Program at Toronto Waldorf School -Wednesday, November 11, 2009
For details, call the School at 905-881-1611
11am - High School Performance of No More Lies . Reflections on War. This program features eurythmy to poetry (including Two Threnodies and a Psalm by Denise Levertov, Dolce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, and The Man With The Broken Fingers by Carl Sandburg) and music (including Intermezzo in A Minor by Johannes Brahms, and Prelude/Wartime by Gregor Simon-McDonald).
2pm - Lower School Performance of The Wild Geese, a story from Lapland.
Tickets will be sold at the door: adults $10, students $5. All are welcome.
Program at Novalis Hall, Camphill Nottawasaga on Friday November 13
For details, contact Treasa O'Driscoll
Monday, October 26, 2009
Practical Things Like Stories and Eurythmy
Grasshopper Productions will soon be presenting a Fairy Tale in eurythmy at the Toronto Waldorf School, and Jonathan Snow wrote this piece for parents in the school newsletter as a general introduction. - MM
Fairytales have been used from the dawn of mankind to convey wisdom to new generations of listeners. Raised to the status of "Volksgut" - cultural heritage of a people - by the scientific endeavours of men like the Grimm brothers during the Romantic era, they became used to convey moral lessons to children. A century later, modern psychology revisited tales and myths, using them as maps of the forces at work in the human psyche, most of which remain largely hidden from our waking consciousness. C.G. Jung argued that each of the different characters in these stories represented archetypal forces active within the soul of a single person. Rudolf Steiner indicated that the characters in fairytales may be direct representations of invisible but very concrete forces, which we can call spiritual beings, which are represented using imagery from the world perceptible to our everyday consciousness. In any case, we have slowly rediscovered that fairytales are not mere childish trifles, but are vehicles of great wisdom from which we as adults can profit.
Eurythmy, which strives to make visible that which normally remains hidden, is a medium of choice for conveying the many sheaths of a fairytale to an audience. It easily frees itself from representational realism, where clothing, mannerisms, etc. of a specific culture are reproduced as accurately and authentically as possible. Rather, eurythmy gives itself the task of conveying an accurate picture of the deeper truths embedded as seeds in works of art. To do this, it uses different qualities of movement and colours (in costumes and lighting), to show visual archetypes and create various moods, and thus speaks a language that reaches us beyond our intellectual comprehension.
The spoken word as conveyer of wisdom is not limited to a role of preserving past tradition. Poetic endeavours in all times seek to capture the essence of our world - visible and invisible - as the poet in all his modernity perceives it. Again, in poetry as in fairytales, we have a language that addresses far more than the human intellect. That which a text wishes to convey may be amplified by eurythmy using the same means as for fairytales. And, whereas fairytales offer us a plot to hold on to, poetry may leave us with no such anchor. So for those of us who have difficulty finding the entrance into modern lyrical art, eurythmy can serve as a kind of subtitles for the messages between the lines.
Fairytales have been used from the dawn of mankind to convey wisdom to new generations of listeners. Raised to the status of "Volksgut" - cultural heritage of a people - by the scientific endeavours of men like the Grimm brothers during the Romantic era, they became used to convey moral lessons to children. A century later, modern psychology revisited tales and myths, using them as maps of the forces at work in the human psyche, most of which remain largely hidden from our waking consciousness. C.G. Jung argued that each of the different characters in these stories represented archetypal forces active within the soul of a single person. Rudolf Steiner indicated that the characters in fairytales may be direct representations of invisible but very concrete forces, which we can call spiritual beings, which are represented using imagery from the world perceptible to our everyday consciousness. In any case, we have slowly rediscovered that fairytales are not mere childish trifles, but are vehicles of great wisdom from which we as adults can profit.
Eurythmy, which strives to make visible that which normally remains hidden, is a medium of choice for conveying the many sheaths of a fairytale to an audience. It easily frees itself from representational realism, where clothing, mannerisms, etc. of a specific culture are reproduced as accurately and authentically as possible. Rather, eurythmy gives itself the task of conveying an accurate picture of the deeper truths embedded as seeds in works of art. To do this, it uses different qualities of movement and colours (in costumes and lighting), to show visual archetypes and create various moods, and thus speaks a language that reaches us beyond our intellectual comprehension.
The spoken word as conveyer of wisdom is not limited to a role of preserving past tradition. Poetic endeavours in all times seek to capture the essence of our world - visible and invisible - as the poet in all his modernity perceives it. Again, in poetry as in fairytales, we have a language that addresses far more than the human intellect. That which a text wishes to convey may be amplified by eurythmy using the same means as for fairytales. And, whereas fairytales offer us a plot to hold on to, poetry may leave us with no such anchor. So for those of us who have difficulty finding the entrance into modern lyrical art, eurythmy can serve as a kind of subtitles for the messages between the lines.
More on Renate Krause
On October 6, Renate Krause decided that she had recovered sufficiently from an operation to resume her eurythmy work, and she opened our study group with a stimulating group eurythmy exercise. We were putting away chairs at the end of the meeting, when somehow she fell in a corner, with the result that her arm was broken. She has been in considerable pain, but she has recovered sufficiently to return home, and she is able to drive when she needs to. It's quite incredible how undaunted she seems by these difficult trials...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
