have a threshold situation, w
hich, as eurythmy
teachers, we can help form
if we w
ork with the required consciousness
on the octave chords.If w
e now taken one big step ahead to the high school, w
e look at the poem
Self-Determ
ination in which E
rika 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 m
e year after year!I follow
ed you uphill and downdale, in dream
sA
nd could not see whom
I was follow
ing.
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 tim
e has come: T
he strengthened handshall hold the reins, bravely. W
e’ll put our shoulder to the wheel,
And if things now
go slowly, w
hat we attain
will be our ow
n, free land.
To represent this poem, the circular form
must, as m
uch as possible, take the form
of whirls, spirals and clearly defined, w
ell-rounded figures. T
he circle is no longer harmonious, it does not com
e to me from
the outside as a harm
onious consonance. As a tenth grader I m
ust now create
it anew. In each m
oment, at each step, I m
ust attempt to be w
here I am, or
else the tension gets lost. A curving line, ideally an orbit, is alw
ays under high tension. If the circle loses its tension, an elem
ent of the straight line has infiltrated it som
ewhere. H
igh tension is will ! It is the language
of form derived from
the circle to help sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds educate them
selves through movem
ent.T
his work requires a lot of practice, a lot of hum
or and a lot of strength. T
he walking of form
s, of the sculptural circle must connect w
ith the young person’s being. T
his will-form
ative force can resurrect only
99
after it has penetrated deep into the human being over m
any years. Then
the circle in the human being connects w
ith the cycle of the cosmos.
What precisely happens now
in the realm of m
ovement, not least from
a strictly technical point of view
? A new
space opens up, from inside. T
his process is very concrete, outw
ardly visible. From a technical point of view
, this space is related to the im
pulse behind every eurythmic m
ovement.
The region of the shoulder blade, the clavicle and the breastbone m
ust be felt and consciously used as the point of im
pulse of movem
ent. If this succeeds, the body ‘grow
s wings.’ In hum
an beings, wings are not external
organs, so this walking and m
oving requires strong inward and outw
ard im
pulses. It can help the persons doing eurythmy perceive from
inside their ow
n movem
ents, perceive that their arms, and hands, and also their
‘wings’ grow
eyes. If the practice acquires this intimate dim
ension, an im
portant developmental stage has been reached. T
his can take place at the end of the eleventh grade or early in the tw
elfth grade. It is then possible to w
ork together on the cosmic cycle as a group. T
he work on
the zodiac crowns the eurythm
ic schooling until the nineteenth year.In concrete w
ork with tw
elfth graders one observes how great the
need is for young people to experience more deeply the higher forces
in humanity, to learn m
ore about the foundation of eurythmy. Shall w
e succeed in finding texts that w
e can connect with these questions and
the work w
ith the zodiac? Will w
e succeed in finding answers to the
latent question of youth? Can w
e make these w
ords visible when w
e give them
eurythmic form
? If we can, they w
ill become real. T
hen, through hum
an beings and for human beings, eurythm
y will becom
e a creative life-building force. W
e might take as a m
antra the following lines by
Steiner about working w
ith the zodiac:
What stands before us as a hum
an being,W
hat we experience as the soul,
What illum
inates us as the Spirit,It flew
ahead of the gods for many eternities
And its intention w
asTo gather from
all the worlds’ forces
That together create the hum
an being. 37
100
Education of the M
ovement O
rganism
through Eurythm
y
Ages T
welve to F
ourteen
On A
pril 26, 1913, Steiner gave a verse during a eurythmy training
course, 38 which could stand like a m
otto for the age of concern to us here and now
:Der W
olkendurchleuchter:
The C
loud Illuminator:
Er durchleuchte,
May H
e shine-through,Er durchsonne,
M
ay He sun-through,
Er durchglühe,
May H
e glow-through,
Er durchwärm
e
May H
e warm
-throughA
uch uns.
Us too.
A higher thing com
es to inhabit the human being, penetrates
it, relinquishes itself to the person—and then goes aw
ay. “May H
e w
arm through” m
eans “May H
e make us capable of returning to the
world som
ething of what H
e gave us.” The verse describes a ladder of
transformation up to the turning point, the m
etamorphosis w
here it involutes.
If we present this verse in eurythm
y, we form
the circle as a breathing form
, the image of som
ething super-ordained, something w
hole. The
eurythmists raise them
selves up to this higher being and bring it down
to themselves in the form
of gestures, even into specific movem
ents of the feet. It is not m
eant to suggest that we should practice the
Wolkendurchleuchter in class, w
ith 12- to 14-year-olds. It is reproduced here to alert us, in an artistic w
ay, to the life conditions of that age.
101
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. T
he muscles
then take over. By the tw
elfth year, all the person’s forces are applied to the skeleton, and from
there the human being m
oves out into the world.
The hum
an being ‘travels through itself’ and thus gains a connection to the entire w
orld.”39 A
nd in the second lecture of Meditative Studies on
Mankind, Steiner described in the follow
ing 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 w
hich 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 sam
e soul activity that later works in the soul as reason and
mem
ory”40
There w
e have, sketched out, the movem
ents of forces that form the
organism, radiating from
the head, ultimately giving the hum
an being its corporality through encounter w
ith the world. Let us follow
this path in the archetypal form
of the circle and its transformations through the
life-stages.U
ntil the ninth year, the circle is the child’s spatial form, very
concretely, in its structure and movem
ents. Imitation too has a circular
Fig. 30
102 character: It should flow as sm
oothly, as uninterruptedly, as possible betw
een the teacher’s movem
ents and those of the children.In the dem
onstration below, w
e follow the circle all the w
ay to its reversal; these evolving form
s could equally well be derived sculpturally
from the sphere. 41 T
his is at first meant sym
bolically: Something that
breathes, something rhythm
ically articulated starts toward the beginning
of the ninth year. The w
orld encounters the circle. Thirds resonate in the
Fifths of the early years. The circle is evolving:
Fig. 33
Fig. 31
Fig. 32
103
Let us rem
ember: O
nce the human being reaches the tw
elfth year, he or she m
oves completely into the skeleton. If w
e feel our way
through the formal m
etamorphosis that had begun, sensing how
the w
orld 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 w
ell-proportioned division of the circle into three. W
e are looking at the relationships of forces in the fifth or sixth grader: harm
onious in physical form, balanced in the soul realm
, aw
akening to thinking.D
uring the process in which the im
pulses move m
ore and more from
the m
uscles into the bones and sinews, the child is, as it w
ere, pushed into space by its bodily grow
th. Now
—around seventh grade—
the space for personal m
ovement m
ust be experienced anew. W
e do this in three w
ays:1. The space is penetrated w
ith feeling (durchfühlt), for instance w
hen vowels are form
ed, not just in arm positions, but also w
ith groups of children placed in the room
:
• T
he A: a w
ondering opening
• T
he O: the circle as loving enfoldm
ent
• T
he U: narrow
ing
Insofar as the space is thus permeated w
ith feeling, there arises a connection betw
een what is personally felt and the objective elem
ent in the w
orld, space.
2. Space
is thought-through,
insofar as
geometric
forms
are transform
ed. For instance, the students form together—
following the
shortest path, the forms of the vow
els and other geometric form
s, such as an equilateral triangle.
