Paper short abstract:

Eurythmy involves performance through movement of musical & voiced sounds, understood by performers to have agency deriving from their etheric interactions with living beings, agency sometimes also put to work to heal. The paper examines anthroposophical roots & practices of such understanding.

Paper long abstract:

As practising anthroposophists, eurythmists work from an understanding that a series of etheric forces underlie and indeed influence all organisms' growth, life energy, development and change; and that sound, musical and voiced, is itself a manifestation of those forces and their relationships with one another. Eurythmists perform both musical and voiced sound through movement and gesture that embody those forces and create opportunity for music to effect social agency. Moreover, since they see such etheric forces as working towards the development (and sometime retardation) of the human body, mind and soul, they also apply their skills to processes of healing. They do that by working with bodily movements that are associated with sounds and music in order to enable the ethers that are the vehicles of sounds and music to work actively on the human subject, thereby healing the body, mind and soul by renewing their mutual harmony. The paper details the kinds of understanding that underpin anthroposophical perspectives on the sounds associated with the various ethers as forces that act as agents of organisms' development and change; and it describes how that understanding is manifested in various eurythmic movement practices. It does that in order to consider an anthroposophical perspective on the multilayered character of musical interactions between the sonic beings alive in music and working through the etheric level to meet the organism; and thereby to understand one contemporary mode whereby the ontology of music is both understood and engaged with.