Alexandra Spadea

Published in the Newsletter for the Performing Arts Section Goetheanum

Easter 2020

I am happy to share with you some reflections and glimpses of my Eurythmy work at the Rudolf Steiner School, NYC.

“Steiner” the first Waldorf school in the United States, was founded in 1928 and in it’s 90 years the school has shown a steady and unwavering dedication to eurythmy, which is palpable!

The Steiner school owns two buildings located on the Upper East Side, one of the grandest neighborhoods of Manhattan, right next to Central Park, and one minute walk on Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art; 10 minutes further north is the Guggenheim Museum. We are grateful for our beautiful buildings with Central Park as our school yard and friendly neighbors all around.

            On their way to school, New York City children receive a full tableau of impressions, as they either travel by train and bus, by car or by foot, bicycle or skateboard. Sounds, smells, images, lots of people, stairs, elevators… transit life, and many different situations to observe, are a big part of the daily experience for New Yorkers. It is easy to imagine and see, how this daily practice of navigating through the city, shapes the growing human being. Our part as educators and parents in this shaping hopefully brings balance and harmony, content and meaningful encounters with each other.

It would be incomplete to speak about the work in the Steiner School community without acknowledging the backdrop of NYC and the very diverse backgrounds our students come from.

Upon arrival at school, our students enter a space held in calm and beauty, truthfulness and joy. The familiar mood and care that breathes in Waldorf Schools around the globe lives strongly in our school, and often parents and visitors describe our buildings as an oasis, a respite from the busy NYC live.

I have been teaching Eurythmy at Steiner to grades 7-12 for the last eleven years and have found the students overall very receptive to forms and choreographies, and a curiosity and desire to bring a part of who they are to our work,  which makes my teaching and our eurythmy time together that much richer.

“As if they fill their inner spaces with good imaginations and ideas, and realizations and then this can manifest in all kinds of good results.”

I strive to offer my students a place where they feel safe, can relax and connect with each other through the art of Eurythmy and be elevated in the experience of space. It is also a place where we can connect with the invisible realities perceived by anyone who develops their senses in a certain way. It begins in the early childhood years and carries throughout the many wonderful lessons, from form drawing to gardening, all that is done and learned by hand and heart, the songs and speech, the plays and the writing and observations, the science experiments, and making sense of life, this is all contributing to a healthy eurythmy  curriculum and school life. I was fortunate enough to have grown up this way myself at the Freie Waldorfschule Bexbach in the Seventies and Eighties and consider it one of the greatest gifts to have “grown up Waldorf” – at the age of 9, I promised myself to become a Eurythmist when grown up.

“I find myself often tapping into what moved me when I was young, and why I fell in love with Eurythmy – I still am – and why I dedicated my life to this art. “

When I am with my students,I feel asked to share from a place of deep understanding, vision, creativity, respect, clarity and heart. What becomes meaningful in my classroom is when together we enter the flow, when I can direct and move classic forms such as “Auftakte” with the students and together we revel in their geometry, lawfulness and freedom – when we “make them our own” and become creative with it. The “Auftakte” are forms of timeless truth and power – as all Eurythmy forms are – and when students learn them and become familiar with how they are in space, how to move all these formations, then they begin indeed to learn another language one that has the potential to be strengthening and harmonizing for all people, in and outside of the eurythmy room, including said adolescents.

In the last few years, our children and youth? along with their parents and teachers have gone through some intense experiences as a country and city, and I am sensing more and more a need for a place where equality, calm, and spirit is cultivated. My student’s thirst for a deeper understanding of the “invisible realm”, is real, and in conversation and movement we explore those realms. I have been teaching well over 20 years and noted in the last 3-4 years an increase of inquisitive questions and longing for a deeper explanation of what Eurythmy is drawing from and why it is a part of their school life. The sometimes unspoken questions my students carry begin to formulate and sometimes be answered in Eurythmy. One example is: how are we dealing with the almost daily news of yet another catastrophe?

I find myself sharing insights with my students in an age appropriate way, and they in turn contribute sincerely their own meaningful insights. I learn a lot from them.

Our room is not very large, so the maximum count of students to comfortably move with is 12 or 14. That said, I like to work with large forms so that ideally all can be moving together.

All Eurythmy forms, in particular the “Auftakte” as well as the pedagogical forms, circles, stars and beyond can offer the growing child a framework that supports healthy body and space coordination, and social soul awareness. As an example, The Halleluiah on the crown from has become a much beloved and a cultivated practice at “Steiner.” Especially the 8^th grade students, are often asking for it- it helps them arrive with one another and send good intentions onto realms of life where people are struggling. It gives them a space no other activity does.