Fig. 34
104
3. A w
ill-full takeover of the space occurs during copper rod exercises, insofar as the rods help us create and fam
iliarize ourselves with spaces
around our
own
bodies: quadrangles,
rectangles, spherical
sections, cones.T
hus we see that entering a new
relationship with space is a condition
for a new relationship to m
y own body. T
his is why the tim
e around the tw
elfth year is an ideal time for rod exercises. N
ow, these exercises are
from an anthropological point of view
, from hom
e base, not earlier.B
esides the physical aspects described above, there is a soul-spiritual aspect. A
s in all other subjects, eurythmy students m
ust now aw
aken to w
hat they are doing. In all will-related subjects, w
e tend to rely much
too long on imitation: In the case of eurythm
y, this is a frequent cause of boredom
and lack of discipline. But the rem
edy is the transparency of the w
hole, not verbal explanations.In an introductory lecture before a school perform
ance, 42 Steiner w
ent 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 eurythm
ic activity as the very young child feels in the aw
akening of vocalization and of verbal speech. This represents
a substantial expansion of the person’s humanity, an expansion
in fact of what is m
ost human in us; and since all teaching and
all education must be a grasping of the hum
an being by the hum
an being, this justifies our using eurythmy—
originally developed as an art—
as a form of ensouled, ‘spirit-filled’
gymnastics. For it w
orks back on the entire human being in
return.A
ctually, it is still difficult to see this from an external
viewpoint. B
ut those who can look into hum
an nature, those w
ho can observe how things that w
ere educated in the child can be organically incorporated, through an education of the eurythm
ic capacity and combined w
ith music and the
sculptural arts, anyone seeing how these w
ere developed in the child w
ill also note how it w
orks back on the entire human
being in the child. We note that the capacity for cognition
105
becomes m
ore mobile, m
ore receptive, as an effect of eurythmic
practice in the school, and we shall see that the child’s entire
world of representations becom
es more m
alleable and filled w
ith vivid interest as a result. The child develops a m
ore flexible im
agination; he or she is more likely to turn to things
with love. In eurythm
y 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 w
hat teachers are trying to introduce to them
.O
n the other hand, eurythmic exercises feed back very
powerfully into the w
ill, into the most intim
ate properties of hum
an will. True, w
ords can be used to lie, and mere speech
provides many occasions for discouraging children from
lying. B
ut eurythmy used in the right w
ay can be very useful in dealing w
ith a childish mischief-like lying. E
urythmy show
s that, w
hen we allow
words to flow
into the body movem
ents, w
hen we speak eurythm
ically in visible speech, it is impossible
to lie. The possibility of lying stops w
hen we get the feeling of
all that it entails, when w
e allow soul expressions to becom
e visible through everything that goes into the body. W
e see that truthfulness, the property of the hum
an will w
hich is of such im
mense ethical relevance, can be form
ed through the right kind of eurythm
ic exercise. And thus w
e can say: Eurythm
y is a gym
nastic drawn out of the soul, and it gives the soul m
uch in return…
.T
hus eurythmy w
ill have counter-effects—in the direction
of mobility, interest and truthfulness—
on the capacity for cognition and w
illing, and on the mood that is affected by
the capacity for cognition and willing. So m
uch depends on the hum
an being’s perceiving itself as a totality while doing
eurythmy, on the perception that w
e do not have a body on one hand and the spirit on the other hand.
Anthroposophy intends to affect im
mediate practical life.
“Matter is precisely the thing w
e don’t understand in today’s life, because w
e no longer perceive the spirit in matter. B
ut this is som
ething that can be perceived only in the doing. We
can already see what it is that eurythm
y makes of the child.
And thus w
e can say that through the perception of this inner harm
ony between the upper, m
ore spiritual person and the low
er, more physical person, w
hich is what the child perceives
106
practically when doing eurythm
y, will initiative is created. A
nd this is som
ething which w
e must educate ahead of all other
things nowadays.
Precisely this
connection betw
een eurythm
ic m
ovements
and truthfulness affects im
mediately the eurythm
y teacher’s self-education. N
ot only is the subject matter im
portant, but the method also m
ust be truthful and know
able, In the precious sixth grade, children must be able
to comprehend in their m
inds what w
e and they are doing.W
e can show, from
the example of a large sym
metrical form
, the path of such conscious practice. It goes as follow
s:
1. Set-up and description of the form
s2.
Individual and collective walking
3. Finding the appropriate qualitative sounds
4. Perceiving the com
monalities betw
een form and sound
Of course, the students could learn this form
faster by drawing
it; they would also forget it faster. Form
s need to travel through the
Fig. 35
107
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 w
ill appear, if not imm
ediately, then perhaps during a following practice.
We cannot m
ake any concessions about the honesty of the method.
Precisely in the sixth grade, when everything still goes sm
oothly on the surface, the guideposts are set for the follow
ing years’ work. If, at this age,
the doing remains stuck in im
itation, limp and shriveled m
ovements w
ill be the consequence. If, on the other hand, the students understand w
hat they are doing, they can engage them
selves, they will stand straighter,
their thinking is given assignments and nourishm
ent, their feelings are freshened, their w
ill acquires warm
th and strength. In this respect, the sixth grade bridges over to the H
igh 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 m
uch—and don’t
react very strongly. We hear—
and perceive very little. In this realm too,
eurythmy should take a hold of the m
ovement organism
and educate it. W
hat is heard should be transformed into connectivity, linkages w
ith my
own body and w
ith space, the body of the earth.
While standing, w
e listen to a repeating melody. T
he students follow
the pitch with their arm
s, and also by rising on their toes and down
again to match the m
elodic line. They do so again and again. Suddenly,
here and there, someone sm
iles. Things have lightened up, the m
elody is shining into our m
inds. There is a law
at work: self-m
irroring. After
repeated listening, one student draws the m
elodic line on the blackboard. N
ow everybody recognizes it: T
he melody m
irrors itself.
108
For the next step, we w
alk. Again, w
e keep to the principle of rising and descending along w
ith the melody, but this path is m
ore winding.
Something appears, that is intertw
ined, yet harmonious, a key of G
. We
can describe it front and backward, alone and in groups, form
ing the tones w
ith our arms.
Fig. 36
Fig. 37
109
Let us look at the metam
orphosis of the circle again. We used this
metam
orphosis to follow the child’s evolution up to the tw
elfth year, and had found a w
ell-balanced, threefold form. If w
e sense the development
of this form as it continues past the initial reversal, w
e experience a tug betw
een imbalance and tightness on one hand and expansion to the
point of pulling the form apart on the other hand. T
he form expresses an
almost unbearable tension. T
he holding force of the old is still minim
al, the new
is pushing and pulling but is still fettered. This form
is like an im
age of the human being’s inner condition at the onset of puberty.
Fig. 38
Fig. 39
110
What can eurythm
y do here? How
do we approach the requirem
ent to restore balance and harm
ony? Only rarely and w
ith great difficulty is it possible to stand on one’s toes w
ithout wobbling and keep one’s balance.
Is it conceivable that the search for different centers of gravity could be the starting point for eurythm
ic work at that age? T
he fields of tension betw
een rising and falling, contraction and expansion, inside and outside becom
e the working them
es. The spreading is a stretch in w
hich the will
reaches out, accompanied by a release of vital force. T
here is an active m
ovement outw
ards, not a loosening in which the breath runs out. T
his stretching m
ust be felt and experienced in the soul like being-contracted-w
ithin the circumference. T
he gesture is incorporated into the physical body w
ith great determination. It acquires character; the students feel
their muscles and sinew
s.W
e are back in familiar territory. W
e 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 vow
el A. W
hen we open
up to the world, the entrance of the m
inor chord feels so strong that our inner being cringes, it hurts—
but the pain awakens us. W
e know
this sensation; it is the sensation of the E. H
ow differently it is w
ith m
ajor chords: my soul rejoices w
ith the chord—or tow
ards it. It become
narrow and ready to accept, it jubilates in an U
form, or else it feels like
expanding and embracing the w
orld in an O gesture.
