The Contemporary Context of Gurdjieff's Movements

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 96–122 RELIGION and the ARTS brill.com/rart The Contemporary Context of Gurdjieff’s Movements Carole M. Cusack* University of Sydney Abstract The “sacred dances” or “Movements” were first revealed by George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (c. 1866–1949) in 1919 in Tiflis (Tblisi), the site of the first foundation of his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. The proximate cause of this new teaching technique has been hypothesized to be Jeanne de Salzmann (1889–1990), an instructor of the Eurhythmics method of music education developed by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950). Jeanne and her husband Alexandre met at Jaques-Dalcroze’s Institute at Hellerau in 1913, and became pupils of Gurdjieff in 1919. It was to her Dalcroze class that Gurdjieff first taught Movements. Esoteric systems of dance and musical education proliferated at the time. Gurdjieff was deeply interested in music, theater, and art. When Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky (1878–1947) met him in 1915 he spoke of dances he had seen in Eastern temples, and was working on a never-performed ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians. This article argues that body-based disciplines introduced by esoteric teachers with Theosophically-inflected systems are a significant phenomenon in the early twentieth century and that Gurdjieff’s Movements, while distinct from other dance systems, emerged in the same esoteric melting-pot and manifest common features and themes with the esoteric dance of Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf von Laban, Peter Deunov, and others. Keywords G. I. Gurdjieff – Movements – Rudolf Steiner – Eurythmy – Émile Jaques-Dalcroze – * Thanks are due to my research assistant, Venetia Robertson, who assisted with library searches and note-taking for this article. Gratitude is also due to Donald Barrett, whose patience with my research projects is greatly appreciated. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/15685292-02101004 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 06:57:41AM via free access the contemporary context of gurdjieff’s movements 97 Eurhythmics – Rudolf von Laban – Movement Choir – Peter Deunov – Paneurhythmy – Sergei Diaghilev – Vaslav Nijinsky – The Rite of Spring Music and dance have been integral to humanity’s religious and spiritual cultural production from the earliest times. All peoples throughout history and around the globe have made music with both the human voice and musical instruments, be they as simple as sticks and stones, or as complex as piano and sitar. Music and dance are embodied practices, and are among the cultural products that are accorded the status of “art.” In recent years, scholars have posited a link between the experience of aesthetic pleasure and evolutionary biology, with philosopher Stephen Davies in The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art and Evolution proposing that art and aesthetics optimized the process of evolution for humans (45). Art is closely related to religion in that both are human cultural products, and many artistic forms appear to have originated in, or early on became subordinated to, religious rituals (Cusack, “Religion-Making” 98). Art is difficult to define, but is here understood to be “the expression of any ideal that the artist can realize in plastic form” (Read 23). This links art to religion as both are aspirational cultural products that focus on aesthetic ideals and moral and ethical ideals respectively, and have the effect of driving human optimiza- tion due to their attractive and inspirational qualities (Hanna 284). However, in the post-Reformation West much of the ritual tradition and artistic expression was excised from Protestant Christianity, though it remains influential in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, which retain complex iconography and liturgy (Michalski passim). The Reformation was also a major event in the development of modern Western selfhood, which is individualistic and views self-transformation as the principal, or indeed the only, spiritual aim. The transformation of the West from medieval Catholicism through the Protestant Reformation to the contemporary secular modernity involved, among other things, a relativization of Christianity, which in the Middle Ages was the dominant, and for most people effectively the only, form of religion. Brad Gregory argues that the radical change between the fifteenth century and the present can be mapped across six domains: first, the exclusion of God from explanatory discourses; second, plu- ralism and the relativization of Christian doctrines; third, the ways in which states and legal bodies took control of the institutional churches in modernity; fourth, the subjectivization of morality; fifth, the growth of consumerism and of the notion that “things” will make people happy and fulfilled; and sixth, the secularization of knowledge (1–24). In the eighteenth century, the Enlighten- ment promoted human reason and empirical experience as sources of knowl- Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 96–122 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 06:57:41AM via free access 98 cusack edge superior to religious revelation, and its concomitant emotional revolu- tion, Romanticism, appreciated beauty in the physical world and rejected the doctrine of original sin in favor of the natural goodness and virtue of human beings (Barzun 115–131). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a new kind of society emerged, industrial and secular, and with it a new attitude to physical activity developed. The clergyman, novelist, and social reformer Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) advocated “muscular Christianity,” a manly and physically robust conception of Jesus, which caused sport and physical exercise to become popular. The famous educator Thomas Arnold (1795–1842) developed a model of sports education at Rugby, the elite boys’ boarding school of which he was headmaster. The founder of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), visited Rugby in 1883 and afterwards espoused pedagogie sportive in France (Hill 5). By the early twentieth century “a more wholesome education brought about through … sport and gymnastics, the observance of hygiene, and plenty of fresh air” (Robinson 29) resulted in dance becoming a popular and widespread phenomenon in the modern West. Prior to modernity, dancing took place in formal, courtly contexts, as an accomplishment valued by the upper classes, or as a peasant recreation. Modern dance was quite unlike either of these forms, and focused on “the cult of Nature … the pursuit of harmony, and a kind of primitive simplicity that may be misunderstood as a return to Antiquity. All this was expressed with a greater or lesser degree of emphasis, sentimentality or mysticism” depending on the dancer or teacher (Robinson 29). The experience of alienation in industrial society and the trauma of World War i were two proximate causes of a plethora of body-based disciplines that emerged in the early twentieth century (29–30). These practices were viewed as an antidote to the Christian repression of sexuality and sensuality, and also to the soullessness of mechanized modern life. There were intellectual developments in the early twentieth century which conferred legitimacy on “experiential learning and sensory research,” including the psychology of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Wilhelm Reich, the phe- nomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and existentialist philosophy, and the educational theories of Heinrich Jacoby and John Dewey (Eddy 6).The encoun- ter of East and West in religion and spirituality is another important theme of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When Gurdjieff’s Move- ments are examined the place of Eurythmy, devised in 1912 by the former Theosophist and founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) is cru- cial (Barnes 107–108). Steiner’s movement art, developed in partnership with his second wife Marie von Sivers and (to a lesser extent) the early Eurythmy instructor Lory Maier-Smits, is the first of its kind—an esoteric movement art Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 96–122 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 06:57:41AM via free access the contemporary context of gurdjieff’s movements 99 directed toward spiritual advancement. Admittedly, Jaques-Dalcroze, a teacher at the Geneva Conservatory, had devised and demonstrated the Eurhythmic method of learning music in 1905 and founded school to teach Eurhythmics at Hellerau in Germany in 1910 (Sadler 11–14). This was, however, not an esoteric art, but rather directed to secular music education. Steiner, too, founded an institute, at Dornach near Basel in Switzerland, which is now the headquar- ters of the Anthroposophical Society. This and Jacques-Dalcroze’s foundation (and possibly the various centers of the Theosophical Society) may have influ- enced Gurdjieff’s foundation of the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in 1919. Two other important teachers of esoteric dance are also brought into the context of the Movements. The first is the Bulgarian mystic Peter Deunov (Beinsa Douno, 1864–1944), who created a dance form called Paneurhythmy that is reminiscent of folk circle dancing, from the 1920s onward (Lorimer, Cir- cle of Sacred Dance 15–25).The second is a teacher who is usually situated in the secular history of dance, Rudolf von Laban (1879–1958). He is best known for his physical system Laban Movement Analysis (lma), and Labanotation (or kine- tographie), the notation he devised to record physical activity (Matluck Brooks 30). Laban also founded a school in Switzerland 1913 on Monte Verità (Mount Truth) at Ascona where a colony of “life reformers” including vegetarians, com- munists, and other spiritual seekers had existed since 1900 (Dörr, Rudolf Laban 29). He developed “Movement Choir,” a combination of ensemble dancing and singing based on his spiritual beliefs, which were derived from Hermeticism, Freemasonry, Sufism, and Theosophy (67–69). The final possible influence on the Movements noted here is the 1913 Paris debut of the Ballets Russes’s The Rite of Spring, under Sergei Diaghilev, which was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky with a score by Igor Stravinsky.

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