The Dionysian Course III

After Rudolf Steiner had finished his wonderful explanation of the energy and peace dance, he suddenly asked, almost a little suspiciously, whether I knew what this rhythm – short, short, long – was called; he also inquired about my preliminary work. Fortunately, this question gave me the opportunity to tell him that in my search for literature on Greek dance, I had come across a book by a German philologist, Christian Kirchhoff, Dramatische Orchestik der Hellenen (Dramatic Orchestration of the Hellenes). Kirchhoff had come to the conclusion that the Greeks had no need to write down dance instructions because they read all their movements from the text. He demonstrates this thoroughly and in detail, but only for the movements of the feet; he talks about the different metrical rhythms, especially rising and falling meters, about short syllables preceding rising rhythms and long syllables following falling rhythms, and also shows that each god was invoked in his own rhythm, and so on. “That's all very good, and you can definitely adopt it,” said Dr. Steiner. Greek meters are about long and short syllables, whereas in German it is more about stressed and unstressed syllables or high and low tones. Nevertheless, we should retain this long-short pattern in our feet, but accompany the steps with arm movements. "The essential thing about a rising rhythm – and the iamb is the rising rhythm par excellence – is really that the iamb can be traced back to the javelin throw. This means that it reaches its goal – clearly outlined in front of it in the outside world – by the shortest route. The iamb can be perceived as a leap into life. And the falling rhythm, the trochee? They really called it the step of Mercury. He, the messenger of the gods, comes down to earth from heaven to the people, but behind him stands the fullness of divine wisdom and grace. And from this abundance he brings them joys and sorrows, tasks and disappointments, as the gods have decreed. And driven by this abundance, he plunges from heaven to earth with such vehemence that he has to “slow down.” And so this powerful length and the brevity that catches the excessive momentum are created. The Greeks often even depicted Mercury as limping. Demonstrate both to your students later. Take a stick for the iambus, show how it pushes forward purposefully, and show, perhaps by jumping from a chair into the room, that you need this fading and lingering brevity. Feel it for yourself and try to teach your students to feel how the iambus leads them brightly and courageously out into the outside world, but that the trochee drives them forward through a fateful impulse acting behind them from the spiritual world.