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

rsc@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

ieschule.berlin@t-online.de

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

y@virgin.net

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

goran.krantz@steinerhogskolan.se

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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