So we find w
ith the students the inner concordance of chords and vow
els. We discover in M
ajor and Minor a stretching and contracting, a
waking and sleeping. It is not so m
uch a matter of virtuoso perform
ances, as it is one of our hearing being ‘true.’ T
his causes a certain kind of levity, even w
hen the general mood of the group is very som
ber. Children hear
well w
ith their limbs!
When w
e work w
ith musical intervals, it is often the case that
children’s gestures display a more secure understanding than their attem
pts to describe their experience in w
ords and concepts. Making them
aware
of this fact helps increase their self-assurance in action.A
nother area of soul-gymnastics is opened by postures, positions
completely rooted in soul-sensations. W
e call them “soul-gestures.” W
e
111
encourage the students: You are someone, show
it! Show that you are
incredibly sm
art-compassionate-questioning-grandiose-sad-silly!
Show
us! Go ahead, show
it! The vital question at that age is after all: W
ho am
I? How
am I? T
he question lies in the students, even when they don’t ask
it. Which is w
hy we need to incorporate it into these ‘soul-gestures.’
The soul-transform
ations must be quick, m
ove at virtuoso speed, for that is their nature! R
ecall 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 im
portant that the fourteen-year-old w
ho is trying to become ‘m
aster in his house’ should practice self-determ
ination, deciding how to get along w
ith his feelings—right into his very body. Steiner speaks of ‘ensouled gym
nastics.’ It must
be done artfully, skillfully and easily. Right/left, back/front—
learning the dim
ensions of space with one’s ow
n body—all this provides the ‘shelter’
for my feelings.
At the end of M
iddle School and beginning of High School, it
becomes clear how
successful we w
ere at incorporating the soul into the heavy, em
pty body through the practice of soul postures. Are there
capacities, even though the limbs are still aw
kward? H
as a new originality
grown? C
an one divine a lighter, freer soul-form—
as was the case in the
circle above? Is the new space slow
ly breaking through its bonds and becom
ing free in the language of forms?
In the ninth grade, we jum
p into High School. O
ne observes at first braver, m
ore far-reaching movem
ents. One feels m
ore courage in the face of assignm
ents: Here is a text—
remem
ber what you know
! To contract and expand is all you need, but you need to be independent. W
here does the text pull you in, w
here does it expand you? And out of w
hat feeling: anger, pride, despair?
� � �
112
Ich
ISklaverei ertrag ich nicht;
Slavery I w
ill not accept;Ich bin im
mer ich.
I am alw
ays I.W
ill mich irgend etw
as beugen, A
nd if I have to bend,Lieber breche ich.
I would rather break.
Kom
mt des Schicksals H
ärte
In the face of harsh destinyO
der Menschenm
acht,
Or of hum
an power,
Hier, so bin ich und so bleib ich
I am and rem
ain myself
Und so bleib ich bis zur letzten K
raft. A
nd will stay so till m
y last breath.
Darum
bin ich stets nur eines, I am
always one,
Ich bin imm
er ich.
I am
always I.
Steige ich, so steig ich hoch;
If I rise, I shall rise high;Falle ich, so fall ich ganz.
If I fall, it w
ill be all the way.
– Ingeborg Bachm
ann (written w
hen she was 16)
The last strophe expresses a law
, a general human law
. We learned
about laws, for instance w
ith vowels. T
he A opens up, the O
surrounds, etc. Let us turn to w
hat we know
rather than merely being of the m
ind. If eurythm
y ‘works’ w
hen things ‘fit’ rather than being mere speculations,
then doing the gestures should mean that I am
able to understand in greater depth and w
ith more feeling the text, the poem
that costs me so
much effort. V
owels can be form
ed in space. [Fig. 40]T
he metam
orphosis 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 movem
ent come to rest, w
e realize that this circle turned inside out now
has changed direction. We
encounter an element of freedom
. Work in the high school m
ust build on this further. (W
ith seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds it is entirely possible to practice this transform
ation as a complete series. For us here,
it will help us understand anthropological developm
ent and stimulate a
eurythmic education really true to m
ovement. [Fig.41]
113
What w
e have observed in adolescent development can also apply
to the development of eurythm
y in its historical beginnings. Already
in 1913, Steiner—in connection w
ith exercises on the forms of the
third person singular pronoun er—had given the verse w
hich began our considerations: T
he Cloud Illum
inator (Der W
olkendurchleuchter). T
he 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 E
u)M
ay he sun-through. (durchsonnen = feet in O)
May he glow
-through. (durchglühen = feet in Ü
)
Therefore, I am
always one,
always only one.
I am alw
ays I.
If I rise, I shall rise high.
If I fall, it will be all the w
ay.Fig. 40
� � �
114
Intended for teachers working w
ith other adults, this exercise was
offered at the birth of the eurythmy. It can help strengthen a com
munity,
create a vessel in which higher forces can stream
. Eleven years later, one
year before his death, Steiner gave eurythmists another verse, w
hich they w
ere to use themselves, i.e., not for their teaching but for their personal
development as m
ovement-artists. 43
With eurythm
ists also, it can be a matter of repeatedly
awakening in oneself a particular soul m
ood to make oneself
receptive to the feeling and sensation of the corresponding gestures. It can be the case that the eurythm
ists’ meditation
about the mysteries of the hum
an organism w
ill allow them
to enter this inner experience. T
his may happen by m
editating on w
hat stands in the words w
ith full inwardness, strong inner
feeling, so that we don’t just m
editate words and concepts, but
rather that in the meditation som
ething of what stands in the
words gets fulfilled.
Fig. 41
115
Ich suche im Innern
I seek within m
y SelfD
er schaffenden Kräfte W
irken, T
he working of creative forces,
Der schaffenden M
ächte Leben. T
he life of creative powers.
Es sagt mir
Earth’s gravity tells m
eD
er Erde Schwerem
acht T
hrough the word
Durch m
einer Füsse Wort,
Of m
y feet,Es sagt m
ir T
he air’s wafting form
s D
er Lüfte Formgew
alt Tell m
e, D
urch meiner H
ände Singen, T
hrough the singing of my hands,
Es sagt mir
And H
eaven’s light tells me
Des H
imm
els Lichteskraft T
hrough the thinking of my head
Durch m
eines Hauptes Sinnen,
How
the world,
Wie die W
elt im M
enschen, In hum
an beings,Spricht, singt, sinnt.
Speaks, sings, thinks.
After such a m
editation, you will see that you can think of yourself
as having awakened from
the world’s sleep into the heaven of eurythm
y. A
gain and again, if you arouse this mood in yourself, you w
ill come into
eurythmy, the w
ay one awakens from
night into the day.Like in the W
olkendurchleuchter, 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 hum
an being, the person’s activities—
his speaking, singing, and sensing mind. T
here they live and w
ork anew and can be freely used by the hum
an being. If the person follow
s the admonition contained in these w
ords, he will m
ake him
self ever more into the gate through w
hich the world-logos enters
and becomes effective.
