Esoteric Dance and Spiritual Transformation: The Gurdjieff Movements By Carole Cusack

https://www.academia.edu/75134862/Esoteric_Dance_and_Spiritual_Transformation_The_Gurdjieff_Movements In the first half of the twentieth century several esoteric teachers developed dance forms intended to facilitate spiritual transformation. Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner’s Eurythmy was devised in collaboration with his wife Marie von Sivers and Lory Maier-Smits in 1912. After World War I ended on 11 November 1918 Steiner sent a Eurythmy troupe on a European tour to reinvigorate the depleted culture and enrich exhausted souls. George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, the focus of this article, began teaching Movements (‘sacred dances’) in 1919 while in Tiflis (now Tblisi). Jeanne de Salzmann, a teacher of the Dalcroze method, introduced Gurdjieff to her eurhythmics class, and the first demonstration of the Movements was given on 22 June 1919 at the Tblisi Opera House. These dance techniques belong to a spiritual milieu that includes Peter Deunov, Rudolf von Laban and Steiner, and a secular milieu that includes Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, and Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe production of The Rite of Spring (1913) in Paris. This article analyses the transformative spiritual potential of Gurdjieff’s Movements and locates this body-based discipline in the context of his anthropological and soteriological teachings. Wim van Dullemen’s classification of Gurdjieff’s Movements, music, and writings as a Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’) is endorsed. ...