Youth Movement - Part Two

This summer, at the Whitehorse Conference, I enjoyed a performance evening by Marjorie Taliano-Nordas. Marjorie spoke with affection and gratitude about her first eurythmy lessons with Christa Kuehn in Montreal. She is now the Director of the Eurythmy School in Oslo, and feels an enduring relationship to Canada.

Lori Scotchko, also from Canada, is currently studying at the Oslo school, and has promised an article about her experiences at this excellent school. I have also heard recently from Marie-Eve Piche, who is studying in Spring Valley. (Marc-Antoine Brodeur is studying in the UK, and you can see his earlier post here.)

It's wonderful that they are using the Internet (email and blog postings) to reach out. Although each of us often feels isolated, it's inspiring to re-discover tha we are part of an international community. We have so much to learn from each other, and this is a great way to start.

Grasshopper Productions - Ontario Tour

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

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.

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...

Feeling Our Feet

Here is an excerpt from an interesting review of a book about barefoot running in The Toronto Star. The author has done extensive research and learned that athletic shoes are doing more harm than good, and says we should be paying much more attention to natural foot movements...

"LEONARDO DA VINCI observed that the human foot is 'a work of art and a masterpiece of engineering.'

Each foot/ankle combo contains 26 bones (both sides comprise one-quarter of the bones of the human body), 33 joints and more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments. Thousands of nerve endings also make our feet extremely sensitive – one of the reasons torturers throughout history have whipped the soles of prisoners' feet.

It's amazing that our feet can sustain the constant shock of walking, let alone running. Especially since, according to some scientists, we've been wrecking our feet. Our shoes, whether stilettos or cushioned, spring-loaded, gel-padded, air-bubble-infused sneakers, make us walk in a way that is not natural for our feet, studies say.

Watch a baby take those first steps. There's a natural way we all walk, with short strides, landing softly on our heels or the balls of our feet before our toes spring us forward.
Now walk in your best running shoes. You'll likely take longer strides and, due to the padding in the heels, strike down harder, unable to roll to the side because of the thick sole and inflexibility of the shoe. This rigid base also stops your toes from springing you forward, so your legs have to work harder.

We're also not feeling what's really going on with our feet. High shock-absorbing footwear prohibits our sensitive plantar surface from sending pain and pressure impulses that would naturally allow us to alter our gait to reduce stress.

"There's a benefit to barefoot running, I really think there is, no doubt," says Dr. Jack Taunton, the chief medical officer for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Taunton, director of the Allan McGavin Sports Medicine Centre at the University of British Columbia, has conducted studies on injured runners and basketball players that show with less support, the body heals faster. The foot and ankle are forced to build muscles that support the ailing area.
It's just the old adage, he says: 'If you don't use it, you lose it.'"

Introducing Pascal Jouneau

Bonjour,
Je suis Pascal JOUNEAU, (formé à l'école de La haye en Hollande/ PaysBas) eurythmiste au Québec dans les deux écoles:
* Les enfants de la terre à Waterville près de Scherbrooke et
* L'Eau Vive à Victoriaville.

Je suis aussi eurythmiste Thérapeute formé en Suisse.

"I am Pascal Jouneau. I did my training in The Hague, and am now working in Quebec. I am teaching eurythmy in two schools: Les enfants de la terre in Waterville near Sherbrooke
and L'Eau Vive in Victoriaville. I am also a therapeutic eurythmist trained in Switzerland."

Eurythmy Association UK

Stories and information about eurythmy in the United Kingdom are available at their website. You can also find a copy of their current newsletter on the site.