The young child’s m
ovement lives in its environm
ent and streams
into it. The w
olkendurchleuchter stands at the child’s age of eurythmy as
young movem
ent art. The onset of m
ovement 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 m
ust be formed in inw
ardness: “I seek to work
in the inner realm of creative forces.” T
he development of hum
an being and the developm
ent of eurythmy go hand in hand.
116
Thoughts on T
eaching Eurythm
y in the H
igh School
Eurythm
y teachers all have tiresome experiences doing eurythm
y w
ith High School students. T
here are many diverse reasons for this.
But all lie in the purview
of eurythmy. H
earing gets corrupted, testing becom
es more rigid. T
he teachers’ training is insufficient. Yet none of those reasons has to do directly w
ith eurythmy, w
ith the curriculum.
As w
ell as a lament, w
e can sing a song of praise. If we com
pare high schoolers now
adays with those about ten years ago, w
e see distinctly that w
e are now looking at young people w
ho are more prepared in the
deeper layers of their soul, more im
aginative, but also more critical, m
ore concerned about truthful judgm
ent. They are m
ore open to art and the anthroposophical aspects of their subjects. E
specially in eleventh and tw
elfth grades, they are interested in concrete human and pedagogical
questions: Why did she have us do this exercise? W
hat did we do in Low
er School? W
hy? The teacher m
ust be able to answer these questions.
Antipathy
and sym
pathy now
adays are
sharply opposed.
We
encounter them every day, every hour. R
ejection and receptivity, prejudice and spiritual openness often are present in eurythm
y lessons without
any transitions. The result is that on one hand w
e must direct extrem
e sym
pathy and openness to each individual student: A w
arm, w
akeful attention for the individual is an existential condition for the teacher. O
n the other hand, each lesson must be illum
inated by the experience of a generally valid supra-personal law
fulness. Eurythm
ic activity must
become increasingly understandable to and intellectually replicable by
117
the students. It must be related concretely to life, i.e., practical for each
age group.Increasingly, w
e have to develop our teaching out of a ‘translation,’ translation in tw
o respects: Teachers must translate their m
aterials into the being of the students, individually and age specifically. T
hey must slip
under the skin of the group and of each individual within the group.
They m
ust also interpret, translate the work. W
e must take a serious look
at the times: W
hat is it the current time dem
ands of the young? How
can eurythm
y answer these dem
ands so as to be of help?T
here was a tim
e when this need becam
e particularly obvious: the days and w
eeks after the Chernobyl reactor accident. T
his was a
fertile time for eurythm
ic work in the high school. W
hich movem
ents strengthen the life forces? D
o they work only on m
e? Do they w
ork for the earth? For the universe? C
an I actually feel them, experience them
? O
r am I expected only to believe in them
, like so much else? T
hese were
questions we w
ere able to meet through practical exercises. W
e really experienced the grace of the dire need of that tim
e. Then it faded. B
ut the sam
e theme re-em
erged as a heavy melancholic pressure in the H
igh School. T
he High School students’ concrete life sphere w
as affected when
the AID
S epidemic spread through C
entral Europe. T
hey asked direct questions and begged to experience in this context w
hat life is, what it
means to becom
e, to move.
We did m
any practices with the series given by Steiner to Tatiana
Kisseleff in 1914. 44 It consists in tw
elve consonants that between them
constitute an evolving conversation. T
he series begins with B
of which
Steiner said, “Protection in something.” T
he next sound, M, m
ust be felt. “It gives strength and the ability to overcom
e.” From B
through M, w
e com
e to D. T
he path starts with the plosives, m
oves over the Zitterlaut
(vibrating) R, and the W
ellenlaut (wave sound) L and ends w
ith the sibilants S, H
and the “remarkably radiant” form
above for demonstrating
T. T
he students eagerly took up this evolutionary series B - M
- D - N
- R
- L - G - C
h - F - S - H - T, and w
e studied it from num
erous points of view
. The activity provided som
ething akin to consolation and security.
118 Similarly, artistic w
ork on texts, e.g., Nelly Sachs’ C
horus of the Unborn
was m
et with readiness and a strong engagem
ent.R
egarding the search for motifs and the quest for sources to stim
ulate one’s ow
n enthusiasm, another kind of translation seem
s important and
essential for the High School eurythm
y teacher. It is the translation of spiritual scientific know
ledge into practical eurythmic exercises. If w
e w
ant to master the task of doing eurythm
y with today’s young people,
we m
ust answer the questions: H
ow can I translate the insights I receive
from anthroposophy? H
ow can I m
ake them so concrete that they w
ill provide the m
otivation that is appropriate for our time?
One exam
ple of bridging through eurythmy from
spiritual science to the life of young people com
es from Steiner’s lecture “W
hat Is the Role of
the Angel in O
ur Astral B
ody?” (October 9, 1918, Z
urich):
We should first develop in im
ages what the spirits of
form w
ant to attain with us by the end of earth evolution
and, further, out of these images, a transform
ed humanity, a
transformed reality w
ill later arise. And the spirits of form
, w
orking through the angels are already forming these im
ages in our astral body. T
he angels form im
ages in the human astral
body, images that one can attain w
ith a thinking developed into clairvoyance. A
nd these images can be pursued. W
e then shall see that these im
ages are formed according to very specific
impulses, very specific principles. T
hey are formed in such a
way that the w
ay in which they appear contains to som
e extent forces for hum
anity’s future evolution. Whenever w
e observe the angels doing this w
ork—this m
ay sound peculiar, but it m
ust be said—the angels have a very specific intention for
the future social shaping of human life on earth; they w
ant to create in the hum
an astral body the kind of images that w
ill produce very specific social conditions in future hum
an social life.H
uman beings m
ay resist acknowledging that angels w
ant 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 im
age-form
ing activity—the principle that in the future no hum
an being should be able to quietly enjoy happiness, if others next to him
are unhappy. (Bodhisattva)
119
But there is second im
pulse yet … regarding hum
an soul life, the angels’ intend w
ith the images they im
print into the astral body that in the future every hum
an being should see in every other hum
an being the hidden divine.… To conceive the
human being as an im
age revealed out of the spiritual world,
as seriously as possible, as strongly and understandably as possible—
this is what the angels put into the im
ages. And once
this is realized, it will have very specific consequences. A
ll free religious feeling to be developed in future hum
anity will rest
upon the fact that each human being recognizes in every other
human being the im
age of God, really so, in im
mediate life
practice, not just in theory.A
nd 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 hum
an astral bodies. I m
ight say that one only needs to raise one’s conscience up to a particular level to feel oneself translated inside the angels’ w
onderful workshop in the hum
an astral body.… H
uman
beings should more and m
ore consciously come to understand
what I just told you. T
his belongs to human evolution …
and it m
ust become practical hum
an wisdom
.T
hese three themes can be elaborated in the upper grades.
