About Eurythmy Trainings

About Eurythmy Trainings

Thank you to everyone, around the globe, for your enthusiastic support of this website. I’ve received over a hundred messages of thanks and gratitude, and they warm my heart. I hope that slowly but surely we all together will be able to grow a new culture of eurythmy for the planet!

                  A few of you who have written have asked if this curriculum can be the equivalent of a partial eurythmy training. The short answer is: no. This website is created to give you the inspiration and the possibility of creating your own eurythmy practice— Eurythmy as a Personal Practice. My students and my patients have been telling me for many years that their eurythmy practice makes such a difference in their lives. This was the inspiration for me to look for a way to make it possible for people around the world to do eurythmy at home, even if they never meet a eurythmy teacher. I also want to make it possible for people who have taken a few classes to be able to remember what they have done in class.  A eurythmy training, however, is a completely different level of work and commitment. A eurythmy training asks everything of its students, and changes their lives completely. A classical eurythmy training takes a minimum of four years. That is: four years of a full-time training, five days a week, 5-8 hours a day, 9-10 months a year. A eurythmy training is rigorous as a training in a musical conservatory, as an art degree, as a pre-med major.

                  If you did a full-time training, you would typically have one hour-long (or more) class on speech eurythmy and one hour-long (or more) class on tone eurythmy each day. You would also have equally long practice periods for each of them, each day. In addition, you would have classes to work on rod exercises and moving forms. And then an earnest student will continue the practice at home, working for an hour or two in the evening as well.

                  Then again, you would have classes on all the adjunct subjects. You would have classes in the humanity’s, inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s work, including the Nature of the Human Being, the Evolution of Consciousness, and Philosophy of Freedom. You would also have anatomy and physiology, studying how the human body works and how it moves. You would have wonderful opportunities to immerse yourself in the artistic history of humanity, including studies of sculpture and painting from the ancient history to the present day. You would have classes in painting, speech and articulation, drama, singing, poetics and music theory. All these are the basis of a very solid and well-rounded liberal arts education.

                  But the most important work is done in the eurythmy classes themselves. They begin with the basic warm-up exercises that I have gathered in this online curriculum here. Of course, the work is much more intense when done in a group than when done alone, because students learn to work not only with the personal etheric but with the shared etheric field of everyone working together.

                  By the end of the first year, you would have worked so intensely that your physical body would be able to move with fluid grace. The rod exercises, three-fold walking, contraction/expansion, and spatial exercises will have already begun to work into your whole constitution so you no longer move your body mechanically, but begin to move in etheric fields. You would have learned all the vowels and all the consonants, and begun to move your first poems with your classmates. You would also learn the gestures for the tones of the musical scales and been able to do simple pieces by Mozart or Haydn or other early composers.

                  In the subsequent years, you would move increasingly complex poems. You would learn to move poems from different periods: ballads, lyrical, romantic, epic poems. You would eventually learn to move fairy tales and stories. You would learn to move together with your classmates in complex forms, to move in close relationships in duos and trios. In tone eurythmy you would learn gestures for all the whole-tones and half-tones of the musical scales, and could show any scale in movement. You would learn the gestures for musical intervals. You could show all the dynamics of music, and make any piece of music visible. You would progress from simple 16- or 32-bar pieces of music to elaborate symphonies. With luck, you would even work with a chamber orchestra, learning to move with your classmates to an ensemble of different instruments. And you would discover a composition from a master composer to do as your graduation solo.

                  In your growth, you would not only become more graceful. Year by year, you would find your consciousness growing. You would find yourself becoming sensitive to every sound and color. You would learn to open your inner soul to be able to listen deeply to the world and to express it authentically through gestures. You would learn to think with your body as much as through your head. The changes you would go through in a eurythmy training are more profound than a lay person can imagine.

                  And you would also struggle! As you and your classmates work so closely together, you affect each other like sandpaper, struggling, sometimes resenting, sometimes back-biting, but ultimately helping each other—usually unconsciously—to let go of bad habits of thinking and feeling, and learning to become less judgmental, more forgiving. In a eurythmy training, nothing can be hidden! Everything becomes visible, everything counts. In the end, a group of eurythmists must learn to move together with the mutual support of a flock of birds or a school of fish.

                  A eurythmist emerges from the four-year training a changed person. The training gives them the foundation to become a performing artist. Most importantly, it develops a profound artistic sensitivity, which serves as the absolutely essential basis for later becoming a eurythmy therapist or teacher.

                  And so I welcome you to enjoy this website to the fullest, and use it to enter the stream of eurythmy movement. Share some of your enthusiasm with your friends, and invite them to sign up as well and learn some exercises (not merely by copying you, but by listening to the guided words of my lessons). Seek out live classes wherever you can! And then, if you discover that you would like to go deeper with the study of eurythmy, find your way to one of the dozen or so eurythmy trainings in the world! It is an unforgettable journey.