Gabrielle ARMENIER
EURYTHMY Agency
Is Eurythmy a new dance genre?
Eurythmy is an art of movement and of forms.
It lifts the center of gravity from the hips to the human chest, allowing a very different approach to space than movement genres whose anchor are in the hips.
How do the movements of a colour form the eurythmy speech gestures ?
YELLOW DRESS
You are busying yourself around the house, full of anticipation, joy and excitement...
RED VEIL
Suddenly you stop still, overcome by the intense strength of your emotions.
GREEN CHARACTER
And the realization comes: this long-awaited Time is finally here!
A never ceasing source of amazement for me, the eurythmy gestures are paintings in movement! For they are not gestures done by the limbs, and dressed up in pretty costumes.
But the interaction of three colours set into movement by the entire body. It is because Orange-yellow encounters Red and is then frozen by Green that the sound 'T' arises.
How could the practice of Eurythmy be pertinent today?
I recently spoke to a man who works in the Silicon Valley. He asked me “what do you do?”
"An art of movement that addresses the growing lack of movement in our lives."
Oh! Tell me more!
"Well, if you think that human labor all over the States is slowly being replaced by robotics, that Google’s self-driving car opens the door to the automated transport of goods (with transportation, a movement of sorts, being the #1 job in the States) and that more and more people relate to their bodies through repetitive movements on a treadmill, what do you see?”
I went through the four year full time eurythmy training without much philosophical study. I couldn’t move all day, and then think on top of that. But an extraordinary thing happened once I had graduated: with the BA and my later MA thesis, the forms in space which I had moved for four years had become a capacity to think things through.
Eurythmy had trained me to think!
We used not to need to go to the gym: farm worked supported peasant wisdom and industrial labor busied us enough. But as we face a job-less economy, how will we fill our days?
I do not need to say that eurythmy is THE answer to it all, but by doing eurythmy, we can at least train ourselves to think the problem through.
How do you address the question of technique?
In a recent conversation about eurythmy, exercises and whether there is a moment when exercises pass over into art, I found my answer to be:
"That line is at the same time very true, and very risky to define. It's the tug-o-war in music conservatories: are finger exercises necessary to advance your technique? Some teachers swear by them, others want nothing to do with them.
One of the very first things that I work on in eurythmy is to never do a gesture that I do not completely inhabit, that is, never to wave my arms around to acquire a 'better technique'. On the contrary, the more I get into what makes a particular gesture/colour/tone artistic, the more I work upon my Technique in its purity.
So that it is not 'I do lots and lots of exercises, and one day I will get to the Art. But rather: I begin with a gesture that is already fully artistic, no matter my level, and work upon my technique from there'.
What does happen is that after a while the gestures sink so far into the body and into the space around the body that they become something you speak without needing to analyse it; the gestures take on a life of their own, and they are the ones taking you along."