They em
erge clearly the mom
ent one attempts to find their
trace. They are articulated and cannot be separated from
each other, they appear ordered as a trinity. T
his resides in human
nature, it resides in the nature of art.To raise one’s consciousness up to a particular level—
one does that w
hen one does eurythmy. In tone eurythm
y, it means
continuing the gods’ work, w
hile doing eurythmy. O
r as it w
as put: “One feels as if transposed into the w
onderful angelic w
orkshop.”45
How
does the work look in actuality? T
he new beginning of
eurythmic w
ork in the ninth grade contains great promises as w
ell as great dangers. T
he students know quite a bit, although they know
about
120 it rather than knowing it in practice. T
hey have encountered the gestures for all the sounds. T
hey have practiced scales and intervals. They have
practiced individually and in groups, matching spatial figures w
ith gram
matical rules and m
ovements w
ith various soul-conditions, using texts, fairy tales, ballads, poem
s and proverbs. They have been exposed
to a large repertoire. The teachers and the students’ ‘chance’ now
rests in the m
etamorphosed approach of fam
iliar material. C
orrespondingly, the danger consists in continuing autom
atically what ‘w
as done before’ (the sam
e old things). Som
e of the quality reflected in the words “w
ith the help of thinking, to cross the abyss to the experience of spiritual reality” m
ust appear at the beginning of high school w
ork. Now
students can and must becom
e conscious of w
hat they know. T
his will please even ninth graders in
eurythmy class. H
ow can this consciousness-raising occur? Students can
find texts of their own choice. N
eedless to say, they should be short. T
hey actually know a large num
ber of poems in a dream
y kind of way.
Each student should draw
at least one of these into forms. A
feeling of helplessness surfaces. T
he permission to learn from
one’s mistakes can be
used as a lure into making a start. W
hen we ask students, “H
ow did you
hit upon this?” we are likely be m
et with a shoulder shrug and, “I dunno,
it just happened.” N
ow w
e go patiently from the text to the form
drawn on the board
by the student. We m
ust strictly follow the apparent rules of the draw
ing. T
his means that the beginning of the form
is marked w
ith a small circle,
the end with an arrow
, the place for the audience marked w
ith a P. In the conversation that follow
s, we develop know
ledge derived from the sense
of movem
ent educated over the years: If there is a passive verb, it feels right to just keep m
oving relaxedly. If I have a question, I pull inward, or
else I pull slowly from
my inner space out into the w
orld, seeking answers,
i.e., following the rule: “U
nfolding spirals express questions.” Divine or
spiritual reality is definitely above or behind me, just as concrete reality
is in front of me. E
lementary form
al rules are thus raised to awareness by
way of the feelings and the w
ill—all of w
hich the students really know,
without know
ing that they know it. N
ow, in the ninth grade eurythm
y class, w
e have the joy of discovery and fun.
121
Two exam
ples are given here:
and
Das N
etz des Him
mels reicht w
eit T
he net of heaven reaches farund seine M
aschen sind gross; and its m
eshes are wide;
dennoch entgeht ihm nichts.
yet nothing escapes it.
– Lao Tse
But there is a second im
pulse. Concerning hum
an soul life, the angels follow
through the images they im
print in the astral body, the goal for the future in w
hich every human being w
ill see a hidden divinity in every other hum
an being. The angels’ activity in our astral body, w
hich they perform
without our being conscious of it, m
ust be completed by us;
humanity m
ust awaken to it. T
he realm of speech and language reaches
into this region. The cosm
ic word created the hum
an being. It stood at the beginning of C
reation. With the sounds underlying this creative
force, we can turn to the divine concealed in hum
an beings. Indeed we
become one w
ith it when w
e do eurythmy!
Fig. 42
Fig. 43
Wie oft w
ard ich gebrochen, brach mich selbst,
Und dennoch leb’ ich unverw
üstlich fort.W
as alles liegt in mir verw
elkt, verdorrt,D
och unaufhaltsam w
ächst es drüber hin.
How
often I was broken, broke m
yselfA
nd still I go on living irrepressibly.H
ow m
uch lies in me w
ithered, dry.,Yet irresistibly it keeps grow
ing.
– Christian M
orgenstern
122
In the course of the school years, this path can be walked ever m
ore consciously. If w
e as eurythmists are not content w
ith teaching merely
the sounds, but can experience enthusiastically in the sounds the force of resurrection, then the spark w
ill be transmitted to the students on a
daily basis. T
he experience of the letters’ creative power can occur by the fourth
grade, when m
ost children know the sound gestures. T
he alphabet can be practiced—
slowly, solem
nly, gaily, and even sometim
es saucily and irreverently! E
ach child gets his/her personal sound in the circle and it can go around faster and faster. A
s fast as the wind after a few
weeks of
practice, the world logos, the alphabet w
ill blow through the class. N
ow
the entire world is w
ith us, all humans, all anim
als, all plants, and even angels and G
od, for there is nothing in the world that is not contained in
the alphabet. We are all in it, each of us lives it. O
nce 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, w
hat Steiner described as follow
s in his Speech Eurythm
y course: “And w
e could go through the entire alphabet, and w
e would have spoken the entire secret
of humankind in the sound gestures; the hum
an being in the cosmos,
the human being in his house, in his bodily shell …
and by the time w
e arrived at Z
, the wisdom
of humanity w
ould be standing before us, for the etheric body is the w
isdom of the hum
an being.”47
In the ninth grade, we approach these gestures on a new
level. N
ow it is very m
uch a matter of aw
akening understanding, applying understanding to the essential nature of the sounds. O
ne possibility is to investigate and ponder in a practical w
ay the series of sounds in the alphabet w
ith respect to its lawfullness. Let us take the first nine letters of
the alphabet as an example.
Step 1: We rem
ain standing when w
e hear a vowel; w
e move in
any direction whenever w
e hear a consonant. Step 2: W
e see a first emerging ‘sequence.’ It is possible to build
a triangle after each pause. If we look at the quality of the
123
consonants we see that the tw
o trinities are very different. In the first one: occlusive/sibilant/occlusive follow
; the second trinity has the sequence: sibilant/occlusive/sibilant. C
an we test in the w
alking how a sibilant m
oves? It flies! A
nd how does an occlusive m
ove? It stamps and doesn’t
really go anywhere, its path is very short.
According to these sequences, w
e get two very different triangles:
an obtuse triangle BC
D and an acute triangle FG
H. A
feeling can be particularly acute w
hen the sensing person is at rest, and this would be
particularly noticeable and familiar to children, w
hose life of feeling-sensing is at the flow
ering stage.
The students know
these formal elem
ents from the ‘peace and
energy’ dance in the sixth grade. There is som
ething satisfying about their reappearing as ‘law
s.’ It is always pleasant to m
eet old acquaintances in new
environments. Feeling m
emories em
erge: Yes! This is connected
with m
e. Energy and peace have to do w
ith me: To stand and ponder,
not to struggle, to overcome m
yself—all of this is a part of m
e, and yet —
to the extent that it also comm
on to others—not just m
e. The law
s of speech connect us all in our inner beings. T
his is a big thing! I feel it in m
y bones, my heart, m
y foot! For the ninth grader these experiences can be developed sim
ply by working on the alphabet. B
ut one shouldn’t ask them
direct questions, but simply practice these series.
