Epiphany Of The Body

“Eurythmy encourages new ways of seeing,” says Liz Smith, a freelance Eurythmy Practitioner.  “As human beings we don’t only see with our eyes – we also have other faculties of perception – and eurythmy helps us awaken and develop these other forms of awareness.

“In the process I ran at the Biennial, I wanted to explore the qualitative differences of space; between how we see when we move forwards, and how we see when we move backwards. Moving backwards is a bit like walking in the dark: you use an inner sensing and become more aware of yourself when you can’t see what you are doing. In a sense, our eyes blind us to other forms of awareness. The eurythmical element comes through the expanded awareness that one experiences through exercising these inner faculties in movement.”

This includes sensing the other; sensing the space around and between us; and becoming very present in what we are doing in the moment. It helps free us from the assumptions that we usually make and awakens us to what is.

 “When it comes to social processes, eurythmy can bring a new dimension to our work,” says Liz, launching into the subject with the controlled passion of a daredevil diver about to launch into the air off a high rock above a deep pool. “There’s listening with the whole body. Just think of what that does in terms of consciousness. It makes the space between people very substantial. It helps us connect with the other. It fills the space between us with consciousness. It makes us more self-aware. More aware of our own centre, and thus more aware of the whole.

“Working with three dimensions in all four directions, using more than just our five senses, we are not limited to the physicality of movement.”

Eurythmy is not just physical, says Liz, it is both inner and outer movement. We are not bound to our physical movement. We may move physically in one direction but inwardly in the opposite direction and eurythmy makes this inner intention and countermovement visible in space. Through eurythmy, we are able to connect with movement that is already there. We consciously enter and make visible the streams of movement that are all around us. We create the movement, and then the movement moves us.

It turns out that Liz doesn’t just do eurythmy: she has a particular approach that she calls social eurythmy. Through group exercises in social eurythmy, social laws are demonstrated. A good example is one’s relationship to space and time.

“In my classes I usually start off with moving purely physically, and then slowly ask participants to start paying attention, which then changes the nature of the movement. The movement – and the moment – becomes filled with consciousness. You can actually see the consciousness entering the movement. So it is a way of becoming more conscious.”
Becoming conscious in this way of where you are and how you are moving in relation to others can have an enormous impact on your sense of space and time. From feeling crowded and rushed, space expands and time slows down.

“Awareness creates more space and time,” says Liz. “And this enables you to see dynamic relationships in movement and patterns emerging out of what initially looks like chaos.”  An important ability in relation to the social processes that OD practitioners work with.

“Walk your own straight line,” Liz might tell her group who are arranged in a circle, “Now contract the circle.” 

When we walk a straight line we see only a straight line.  When we contract a circle we see the circle. Through a shift in attention, a change of focus, we see differently.
It’s exercises like these that show us that what we see is often what we are looking for. What we see depends on how we see. How we see reveals what we see.

“So, Liz,” I ask, completely baffled by all this, although a part of me does seem to get it, somehow, in a way that I don’t clearly understand. “What does social eurythmy actually do?”

“ Eurythmy takes social process out of the realm of talking about it and instead reveals it in space so that you can start to work with it. It is, literally, a seeing of process: an essential thing for practitioners to be able to do.

“And it is not just the one process. You may be doing something, but then you realise that other things are actually happening as well. One process may cause other processes to happen; simultaneously your process is part of other processes that are already happening. It is helpful to see these multiple processes in action.”

“We are always concentrating on what is around us, but now I have been brought back to my centre,” said a participant in one of Liz’s workshops.
Explains Liz: “The relationship between the centre and the periphery is in constant interplay, and in eurythmy we are always holding the tension between the two.

“Eurythmy does not consist of arbitrary or random movements. It is based on the fundamental principles of living process.  It is based on the word; on speech and the difference between vowels and consonants, making what lives in speech visible through gesture, movement and rhythm. It is also done to music, making all the musical elements visible through movement, and we are – or we can become – the instrument.

“It is a discipline of practice. It’s not so much about expressing personal feelings - as other forms of dance might do – it’s participating in something more archetypal. Working with archetypes such as straight/curved; contraction/expansion; movement /countermovement, and finding a balance. Eurythmy is the art of balance.

“It’s not only about how we move: it’s also about how we see. In our normal everyday state we see outwards, from the centre. But it’s when we start seeing in both directions: from the centre outwards, and also from the periphery back to the centre, that things begin to change.”

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