All classes love weaving circle forms and when they for example truly unlock the power of a harmonious eight, the room rejoices!

The gratification everyone in the room receives when the forms begin to appear in space and the students experience it, because they make it happen, together with the power of gestures and sound or silence, it always is soul nourishment. While performing eurythmy is a big piece of our work, and the students love to perform, I find that the most important moments happens when we are in a healthy movement space together.

It is for those moments that happen frequently enough that I continue to share my passion and love for eurythmy with teenagers. Eurythmy forms and strengthens their etheric bodies, just like navigating the NYC streets and subway system does in other ways. I think because my students live in this big city they live with forms, orientation and geometry in a very particular way. It would be beyond the scope of this letter to explore these thoughts further right now, but is certainly worth looking into.

Eurythmy has served me in my life tremendously well, and I am honored to be sharing my findings with my students, and their parents, who also practice with me. The spirit of support at Steiner also became evident at our Eurythmy flashmob for Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim, in April 2019. The whole city was buzzing about Hilma (see the photo of my students on the subway track) and I went several times with classes to see the exhibit. On some visits we “spontaneously” positioned ourselves along the spiral rotunda and did Eurythmy, being joined equally spontaneously by other Guggenheim visitors…. This was the answer to my inner question: Will a flashmob for Hilma work?  My students were on fire about the idea, as were my colleagues, parents and friends, and of course so was Hilma, and together we made it happen – it was remarkable!

Perhaps from a distance NYC may seem like a crazy place….and while that is also true, I experience this city and school filled with creative potential and willingness to make amazing and unusual experiences happen. As a community of colleagues and families we manage to create a space where learning and social life can indeed flourish and the arts hold a cherished and valued place.

I am happy to report that Eurythmy is well and thriving at the Rudolf Steiner School! Should you find yourself on a trip to New York City, I welcome you to visit our school, just reach out! aspadea@steiner.edu

By Leonore Russell
One of the first questions parents ask when they come to learn about a Waldorf school for their child is about the movement art taught in most Waldorf schools: eurythmy. What is it? Why does my child have to do this? After many years of working as a eurythmy teacher and in the administration of a Waldorf schools, I find myself still answering these questions. Yet the answers grow and develop as the years pass and new knowledge both in science and education are bring light to bear on the questions.
First of all, what is eurythmy? It is a movement art, living in the family of movement arts such as mime and ballet yet standing midway between these two arts. It shares meaning and gesture with mime, yet it is married to sound rather than objects or recognizable actions, and shares the moving to music and words with dance, but seeks to follow the invisible movement within sound rather than move to it or juxtapose itself against it. It is the expression of the human soul through gesture and movement.

A student once asked: “who thought this up?” after seeing the same gestures in the great art of the past.  He had stumbled on the truth of the expressive gestures that artists such as Giotto and Michelangelo had mastered in their paintings. In the early part of the twentieth century Rudolf Steiner pointed us towards these gestures to learn their meaning and to find a new art of human movement. He worked with first a young girl and then an ever growing group of interested artists to develop this new art of movement. Continue reading →

Eurythmy developed from its beginnings in 1912 with Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. It occupies a unique position amongst the arts of movement, as it grows out of the lawfulness of speech and music. The profession of eurythmy teacher is practiced by men as well as women. Continue reading →

By Robin W. M. Mitchell

At times, the question arises, “What is eurythmy, and why is it so important in Waldorf education?”  In an attempt to answer these questions, I started by looking at a number of definitions of education. I have synthesized them into the following synopsis:

“Education brings about a state of knowledge and of aesthetic moral development, resulting from a learning process which develops skills needed by a person wishing to take charge of his or her own life.”

Encompassed in this definition, we can find attributes that go much further than a summation of known facts, held in memory.  Knowledge may be in the foreground – but it is a form of knowledge that finds its validity in relationship to living one’s life and making one’s own decisions. Skills are also mentioned.  Skills require practice so that they may be at the service of the individual who has taken the trouble to acquire them.  Aesthetic development unfolds the ability to recognize beauty when one meets it – and the lack of beauty as well.  On a different level, where knowledge presupposes the ability to look at facts as objective realities, aesthetic development presupposes that one has an inner life with a capacity for discernment.  In the sphere of moral consciousness, we can see a need for ones objective qualities to meet ones subjective qualities in harmony.  To sum it all up, we might say that education has to do with a journey into the knowledge of oneself in relationship to everything around us in the world.

Continue reading →

How can Waldorf Education Meet the Needs of Children?