Figs. 44 and 45
124
If we attem
pt to test further how “the divine im
age can truly be recognized in everything through im
mediate life-praxis,” w
e 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 follow
ed by V, related to F. In Septem
ber 1924, Steiner described the F as the w
isdom of exhalation. T
hus we travel from
the singular to things w
isdom-filled. W
e not only recognize the other being, but through the O
that follows w
e form a loving connection w
ith it. And w
e return to the E
feeling enriched. The greeting has transform
ed, graced and strengthened us. Som
ething like it happens in the greeting E-V
-O-E
. In his lecture of Septem
ber 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 E
ach handshake says, ”We seek each other out and w
e have found each other.” E
urythmy raises the encounter to the highest hum
an level, w
hich is supra-personal.T
here remains the question of the third quality, the law
that “in the future, hum
an beings won’t be able to rest in their happiness as long as
others are unhappy.” Here, in a w
ay, we are dealing w
ith an archetypal practice field. T
here is never any lesson, even in the first grade, without
a recognition of the comm
unity, without w
orking to create art forms of
and for the comm
unity. The king’s castle is built by the children’s w
akeful hands and feet, the gods’ high castle is built through the stam
ping of the rods in the rod-verses. T
he wind and the w
ater elements or the arm
ies in ballads receive their expressive pow
er from the com
mon activity. Yet
only in the upper grades, can we follow
in full consciousness the urge to w
ork within this process of “absolute brotherhood, absolute unity of
humankind.”W
e now turn back to the circle as archetypal form
. Anyone w
ho has gone around a circle, going faster and faster, know
s that this is one of the hardest exercises in form
-walking. Som
e groups never manage to go
beyond a very measured tem
po, either out of fearfulness or because they are trying too hard. Som
e students always break the circle, alw
ays spill out,
125
and others never produce anything. But the technique for form
ing in a group of tw
elve people a harmoniously sw
inging circle, this is high school w
ork, real higher level work. For w
hat is the precondition of success? T
hat every single person retain the totality in his/her consciousness, i.e., in his/her thinking, feeling and doing.
Going back to sound gestures: In the tw
elfth grade we seek the letters
in their respective cosmic hom
elands. In conversations and through practice, w
e find the R in Taurus, the T
in Leo, the M in A
quarius and the Z
in Scorpio. There are m
any ways to find these w
ith the students, w
hich can’t possibly all be described in the space of this book. Once a
path has been followed over several w
eeks, intuitions come up, as they
did in the fourth and ninth grades, but now expanded: C
osmic forces
live in speech, speech lives in me, cosm
ic forces live in every human
being. Speech connects us with other hum
an beings, but also with the
creative forces of the zodiac. We should not be afraid to perform
the
Fig. 46
126 zodiac movem
ents quickly, in agile, flowing m
otion; and in the process also m
oving quickly and nimbly in our consciousness through the entire
twelve-fold circle. O
ut of this zodiac work, the desire aw
akens to reconnect w
ith the cosmos, to be a gate for cosm
ic forces in the planetary world, to
be completely here, com
pletely in the other, completely above ourselves.
In this way, the student can experience: I am
a contemporary hum
an being ( Ich bin ein Z
eitgenosse), I am a hum
an being among other hum
an beings, I am
a cosmic being.
In a first artistic step, this exercise can be raised further in connection w
ith the work on the planets. For instance:
• the sun’s movem
ent as encompassing circle in all spatial
direction: top/bottom, front/back, right/left, all-encom
passing w
isdom, w
hite, AU
• the moon’s m
ovement as m
ovement com
e to rest, silence, concentrated force, m
irroring, violet, EI
• the Four-Headed B
east as a four-fold human being—
Lion, E
agle, Bull and A
ngel in harmony w
ith the sun and moon,
establishing the human being on earth, establishing it in space
and time.
The spatial form
s interpenetrate and turn inside out. Doing this can
awaken the consciousness of a sublim
e comm
unity to a very high level of cooperation.
We can practice an introductory form
leading to the work on
cosmic poem
s. Which texts to choose for one or another class depends
on the individuality of the class. What is generally valid is w
ork on the m
ovement of forces in circle. If it is successful there is no need to refrain
from using the m
any different proposals from the students. T
hey are what
allows us to ‘read’ w
hether the quality of this very challenging exercise in com
munity has truly been experienced.
127
The P
rofessional Picture
of the Eurythm
y Teacher
The eurythm
y teacher in a Waldorf school has in m
any respects a particular position. (S)he teaches a special subject, currently w
ithout equivalent in any other school system
. The art of eurythm
y, which is
still very young and in the formative stage, needs to be supported by the
entire school comm
unity—w
ith teachers, parents, students and school board—
securely and with solid skills. A
t the same tim
e, eurythmy and
its representatives the eurythmy teachers, m
ust be incorporated in the school as a w
hole. They all m
ust be trusted, and hired on the basis of their sound know
ledge of the subject.Teaching in schools requires training in eurythm
y, sealed by a diploma
from a recognized training institution (see listing in Eurythm
y Training C
enters). Additionally, general pedagogical training is recom
mended.
Possibilities for the latter are varied.R
egarding work in the school, one can generally assum
e that one teacher w
ill cover all the grades from 1 through 12. In m
any schools, one needs to add classes in the kindergarten and courses for parents and teachers. T
he teacher’s role thus goes beyond the school age. Personal artistic practice is part of the teacher’s preparation. It is also a part of the teacher’s responsibility, since it m
akes it possible to contribute to festivals and perform
ances.O
nce the eurythmists are in place, adm
inistrative duties in the school’s self-m
anagement aw
ait them, w
hich they can take up in very individual fashion. A
nthroposophical training allows the eurythm
ists to be valuable contributors to C
ollegium w
ork. The eurythm
ists can contribute greatly
128 as organizers of festivals, performances and class plays, to nam
e only a few
activities.A
lmost every W
aldorf school also needs a curative eurythmist in
collaboration with the school doctor. T
hey work together w
ith both individual children and sm
all groups. Therapeutic eurythm
y is prescribed for a num
ber of illnesses, but also for constitutional factors which
can create psychological, learning and social difficulties. Therapeutic
eurythmy training continues for one and half years follow
ing the four-year foundation course.
Aside from
schools, eurythmy and curative eurythm
y are also offered in a w
ide range of institutions: anthroposophical training institutions, clinics, sanatoria, therapy and m
edical practices, curative homes, special
education schools and day-programs. In m
any places, there are also eurythm
y classes open to the comm
unity.A
fter World W
ar II, eurythmy began to be introduced in a few
businesses and in apprenticeship training program
s in Europe. A
lthough these developm
ents have been slowed dow
n by the shortening of the w
orkweek and other econom
ic difficulties, there have been some successes
and future prospects for eurythmy in the w
orkplace.
129
Endnotes
1. R
udolf Steiner, Truth-Wrought W
ords. GA
40, Dornach, 1991.
2. V
assili Kandinsky in O
f the Spiritual in Art.
3. V
assili Kandinsky and A
rnold Schönberg, Briefe, B
ilder und D
okumente einer aussergew
öhnlichen Begegnung, ed. Jelena K
ahl-K
och, dtv Kunst, M
unich, 1983. http://ww
w.schoenberg.at/4_
exhibits/asc/Kandinsky/letters–e.htm
.4.
The text of D
er gelbe Klang (T
he Yellow Sound) is reproduced in the
correspondence between Schönberg and K
andinsky; see note 3.5.
Margarita V
oloshin reports on this conversation in her autobiography, T
he Green Snake, Freies G
eistesleben, Stuttgart, 1997, p. 200.
6. A
reproduction of the The H
arvesting of the Fishes appeared in 1932, in the portfolio D
as Licht schien in die Finsternis, Eugen Fink
Verlag, Stuttgart.
7. M
agdalene Siegloch, Lory Maier-Sm
its. Die erste Eurythm
istin. Die
Anfänge der Eurythm
ie. Goetheanum
, Dornach, 1993.
8. R
udolf Steiner Das K
ünstlerische in seiner Weltm
ission (The A
rts and T
heir Mission), Lecture, K
ristiana, May 16, 1923. G
A 276,
Dornach, 1982, p. 130.
9. First day of the course, Septem
ber 16, 1912, in Bottm
ingen. Cf.
