Esoteric Dance and Spiritual Transformation: The Gurdjieff Movements PDF

Preview

Summary

Esoteric Dance and Spiritual Transformation The Gurdjieff Movements Carole M. Cusack University of Sydney Esoteric Dance Systems • Esoteric systems of musical education and dance proliferated in the early twentieth century. The former Theosophist and founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner (1861-19...

Description

Esoteric Dance and Spiritual Transformation The Gurdjieff Movements Carole M. Cusack University of Sydney

Esoteric Dance Systems •

•

•

•

•

Esoteric systems of musical education and dance proliferated in the early twentieth century. The former Theosophist and founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) in 1912, introduced Eurythmy in 1912. Steiner and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze established headquarters for the teaching of their systems, Steiner at Dornach in Switzerland, and JaquesDalcroze at Hellerau in Germany. Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958) developed ‘movement choir’, based on his spiritual beliefs, which were derived from Theosophy, Sufism, and Hermeticism. Peter Deunov (1854-1944), a Bulgarian teacher of esoteric Christianity (educated in the USA from 1888-1895), devised Paneurhythmy (‘supreme cosmic rhythm’) in the 1920s. The Ballets Russes’ The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky with a score by Igor Stravinsky, debuted in Paris in 1913.

Gurdjieff, Music & Dance • •

•

•

Gurdjieff was deeply interested in music, theatre, and art. When P. D. Ouspensky met Gurdjieff in 1915, he spoke of ‘sacred dances’ seen in Eastern temples. He was working on a ballet (which was never performed), The Struggle of the Magicians, in which the heroine Zeinab and her suitor Gafar, are caught in the struggle of the White and Black Magicians. With Thomas de Hartmann, a classical composer, Gurdjieff composed hundreds of pieces of music (both for Movements and piano music). Late in his life he improvised on the harmonium. He styled himself ‘a rather good teacher of temple dances’.

Gurdjieff’s Teaching in Brief • Law of Three (Triamazikamno) which can be expressed as affirming-denying-reconciling. • Law of Seven (Heptaparaparshinokh). • Humans are Three-Brained Beings (the mind, the body and the emotions). • Humans are asleep, and need to awaken and grow a Soul (kesdjan or astral body). • Those with no soul become food for the Moon. • Teaching methods: writings, music, physical labour, inner exercises, and sacred dances.

Gurdjieff Introduces the Movements •

•

•

The ‘sacred dances’ or ‘Movements’ were introduced by G. I. Gurdjieff (c. 1866-1949) in 1919, in Tiflis (Tblisi), the site of the foundation of his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. The proximate cause of this new technique has been hypothesised 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 had become pupils of Gurdjieff in 1919, and it was her Dalcroze class that Gurdjieff first taught Movements to.

Movements Demonstration

Gurdjieff and ‘Objective Art’ • “While the movements were being performed, the aim was not to create a work of art. I would add that not one of the dancers ever thought of himself as an artist; not one considered himself a specialist in sacred dance ... Gurdjieff had a very lofty idea of what he called objective art. One of its characteristics is that it has the same effect on everyone ... It’s not the ambition of those who study these movements to create a work of this sort; but in the course of their practice, sometimes a very special phenomenon occurs. It may happen that everything comes together so perfectly, with such a shared understanding, that their differences disappear. One doesn’t notice one or another person any more ... this possibility opens only at moments” (Pauline de Dampierre, ‘Sacred Dance: The Search for Conscious Harmony. Interview with Jacques le Vallois’, American Theosophist, 73.5 [1985], 180).

The Enneagram Movements •

•

•

Johanna Petsche’s experience of learning the Movement called Enneagram 5 was of the relative simplicity of walking around the circumference of the Enneagram, compared to the complexity of learning the six turns that were completed when crossing the inner lines, with no variation, despite the fact that the ‘lines joining points 2 and 8, and 7 and 1 are longer than the other lines’ (Petsche 2016: 68). She states that moving through the Enneagram breaks mechanical modes of thinking, and when participants return to their original points on the periphery ‘conscious effort, attention and observation are ... forced on practitioners during this process; there is a sense that something has been achieved and developed’ (Petsche 2016: 70). Petsche concludes that Enneagram 5 clearly references the two fundamental principles of Gurdjieff, the Laws of Three and Seven. In the Law of Three the reconciling force nullifies the opposition of affirming and denying, and the Law of Seven governs all processes in the universe.

Inner Work: Contemplative Exercises •

•

•

In a meeting in New York in 1930, transcribed in Life is Real, Gurdjieff describes other exercises. One is the ‘preparatory’ exercise, which involves announcing aloud ‘I am’ while concentrating attention on parts of the body. A reverberation or vibration can proceed in the person’s ‘solar plexus’ if the person is ‘a real man’ (or in other words has developed their essence or ‘real I’). For beginners, repeating these words and imagining this reverberation occurring is a start for development. A person can also cure parts of the body with this exercise; for example, cure a headache by concentrating the reverberation on the head. Another exercise involves being sincere within the group. He also mentions in this meeting an exercise that he was carrying out while giving the meeting. He was intentionally directing his attention on his foot while looking at a pupil. His attention was divided into two equal parts. The first part was conscious of his breathing, where he felt that a greater part of the air he inhaled passed through his lungs and left the body, while the lesser part remained in the lungs and spread through the organism. The second part of his attention centred on his ‘head brain’ for the purpose of observing processes proceeding in it. Then, he directed this second part of his attention to the solar plexus, allowing what arose in the head brain to flow into the solar plexus, remembering the whole self (Life Is Real, pp. 140-141).

Feeding off Energies to Develop a Soul •

•

•

Frank Sinclair says Gurdjieff told a Movements class, ‘At this time [around Christmas], many people pray. Their prayers go only so far up in the atmosphere. You can suck these into yourself; this force’ (Sinclair, Benefit, p. 125). Martin Benson, an early pupil of Gurdjieff, had said that after his 1924 car accident G went to cafés frequented by prostitutes to ‘feed’ off their vibrations. Gurdjieff told him, ‘Go to church, Benson, and steal. Their prayers will not reach God. Steal them’ (Sinclair, Benefit, p. 146). Sinclair says that Louise March and his then future wife Beatrice also recall his injunction at the Wellington Hotel on Christmas Day of 1948 to go out and “draw in,” “steal,” or “suck in” the energies being poured out “by millions” of people in prayer. Louise March gave her recollection of this exercise as, ‘I wish give real Christmas present. Imagine Christ. Somewhere in space is.” Mr. Gurdjieff forms an oval with both his hands. ‘Make contact, but to outside, periphery. Draw from there, draw in, I. Settle in you, Am. Do every day. Wish to become Christ. Become. Be’ (Sinclair, Benefit, 230-231).

Preliminary Conclusions •

•

• Many thanks for listening to me

It is clear that the Movements, the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann music, and the inner exercises were all directed at a single aim; the development of a higher-beingbody (an astral or kesdjan body) that would survive the death of the coarse material body that humans were born with. Gurdjieff’s anthropology is unique in his insistence on everything being material, and his insistence that humans are not born with a soul, but must attain one. Dancing is a means to grow a soul, and is thus esoteric practice of a most serious kind....