Report from Youth Eurythmy Week in Spring Valley, New York
by Caitlin Palo

Six young women participated in Eurythmy Spring Valley’s first summer Youth Week, traveling from Massachusetts, Oregon, Colorado and California to share their enthusiasm for eurythmy with each other and with the faculty of the School of Eurythmy. The following report was written by Caitlin Palo, a Denver Waldorf School graduate, and was originally published in the Eurythmy Association of North America Newsletter, fall 2004.
The first time the six of us sat down to dinner, we got the “what’s your name” and “where are you from” questions out of the way, and we all agreed that the most exciting thing was to be in Spring Valley to do eurythmy with other people who wanted to do eurythmy. While the three Portlanders, Christa, Ilana and Laura, were lucky to have a performing group as well as their regular classes, and Morgan, from California, had come to the public Summer Eurythmy Week last year, Kimberly and I were taking our first steps into the world of people who actually like eurythmy.
That first dinner was just the beginning of a wonderful week. We had half an hour to eat, meet with our R.A., Mark Menges, and get ready for the performance of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. I’m hesitant to describe that night’s performance only because I’m afraid I’ll overuse the words “wonderful” “exciting” and “marvelous” before I even begin to tell about the workshop itself.
Monday at 9 AM sharp we began our schedule of three hours of class in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. The first day was filled with “aha” moments for me. In speech eurythmy we began almost immediately to work on a piece from the Tao Te Ching. Jennifer led us through the sounds in the piece and explained how the eurythmic movements worked. The sound that was most exciting for me was “ch”, as in “change”. For the non-eurythmists reading this, the movement is a sudden downward movement with the arm into a point with the fingers, and then a soft upward movement as if the hand were in whipped cream or soft-serve frozen yogurt. Jennifer pointed out that change couldn’t happen without that sharp downward point. That movement was like the instigation and then the change moves upward like circles of water. I remember thinking, “This makes so much sense, it is impossible to know whether the sound or the word or the movement came first.”
There were many more moments on the first day, and even more throughout the week. To go into them would neither be possible in this space, nor would it be interesting as so many of the things that captured me were the beauty of the movement combined with the sound.
The final performance was a culmination of these “aha” moments. We performed three speech pieces: a portion of the Tao Te Ching— the T-I-A-O-A-I-T—and Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Our two music pieces were the Rondo Alla Turca from the end of Mozart’s Sonata in A major, and a piece by Mendelssohn that no one could name.
The final performance was more of a demonstration than a performance. We had only worked on the pieces for a week. I was left wanting more eurythmy, more “aha” moments, more laughing with these Waldorfians and eurythmists. I didn’t really want the week to end. Next year, though, I am still in the age-range (all the way up to 21!). So I hope and plan to be back in Spring Valley in the middle of summer with aching feet and sweat in my hair from running and jumping to music in the Large Room. The whole week was wonderful, exciting, and absolutely marvelous.

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