Steiner Die Entstehung und Entw
icklung der Eurythmie (T
he Birth
and Evolution of Eurythmy). G
A 277a, D
ornach, 1965, p. 19.10. Ibid., p. 38.11. Ibid., p. 39.12. Ibid., p. 38.
130 13. Ibid., p. 38ff.14. R
udolf Steiner, “Menschengeist und T
iergeist,” Lecture, Berlin,
Novem
ber 17, 1910. In Antw
orten der Geistesw
issenschaft auf die grossen Fragen des D
aseins. GA
60, Dornach, 1959, p. 114.
15. See note 10.16. R
udolf Steiner, Lecture, Munich, early Septem
ber 1912 in Die
Entstehung und Entwicklung der Eurythm
ie, op. cit., p. 18.17. R
udolf Steiner, Conferences w
ith Teachers of the Free Waldorf School
in Stuttgart, vol. 2. GA
300, 2 (Germ
an version), Dornach, 1975,
p. 294ff; (English version).
18. Rudolf Steiner, O
kkulte Untersuchungen über das Leben zw
ischen Tod und neuer G
eburt (Occult Research on Life betw
een Death and a
New
Birth), Lecture, B
ergen, October 11, 1913. G
A 140, D
ornach, 1970, p. 358.
19. Rudolf Steiner, A
nthroposophische Leitsätze, Der Erkenntnisw
eg der A
nthroposophie (Leading Thoughts in A
nthroposophy), Das M
ichael M
ysterium. G
A 26, D
ornach, 1989, p. 14.20. In A
grippa von Nettesheim
, De O
cculta Philosophia. Drei B
ücher über die M
agie. Nördlingen, 1987. A
grippa von Nettesheim
(1486–1535), G
erman w
riter and physician, reputed to be an alchemist
and magician. O
riginally a physician to King M
aximilian I, he
began to take a lively interest in theosophy and magic, pursued in
teaching positions all over Europe. T
he Inquisition sought to stop the printing of D
e Occulta Philosophia (1550), a defense of m
agic by m
eans of which m
ankind may com
e to a knowledge of nature
and of God. It contains A
grippa’s idea of the universe with its three
worlds or spheres. H
e denounced the accretions, which had grow
n up around the sim
ple doctrines of Christianity, and w
ished for a return to a m
ore personal religion. His w
orks published in 1550 have been reprinted frequently over the centuries.
21. Rudolf Steiner, G
egenwärtiges G
eistesleben und Erziehung (Spiritual Life of the Present T
ime and Education), Lecture, Ilkley, A
ugust 9, 1923. G
A 307, D
ornach, 1973, p. 88 (English version).
22. Ibid., p. 86.
131
23. Rudolf Steiner, H
eileurythmie (C
urative Eurythmy), Lecture,
Dornach, A
pril 13, 1921. GA
315, Dornach, 1973, p. 28.
24. Ibid., see p. 121: “I seek in the inner.…”
25. Rudolf Steiner, D
ie Eurythmie als sichtbare Sprache (Eurythm
y as V
isible Speech), Lecture, Dornach, June 24, 1924. G
A 279,
Dornach 1979, p. 57ff.
26. Rudolf Steiner, T
he Impulse of Spiritual Pow
ers in World H
istorical Events, Lecture, D
ornach, March 11, 1923. G
A 222, D
ornach 1976, p. 14.
27. Rudolf Steiner, G
egenwärtiges G
eistesleben und Erziehung (see note 2), Lecture, Ilkley, A
ugust 10, 1923. GA
307, Dornach, 1973, p.
103ff.28. Eurythm
ie als sichtbare Sprache, op. cit. p. 248.29. D
ante, Alighieri. D
ivine Com
edy, London: Penguin Classics, 1950,
p. vv.30. In So viele Tage w
ie das Jahr hat. Gedichte für K
inder und Kenner,
collected and edited by James K
rüss, Bertelsm
an, Gütersloh, 1959.
31. In Wahrspruchsw
orte, op. cit., p. 121.32. See note 21.33. R
udolf Steiner, Die M
ethodik des Lehrens und die Lebensbedingungen des Erziehens, Evening Lecture, A
pril 10, 1924. GA
308, Dornach,
1986, p. 73.34. G
egenwärtiges G
eistesleben und Erziehung, p. 34.35. See A
kasha Research: The Fifth G
ospel, Lecture, Berlin, January 13,
1914. GA
158, Dornach, 1975, p. 185.
36. Rudolf Steiner, “D
er neue baukünstlerische Gedanken,” in W
ege zu einem
neuen Baustil. “U
nd der Bau w
ird Mensch,” Lecture,
Dornach, June 28, 1914. G
A 286, D
ornach, 1982, p. 76.37. R
udolf Steiner, “Die Prufung der Seele,” in V
ier Mysteriendram
en. G
A 14, D
ornach, 1962, p. 192.38. Lory M
aier-Smits com
ments in D
ie Entstehung und Entwickelung
der Eurythmie (O
rigins and Developm
ent of Eurythmy). G
A 277a,
Dornach, 1965, op. cit., p. 46.
132 39. Rudolf Steiner, D
ie gesunde Entwickelung des Leiblich-Physischen
als Grundlage der freien Entfaltung des Seelisch-G
eistigen (Healthy
Developm
ent of the Physical Body as a Foundation for the Free
Unfolding of the Soul-Spirit), Lecture, D
ornach, January 2, 1911. G
A 303, D
ornach, 1978, p. 205.40. R
udolf Steiner Meditativ erarbeitete M
enschenkunde, Lecture, Stuttgart, Septem
ber 16, 1920. GA
302a, Dornach 1977, p. 26.
41. The basis for this is in Steiner’s indications, com
mented by A
rmin
J. Husem
ann, in Der m
usikalische Bau des M
enschen. Entwurf einer
plastisch-musikalischen M
enschenkunde, Stuttgart, 1993.42. R
udolf Steiner, Anthroposophische M
enschenkunde und Pädagogik, A
ddress, Stuttgart, March 27, 1923. R
eprinted in GA
304a, D
ornach, 1979, pp. 57–59.43. R
udolf Steiner, Eurythmie als sichtbare Sprache. G
A 279, D
ornach, 1979, p. 238.
44. Steiner’s suggestions to Tatiana Kisseleff reproduced in facsim
ile in D
ie Entstehung und Entwickelung der Eurythm
ie, op. cit., p. 59.45. R
udolf Steiner, “Was tut der E
ngel in unserem A
stralleib?” Lecture, O
ctober 9, 1918, in Der Tod als Lebensw
andlung. GA
182, D
ornach, 1976, pp. 140–143.46. In the G
erman language there are tw
o forms for the E
nglish ‘‘to know
”: können = to know how
to do something and kennen = to know
a person, a concept, a piece of m
usic, and so forth.47. R
udolf Steiner, Eurythmie als sichtbare Sprache, op. cit., p. 54ff.
48. Seventh Course D
ay, Bottm
ingen, September 22, 1912, p. 40.
133
Eurythm
y Training C
enters(partial listing)
U.S.A
.
School of Eurythm
y Spring Valley
285 H
ungry Hollow
Road
C
hestnut Ridge, N
Y 10977
Tel: 845-352-5020
Fax: 845-352-5071
info@
eurythmy.org
ww
w.eurythm
y.org
Im
-Pulse Eurythm
y
P.O. B
ox 90425
Austin, T
X 78709-0425
Tel: 512-426-5974
info@
impulse-eurythm
y.org
ww
w.im
pulse-eurythmy.org
E
urythmy Training at R
udolf Steiner College
9200 Fair O
aks Blvd.
