Foundation Stone Meditation in Eurythmy

by Andrew Wolpert

This Easter 2024 marked the centenary of the eurythmy forms for the Foundation Stone Meditation. There will be a festival in Sheffield, England, to celebrate the event with several eurythmists sharing their work on April 20, 2024. In my continuing exploration of the Foundation Stone Meditation as a metamorphosis of the First Goetheanum, I offer these thoughts to accompany the invaluable artistic research the eurythmists engage in.

If the sculpture of the Representative of Humanity had been at the back of the stage of the First Goetheanum, when leaving the auditorium we would have felt the confirming and enabling power of the Christ behind us, in His engagement with the adversaries, and blessing our exit back into the world where we, too, have our engagement with the challenges of everyday life. But this was not to be. In the metamorphosis through fire of the First Goetheanum, the House of the Word, not just into the Foundation Stone Meditation , but then also into the eurythmy forms and gestures of this meditation, we see and are blessed by the following.

In the postlude after the first three sections, there is the exchange of positions between the eurythmists that are customarily referred to as Figures 6 and 5 at the front of the stage. This making way of the former for the latter unmistakably expresses the Pauline words, “Not I, but Christ lives in me.” Then the other four eurythmists exit the stage, and now from the back of the stage, Figure 6 powerfully affirms the Christ presence in Figure 5 from behind, before Figure 6 withdraws through the temporary opening in the center of the back curtain. Now the fully ‘Christened’ Figure 5 makes a huge circle around the stage that symbolizes entering and embracing the whole of the world, the world we will go back into at the end of the performance. Before Figure 5 exits, the

Christ affirming gesture is shown to us once more, actually from the place where the Representative of Humanity sculpture would have been.

The living enactment in eurythmy of the gesture and power of the sculpture is a further example of the heightened metamorphosis in the movement of what would have been a spatial experience. It is an experience that eurythmists can celebrate anywhere, as it does not involve going to the original place, and how Michaelic is that! Also, it becomes another compelling reason for not putting the sculpture at the back of the present stage. The sculpture (wherever it is located) always exists, the metamorphosed gesture in eurythmy only exists when it is brought to life by the artists. Eurythmy certainly has not rendered the sculpture unnecessary, but it has rendered it unnecessary in a place where the eurythmist can raise the Christ experience from the fixed threedimensional space to the dimension of time.

The sculpture, like the First Goetheanum, is susceptible to being destroyed, yet its metamorphosis into eurythmy is indestructible, and, like a meditation, only exists when it is brought to life consciously. The sculpture still exists because of what Rudolf Steiner and Edith Maryon did . The meditation and the eurythmy for it lives only when we give them life through our initiative, by what we do

To put all this concisely: The Foundation Stone Meditation has rescued, transformed, and affirmed what lived behind and within the destroyed ‘static’ building that was sense-perceptible in space, always there, whether seen or not. Meditated, it lives in the supersensible. The eurythmy forms given at Easter 1924 render the meditative substance into the realm of the sense-perceptible in space, movement, color, and sound, but only when striven for artistically, and if seen and affirmed within by a receptive witness.

Andrew Wolpert has been active as a course facilitator, lecturer, tour leader and author in the fields of language teaching, art history, Shakespeare, Parzival and general anthroposophical themes at Emerson College, at the University in Stuttgart and in other institutions around the world.