Goetheanum Theater Festival: July 10-14, 2024

by Christine Burke

September 1924 marked a period of an astonishing amount of lecture activity in Rudolf Steiner’s life, which included The Speech Course for the Participants of the Dramatic Arts, and the Speech and Drama Lectures. Sometimes he gave five or more lectures a day, many participants attended multiple courses on the many topics presented.

As one of few speech artists in North America, I felt it was necessary to attend the 2024 festival – and had hoped that we could offer a play.  The condition from the organizers was that the ensemble use specific elements of the Speech and Drama Course in preparing for it. Despite a valiant effort, there were few English-speaking speech artists able to commit, but I was determined to go. Then a colleague from Australia, Penelope Snowden, asked if any of us might help with speech chorus work for a production that was coming from her community.  Beatrice Voigt and I agreed, which resulted in our doing chorus work in the Australian project by the Ink Pot Arts founder, JoAnne Sarre.  The project is based on the story of Parsifal – a new adaptation by author Peter Oswald – that brings the women in the story to the forefront and shows how the community shapes and allows a single person’s destiny to unfold.  In its essence, the Parsifal Project is about reconnecting to ancient wisdom with the people and practices that are needed in our time.  See https://inkpot.com.au/wp-content/uploads/ ParsifalProjectNewsletterFeb2024V2.pdf for more information on the project.

The ensemble for the Parsifal Project had about 10 days to rehearse and hone the elements of the play that we were bringing to a performance level.  Half of us had very little time to step into the roles, but Jo-Anne Sarre worked her magic and we shared a beautiful one-hour performance during the Theater Festival.

The July 2024 Theater Festival took place in and around the Goetheanum – in some rooms I didn’t even know existed.  While most of the plays/offerings were from countries near the Goetheanum, there were other performances that brought people together from quite far away (Australia, New Zealand, North America, Korea, Japan). Meeting colleagues from around the world and experiencing the speech work in the various languages was something I will not soon forget.

In the mornings, we had lectures or panels that covered topics like the work with the Greek Gymnastics Exercises related to speaking.  Peter Selg shared about the historical time when the speech and drama lectures were given.  Everyone there was able to see two performances during the day – and typically there were about six to choose from, while at night we all had the opportunity to watch together a larger production on the stage under the great hall.  We basked in the beauty of the work from sun-up to sun-down, in a place created for the Word to be sounded forth beautifully.

It is hard to mention just one of the performances but, for a taste, I will share that when the ensemble from France brought Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – in French (of course) – this was my absolute favorite performance.  Not because I understand French (I don’t), but because even though they were missing an actor (Festis – if you know the play) due to illness, they brought the play through the Word and through their ensemble body (shared etheric body) in such a delightful way that one could see the fruit of the speech and drama work in it and celebrate the irony of bringing a Shakespeare play in French, to the delight of 200+ people.

The Colloquium  - After The Festival July 15-17, 2024 At the colloquium we shared much of the work we are doing and how we are doing it – and what kinds of changes are being made to keep the work alive and relevant in the world.  This was invaluable work that has not happened on this kind of scale since 2012.  We spoke about how underfunded the speech arts in general have been and tried to open conversations about how we can change that.  Some spoke of the difficulties of keeping trainings alive and relevant and how what we do is, of necessity, a long training – noting that long trainings are not part of the trend in learning at the moment.

In my own experience, the speech arts training is an initiation into the Mystery of the Word, and that sacredness was brought into the conversation as well.  The conversation, like most, I find, also brought in how important it is to support one another, to work on the social arts connected to and with the Word.

My further hope for the future of the sacred and creative, formative arts of the Word is that they come back into fashion and perhaps become treasured as in days of old.  And there is good reason to hope for that - - - as I can attest after returning to my school- year job at a California community college.  Students are stating more and more that online teaching is not working for them, that being in person is more fulfilling, more nourishing, more productive than staring at a screen all day.  They find joy in the speech exercises and verses I bring from this work into my communication studies courses, which I call Logodynamics.

The Theater Festival had about 200 attendees – 80 of whom were not speech colleagues, echoing the scene 100 years earlier in its appeal to professional and lay people alike.