The Section for the Performing Arts is supported by the Collegium of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum and the Section's advisory groups for the Eurythmy, Music, Speech Formation and Drama and Puppetry Departments, which are active in advising and supporting the Section in all matters.
Eurythmy
This art of movement, founded by Rudolf Steiner, makes visible the soul-spiritual substance of language and music, which lives hidden in laws in words and sounds. It can be experienced as a stage art; it is taught in schools, applied as curative eurythmy in the therapeutic field, and is effective in the social sphere in the most diverse areas of life.
Speech formation and Acting
Speech formation is an art of speaking that is practised as a stage art in recitation and drama, in readings, in speaking for eurythmy, as well as in the area of literary stages or literary theatre.
Based on anthroposophy, they are contemporary spiritual arts that were developed from 1903 onwards beginning with the collaboration of the spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner and the reciter Marie von Sievers. They continue a long tradition and have been further developed for the application areas of performance art, pedagogy and therapy. The starting point is the linguistic-artistic interpretation of literature (epic, lyric, drama) in recitation, declamation and conversation on the basis of an individual and authentic artistic statement and taking into account the laws of language and poetry such as sound, rhythm, word-breath gesture, content, style and the like.
Music
Rudolf Steiner's indications and statements on the "melody in the single tone", the "necessary expansion of the tonal system", or on the "intervals", are concerned with a deeper experience, i.e. with penetrating into the qualities and active forces of the basic elements of music, in which the spiritual-cosmic can then be expressed and have an effect. Steiner's suggestions and hints for a renewal of singing and instrumental playing or new instruments are also to be seen in this context. In all this, one prerequisite is complete individualisation - i.e. only that which the individual musician has appropriated himself from these objectively existing elements has any weight. In the decades after Rudolf Steiner's death, numerous musicians and composers have engaged in what could be called an anthroposophical musical impulse in many different ways - in singing and instrument making, in composing and music theory, in therapy and pedagogy as well as in music for religious worship.
Puppetry
Hardly anyone can escape the magic of moving figures and puppets. On strings, moved by a mechanism or by hand, the little creatures of art are reminiscent of a time in the past when human fate still hung on the divine umbilical cord in a comparable way and listened to the divine counsel. In order to bring these moods into imaginations that touch every child and every adult, workshops and a lively mutual exchange between the puppeteers take place in conferences and courses.