A BEAUTIFUL, HARMONIZING DANCE
Eurythmy, the Dance of the Living Word is a gentle, enlivening, energizing form of movement, offering a non-aerobic, low-impact, fluid bodily experience. It helps develop a new consciousness of spatial orientation and posture, and fosters awareness of our subtle energies -- our life forces, emotions, and the guiding force of the I AM consciousness. Practitioners attest to its peaceful and harmonizing powers, and the life-changing possibilities it offers.
A MODERN SACRED DANCE.
Eurythmy was envisioned in the early 20th century by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, a visionary scientist of the spirit, whose mission it was to forge a fully conscious path of the spirit for the Western human being. Eurythmy is the dance of the awakened spirit, which knows its own temple to be born out of the divine creative word, the Logos.
Eurythmy’s roots stretch deep into ancient mythological history, when priests and priestesses sang the meaning of the world into our dreaming consciousness at the dawn of earth time. Through all the cultures of all ages,we have danced our relationship to the stars, the planets, and natures. Our dances have been dances of celebration, worship, mourning, praise, and art. In the temples of ancient cultures, in the halls of the kings and the bards, the dancing human race spoke back to the Creator.
The stars and the planets which reign in the sky find their reflections on the earth, in nature and in the human body. Their signature can be found in all phenomena of the world. The human body is a perfect holographic image of the macrocosmos, and the seeking human being can come to self-realization by awakening to consciousness in this sacred temple. Everything we do with this body brings the cosmic word into movement. When we dance with temple awareness, the body is sanctified.
In Eurythmy, great poetry and great music become incarnate, as we experience how the words of the poet and the sounds of the music become visible through our choreography. The open throated A becomes a joyful opening of the arms and the heart; the warm rounded O becomes a loving embrace; the sinuous S is a slithering snake gesture. Words, built of sounds, become visible as they sculpted in the auric field by the dancing human body. Experience Eurythmy, the Dance of the Living Word, and know yourself to be surrounded by the love of the Creator, speaking through your limbs in a new way and contributing the the building of the future world.
A SOMATIC APPROACH TO LANGUAGE
Eurythmy, the Dance of the Living Word, offers you a somatic approach to language. It moves the awareness of the word out of the mere conceptual level of your head into your greater mind, your heart, your limbs. Every phoneme has its own iconic meaning, which it expresses through the way it sounds. In Eurythmy we attune ourselves to the archetypal powers of pure sound. That which we normally process auditorily becomes a somatic experience. We learn to feel the crispness of the plosive sounds, the soft flow of the velar sounds, the sinuous nature of the sibilant sounds. Most amazingly of all, we learn to feel that these sounds are intimately close to our own hearts and souls. When we speak the sound “ahh,” we open ourselves in wonder, and when we speak the sound “ohh,” we feel as if we go out to embrace something outside of ourselves. When these are practiced as somatic experiences, we deepen our own feelings of wonder and love. In short, we learn how speech affects us on a bodily level, and we move in a genuine relationship to speech.
The Dance of the Living Word is an invaluable experience for anyone who works with Language. Writers, poets, speech therapists and art therapists will find it affords them a tremendous deepening of their professions. Eurythmy has also found tremendous applications in the field of education, particularly in the Waldorf Schools, where it is a required subject from Kindergarten through twelfth grade. A well-crafted curriculum offers children somatic experiences of language appropriate for all age levels.