Five lectures given at the West Coast Teachers Conference in Fair Oaks, California, February 15-19, 1998 by Michaela Glöchler, M. D.

Rudolf Steiner College Press

9200 Fair Oaks Boulevard

Fair Oaks, Ca. 95628

916-961-8729

Fax: 916-961-3032

bookstore@steinercollege.edu

ISBN 0-945803-48-6

101 pages Paperback

$15.95

Copyright 2000 Reprint 2003

Permission to reprint kindly granted by Dr. Glocker. This excerpt is taken from pages 80-82.

Of course you could experience during the eurythmy performance and also through your own eurythmy study how important and differentiated and delicate the study of eurythmy is. You can experience, for example, that if a teacher does something like this, that this is not a eurythmy E. It is just a nice movement, isn’t it? But a eurythmy A, a eurythmy E, is something very different. It is an etheric stream. And if you start to practice often and learn from Rudolf Steiner that our heart is the source of the etheric forces and that all the vowels have their origin in the heart region, you will know that you need first to pull back all your movement capacity, to bring it into silence, to bring it into pure intention, and feel that this impulse is something which has no weight but has intensity. The etheric quality has no physical weight. It flows purely in time and not in space. Our physical body with its substance and weight reveals itself in three-dimensional space. Our etheric body lives only in time. It’s a system of circulations, of rhythms, of all those life cycles. It is a system of developmental laws living in time. It’s the basis for the streaming changing of evolution, and this together with the physical gives what we see as the physical-etheric constitution of plants, animals, and human beings. When you study eurythmy, you have to enter into this realm of the etheric and create even physical movements out of this etheric source. You have to study for years to come into this attitude and to be able to bring movements out of the heaviness of the physical body and into this etheric lightness. And one can’t do this in eurythmy without training. I did not mean that the class teacher should replace the eurythmy teacher at school. It can’t be. Eurythmy is something very special.

Continue reading →

By Robin Mitchell

Lifetime learning requires challenges that move us out of our comfort zones, no matter how old we are.  As we grow, we stretch our present limits to embrace new abilities, gaining confidence as we develop. This is as true for older people as it is for the young. When we are at school, we know that we are constantly learning new things and discovering new skills that add to the quality of our lives, thus adding to the sum of experience that establishes our relationship to the world around us – as well as to each other.

We look into the world and discover ourselves…

We look into ourselves and discover the world.

This is also true for older people who have been in the school of life for so much longer. Only, the challenges are rather different from those that face the young. Younger people tend to look forwards with an optimism that can transform ideas into ideals – and ideals into deeds that can change the course of life. Older people have already been in that situation – therefore they can look back and evaluate the ideals that have filled their lives, the decisions made and acted upon and the outcomes of those choices. Younger people are often unsure – or even unaware – of their abilities. Older people can look back upon a lifetime during which they exercised their abilities – or did not. The question arises: To whom does a young person turn when asking questions about life – its challenges, its tasks, its requirements and its values?

Continue reading →

Artistic and Therapeutic Eurythmy speak for themselves. What about Educational Eurythmy?

By Mary Watson

The most important educational task of eurythmy is to aid the incarnating processes of the growing child, in order that these processes may take place in the most harmonious way possible; a very lofty ideal, but nevertheless one toward which every eurythmist strives.

Plunge into the world

These processes change and assume different forms in the various stages of childhood. The very young child lives very much in his surroundings; he is ‘at one’ with the world, and it is easy for him to transform himself, through the imaginative pictures of stories, into animals, plants, beings. In these early years he must plunge into and experience to the full the world around him. He must unite himself with every tree, bird and stone, immerse himself in the rhythms of the created world. At this time the eurythmy teacher can lead the class through a Paradise, where they can learn to know the created and the creator.

Between the seventh and ninth year, the child will then begin to stand back and observe the world. He will begin to separate himself from it in his experience and even begin to be critical of things around him. The closer his unity with the world before this time, the more his powers of reverence and wonder will be enhanced during these years of separation from the whole. During this time the spiral form becomes very important in the eurythmy lesson, where the child spirals into his own inner  world, and out once again to the outer world. Repetition of this form with
various verses strengthens the individuality in its first awakening.

Continue reading →

By Robin W. M. Mitchell

At times, the question arises, “What is eurythmy, and why is it so important in Waldorf education?” In an attempt to answer these questions, I started by looking at a number of definitions of education. I have synthesized them into the following synopsis: “Education brings about a state of knowledge and of aesthetic moral development, resulting from a learning process which develops skills needed by a person wishing to take charge of his or her own life.” Continue reading →