Fair O
aks, CA
95628
Tel: 916-961-8727
marketing@
steinercollege.edu
w
ww
.steinercollege.edu
134 GE
RM
AN
Y
Eurythm
eum Stuttgart
Z
ur Uhlandhöhe 8
70188 Stuttgart
Tel: 49-0711-2364230
info@
eurythmeum
stuttgart.de
ww
w.eurythm
eumstuttgart.de
A
lanus Hochschule für K
unst und Gesellschaft Fachbereich E
urythmie
Johannishof 53347
Alfter
Tel: 49-02222-93210
info@
alanus.edu
ww
w.alanus.edu
R
eifestudium B
erufsbegleitende Eurythm
ieausbildung
Alanus W
erkhaus
Johannishof 53347
Alfter
Tel: 49-02222-4103
Fax: 49-02222-938842
A
ndrea-Heidekorn@
web.de
Schule für eurythm
ische Art u.K
unst
Argentinische A
llee 23
14163 Berlin
Tel: 49-030-8026378
Fax: 49-030-80908263
eurythm
w
ww
.eurythmie-berlin.de
E
urythmie W
itten/Annen Institut für W
aldorfpädagogik
Annener B
erg 15
58454 Witten
Tel: 49-02302-79673-0
info@
wittenannen.de
w
ww
.wittenannen.de
135
M
erZ-T
heater Hannover B
ühne und Schule für Eurythm
ische Kunst
B
rehmstr. 10
30173 H
annover 0511-815603
merztheater@
t-online.de
ww
w.m
erz-theater.de
E
urythmie-A
usbildung Nürnberg
H
eimerichstr. 9
90419 N
ürnberg 0911-337533
info@eurythm
ieschule-nuernberg.de
ww
w.eurythm
ieausbildung-nuernberg.d
4.D
raum für E
urythmischec A
usbildung und Kunst
M
ittelweg 11-12
20148 H
amburg
Tel: 40-41331644
info@
4d-eurythmie.de
w
ww
.4d-eurythmie.de
HU
NG
AR
Y
Akadem
ie für Eurythm
ie Budapest
N
agymezo u. 30. T.e.
1065 B
udapest
Tel: 36-01-312-2730
Fax: 36-01-312-2730
huneuritmia@
hotmail.com
EG
YPT
School of A
rts Sekem A
cademy
P.O
. Box 2834
E
l Horrya, H
eliopolis
Cairo, E
gypt
Tel: 20-55-2880550
Fax: 20-55-2880550
christoph.graf@sekem
.com
ww
w.sekem
.com
136 ISRA
EL
Jerusalem
Academ
y of Eurythm
y
Moshar B
et Zait 99
90815 Jerusalem
, Israel
Tel: 972-2-5344639
Fax: 972-2-5344679
abdalma@
012.net.il
NE
TH
ER
LA
ND
S
Euritm
ie Academ
ie Den H
aag
Riouw
straat 1
NL-2585 G
P Den H
aag
Tel: 31-70-3550039
euritmieopleiding@
hhelicon.nl
ww
w.euritm
ie-denhaag.nl
SW
ITZ
ER
LA
ND
A
kademie für E
urythmische K
unst
Baselland
A
pfelseestr. 9a
CH
-4143 Dornach
Tel: 41-61-7018466
Fax: 41-61-7018558
w
ww
.eurythmie.ch
E
urythmeum
Elena Z
uccoli
Hügelw
eg 83
CH
-4143 Dornach
Tel: 41-61-7064431
Fax: 41-61-7064432
info@
eurythmie-zuccoli.ch
w
ww
.eurythmie-zuccoli.ch
E
urythmée Lausanne
C
ase Postale 569
CH
-100 Lausanne
Tel: 41-21-8062168
137
FR
AN
CE
E
urythmée-Paris
1 rue Francois Laubeuf
F-78400 C
hatou
Tel: 33-13-0534709
EN
GL
AN
D
London College of E
urythmy
R
udolf Steiner House
35 Park Rd
London, N
W1 6X
T
Tel: 44-20-7723 4400, extension/208
lceurythmy@
freeuk.com
E
urythmy W
est Midlands at the G
lasshouse Arts C
entre
Ruskin A
rts Centre
10 K
ohima R
oad Dr.
Stourbridge D
Y8 3SA
Tel: 44-1384-442563
Fax: 44-1384-442563
eurythmy.w
m@
ukonline.co.uk
ww
w.eurythm
ywm
.org.uk
C
amphill E
urythmy School
B
otton Village
D
anby/Whitby
N
orth Yorkshire YO21 2N
J
Tel: 44-1287-661257
Fax: 44-1287-661254
camphill.eurythm
w
ww
.camphilleurythm
y.org.uk
Peredur E
urythmy
W
est Hoathly R
oad
East G
rinstead R
H19 4N
F
Tel: 44-1342 824109
info@peredureurythm
y.com
ww
w.peredureurythm
y.com
138 AU
STR
IA
Bildungsstätte für E
urythmie W
ien
Tilgnerstr.3
A
-1040 Wien
Tel: 43-15-048352
SW
ED
EN
E
urytmilärarutbildningen
R
. Steinerhögskolan
15391 Järna
Tel: 46-8551-50770
Fax: 46-8551-50685
w
ww
.steinerhogskolan.se
NO
RW
AY
D
en norske Eurythm
ihoyskole
Prof. Dahls gt. 30
N
-0260 Oslo
Tel: 47-22-443290
Fax: 47-22-436629
dne@
eurytmi.no
w
ww
.eurytmi.no
FIN
LA
ND
E
urytmiakoulu
c/o A
ntroposofinen Lütta
Undenm
aankatu 25a
00120 Helsinki
Tel: 35-896987698
Fax: 35-896802591
ann-m
arie.somero@
welho.com
139
RU
SSIA
Institut für Musikalische Plastik und D
rama
Nikolai K
onowalenko
Povarskaja 20
R
U-121069 M
oskau
Tel: 70-95 2915039
Fax: 70-95 3124008
UK
RA
INE
E
urythmie-A
usbildung Kiev
c/o K
unstschule Turchaka
Tiraspolskaja 49
K
iev
Tel: 38-44-5526059
kuhjuerg@w
eb.de
E
urythmie-A
usbildungsprojekt Odessa
R
eichensteinerstr. 18
4144 Arlesheim
, Switzerland
Tel: 41-61-7013640
Fax: 41-61-7011802
BR
AZ
IL
Nucleo de form
agáo en Euritm
ie
Rua R
omilda M
argarida Gabriel 178 / A
pt. 802
045-30-090 Sáo Paulo
Brazil
Tel: 55-11-30792776
Fax: 55-11-30792776
renatenisch@
nol.com.br
SO
UT
H A
FRIC
A
Center for C
reative Education Iziko
Labantu be A
frica
PO B
ox 280 Cape Tow
n
ZA
-7800 Plumstaed
140 C
ape Town E
urythmy School
E
mpire 15
Z
A-7800 H
out Bay
JAPA
N
Eurythm
ieausbildung Tokio
Eurythm
ie Haus
O
kubo 2-10-2-102 Yamazaki-B
il.
Shinjuku-ku
Tokyo
Tel: 169-0072
Fax: 0081-44-95 42 156
AU
STR
ALIA
A
urora Australis
P.O
. Box 18
K
EW
3101
Victoria
Tel: 61-3-94971979
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