Working Together in the Sections

Reviewed by Alice Stamm

Sacramento, California

Often eurythmists are the ones who initiate a performance, having gone to a speech artist or to musicians with a wish to work on a particular poem or piece of music. So, performances come about and a wonderful working together takes place. More musicians have come to me to ask, what would this look like in eurythmy? It is always a delight to be asked to make visible what we usually enjoy audibly.

In the introduction to a eurythmy performance at the beginning of the Foundation Stone conference in 1923, Rudolf Steiner brings a new picture of eurythmy in performance with speaker and eurythmist and audience. Eurythmy had accompanied the building of the first Goetheanum, its forms and all artistic aspects. This imaginative quality and power of this new art form was vital for this building’s development and almost completion. Eurythmy itself was imbued anew with this, making it possible for the Foundation Stone to be performed for the first time on April 20, 1924.

Dr. Steiner gives a new picture of what is happening during a performance, knowing this can only inspire our relation to performing, deepening our working with such materials. There he speaks about what we otherwise know along the Rosicrucian path of development, from living thinking to imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

In the introduction, Dr. Steiner speaks about the relation between speaker and eurythmist. In a performance one has the possibility to experience the mystery behind the artistry of speaker and eurythmist. The audience is addressed as well. For in the performance, he relates how the eurythmists create imaginations in doing eurythmy to the speaker’s recitation; inspiration is evident; and the audience experiences the intuitive element of what is performed.

This moment of the laying in our hearts of the Foundation Stone, one sees how a truly esoteric deepening is given, even in the realm of eurythmy and performance. Rudolf Steiner has indicated that the Masters who care for western esotericism are Christian Rosenkreutz and Master Jesus. Throughout his life and work, Dr. Steiner always made room for or allowed Christian Rosenkreutz’s impulses to inspire his own endeavors in bringing Anthroposophia to work in the world. The Rosicrucian impulses had always to do with the artistic, lifting the material into the gesture of the spiritual.

So too in eurythmy performance, there was an open secret of spiritual reality.

When Ilona Schubert asked Dr. Steiner what the C and R meant in the prelude to the fourth panel of the Foundation Stone in eurythmy, and then R, C in the silent conclusion, he answered Chrisrian Rosenkreutz