Dancing Backwards
Dancing Backwards was performed by the Word Sisters in the Living Arts Centre, Mt Barker as part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, 2019.
Review by Dawn Langman
Without hail or tempest
Blue sword or flame
Love came so lightly
I knew not that he came.
Excerpt from ‘Love’s Coming’ by John Shaw Nielson.
These words come to mind when I recall sitting in the audience, washed by wave after wave of gentle breath, of sounds, of life experience transmuted into shifting veils of beauty, mutual support, and respect for each other’s journey: all infused with the chaste energies of divine creative powers. These are the Planetary Beings who bestow on human souls the spectrum and rhythms of our inner life through the cycles that unfold in our biographies and how these are channelled through the shaping gestures of the vowels.
A member of the audience expressed it afterwards: ‘Thanks – after the assault in shopping malls, the flight from mindless noise that assails us everywhere, the clenched cells and muscles of defences erected so long ago that we forget how tightly we must brace ourselves to sally out into a world grown alien – for the sheer relief of finding sanctuary: a healing space, where nothing has designs on us, lays claim to our sensations, manipulates our souls, but where instead we are invited to an altar on which is placed nothing but the truthful offering of our humanity.’
In mainstream theatre practice it is not new to create performances from personal biography. Within the world of Anthroposophy, however, striving to reach the highest goals of what is human, we have tended to resist the sharing of our journeys, fearing that if we expose our weaknesses they will be judged as failings. The Word sisters courageously explore transforming the substance of their own biographies into art through the healing power of the Word. This marks a new step in the evolution of the speech impulse arising out of Rudolf and Marie Steiner’s work. There was nothing self indulgent; I felt only reverence and dignity in celebrating what it takes to be a human being.
Rudolf Steiner indicated that practicing the arts builds organs of perception and capabilities that will allow us to increasingly participate in the conscious completion of the greatest work of art of all: the creation of the human being. In addition to the traditional arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry and dance (now in its new form of eurythmy), human beings will evolve the seventh art. Steiner does not name this but many have felt he is referring to the social art.
I sensed how each performer was deeply engaged in the process of transforming her own life into art. At the same time the work of the ensemble was a beautiful example of the social art; each supporting the other, each so different and with different strengths and capacities, yet each one utterly respected for their place within the whole. I know that the next chapter of their research is centred round the consonants and starry beings of the Zodiac. I hope that I shall have a chance to see and hear the fruits.
Blessings on this significant pioneering work!