| Newsletter
3/2003
Review of the Movements Performance at the Occulture Festival,
Brighton 19 July 2003
by Pauline Tiben (one of the performers)
Looking back at our adventure in Brighton in July, for an
adventure it was, a few things come to my mind immediately.
The smiling faces of the garbage collectors in their big
smelly truck as they saw us practising on the parking lot
of the dormitory the day before the performance. We clearly
brightened up their day no end. The half hour before we
went on stage, with our group in a small dressing room,
silent, tense, our faces expressionless. And I can still
see the many unusual looking people on the festival as
we walked around at the venue.
The general atmosphere was good, though, and it occurred
to me that the people who organised this festival really
managed to bring about an attitude of respect
for other people’s convictions. Actually, this is quite a positive step,
in the sense of human development. Gurdjieff himself said once, as one of his
pupils told us, “to bear the presence of others is no small feat, it
is the last thing a man can do”. A true word indeed!
With respect to the performance itself, I kept another of Gurdjieff’s
sayings in mind: ‘The results do not belong to us”. I was happy
(and nervous), however, to see that we had attracted a full house. We later
heard that Colin Wilson, the well-known author in the field of Fourth Way themes,
was in the audience and that it was the first time for him that he saw live
movements!
For reactions of the audience, I will quote from the letter we received from
Justin Hankinson, one of the three organisers of the festival: “Your
performance of the movements, judging by the feedback we have received, was
very popular and the audience enjoyed it enormously.”
Lecture on the occasion of a Movements Performance in Brighton,
at the Occulture Festival, 19 July 2003
written by Wim van Dullemen, edited and read by Pauline Tiben
The performance started with a movement called ‘Adam & Eve’,
which was performed by Christiane Macketanz alone.
What you just saw is a Movement created by Gurdjieff in the
late nineteen-forties, and the musical accompaniment you
just heard was written in the style of his court composer
Thomas de Hartmann.
This particular Movement is based on the Morse code and
if you’d be able to read that code in the succession
of enigmatic gestures just demonstrated to you, you’d
have read the words ‘Adam and Eve’. It is an
interesting example, also because nowadays this Movement
is known and remembered by no more than a mere handful of
people, and it is unlikely that they’d be willing or
able to perform it the way you just saw. Well, which shows
something of the atmosphere of drama, tension and secrecy
that affects the transmission of Gurdjieff’s Movements
to younger generations. ‘Adam and Eve’ is one
of the 250 Movements that have been remembered after Gurdjieff
died, and these 250 represent no more than a quarter of the
Movements that he taught originally. The remainder is forgotten,
a consequence of Gurdjieff’s strict orders that no
choreographs were allowed to be made.
For a productive approach towards Gurdjieff’s Movements,
we would like to mention some of our points of view. First
of all, the Movements form an essential and inseparable part
of Gurdjieff’s teaching, further consisting of orally
transmitted ideas, books and musical works. To separate them
from this organic whole, or even worse, to let them serve
other spiritual, oriental, religious or pseudo-religious
traditions or cults, will rob them or their significance
and potential. Because, Gurdjieff’s Movements are,
like his writings and his music, an expression of his psychological
and cosmic views.
Gurdjieff saw the cosmos as formed out of a succession of
different worlds, related to one another as are the notes
in the diatonic musical scale. Diatonic is a Greek word meaning ‘through
the sounds’. The creation of the world as Gurdjieff
saw it, is described in exactly the same way in Plato’s ‘Timaeus’,
proving that this is not one or other fanciful idea once
hidden in a Mysterious Temple, but one of the cornerstones
of our own civilisation.
Gurdjieff’s way to arrive at this view, however, is
independent from Socrates’ ‘calculations’,
as was proved recently by the research of Russell Smith from
Austin, Texas. The role of mankind in this scale of creation
is not exactly a Hollywood dream of a Universal Brotherhood,
but limited to the providing of energy for a distant cosmic
formation.
In spite of this merciless yoke, development is possible
for man and this has to start with the co-operation of his/her
three main functions: the physical, the emotional and the
mental. It is the birthright of man that these three functions
should work together, but as it is this is rarely the case
and if one of these functions dominates the other two, it
is not possible to perceive reality and our visions quickly
turn into illusions, as wine can turn into acid overnight,
or even worse, into hallucinations.
The struggle to perform Movements has much to do with a
harmonisation, at least temporarily, of these three functions,
to give us back our true state, the state of Adam and Eve.
This implies that all the efforts in the Gurdjieff Work are
not directed towards acquiring new, spectacular insights,
states or possibilities, but towards restoring what has been
lost. This means to become normal, ‘normal’ not
in the sense of ‘the ordinary’ or ‘average’,
which as every newspaper will immediately testify is abnormal
enough, but ‘normal’ meaning ‘living according
to our inherent possibilities’.
In our demonstration, you’ll see people at work. Usually,
a Movements class consists of 24 people, but for various
reasons it was not possible to have more than 7 people here
in Brighton from our Amsterdam and Berlin groups. Yet we
hope that this demonstration will give you a good impression
of the treasure that Gurdjieff put at the disposal of humanity.
We have not handed out programmes because the titles of
Movements are either just dates or code numbers, and finally
we have to mention that only for some of the Movements we
demonstrate today, the music was written by Gurdjieff, most
of the music comes from traditional sources within the transmission
lines of Movements or was composed by mr Van Dullemen.
see also
http://www.occulture.tv/Occulture2003_Reviews.htm
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