By Noam Radwin | WSP Class of 2024
Below is the full transcript of Noam’s speech delivered at the Commencement Ceremony in 2024. If you would prefer to watch and listen to his inspiring words, a video recording is available below. Used with permission.
One of the hardest parts of joining a Waldorf school for me was Eurythmy. If you’ve never seen Eurythmy performed, it can be quite hard to wrap your head around. So I’ll do my best to explain it. I’ve described it as kind of like an interpretive dance, but with certain frameworks for what certain movements mean. Also, sometimes it’s like a puppet show. Oh, and whenever it’s performed, the dancers wear flowing silk robes. I’ve certainly received strange looks when talking about it. The Waldorf description sounds more like connecting your soul to the cosmos or making your internal world external, which makes equally less sense at first. The important thing to know is that Eurythmy is a movement art that’s not taught anywhere but Waldorf schools.
When I started high school, Eurythmy seemed like the most colossal waste of time, and I could not justify spending even one hour a week in what amounted to a complicated puzzle that I was sure was engineered to cause me misery. I remember a moment while doing Eurythmy over Zoom (yeah, that was a thing) when we were told to grip a pencil with our toes and draw a star with our feet. Sitting alone in my room watching the seconds tick by, I wished I could be literally anywhere else. And lost in my own contempt, I missed my ability to actually do the exercise. I snapped out of it when we were asked to show our work, and in a panic, I held up a completely blank piece of paper and blamed my camera’s glare for the evident lack of stars drawn by feet.
My relationship to your Eurythmy has significantly changed over the years. This would be a strange thing to talk about if it hadn’t. Throughout high school, but especially this past year, I’ve come to respect, and I dare say, even enjoy Eurythmy. So what changed? The biggest thing that changed was my attitude. Initially, when I started doing Eurythmy in person, I was frustrated with the inconsistencies I saw in Eurythmy class. Eurythmy is a group exercise, and our class’ movements weren’t perfectly timed to the music. Each week, we would emphasize different parts of the words, and sometimes in the time between Eurythmy classes, the form we walked would be forgotten or altered. This irritated me to no end, and I remember spending many of my freshman, sophomore and even junior year Eurythmy classes, arguing with my classmates or even my teacher, the lovely Ms. Bergmann. I wanted Eurythmy to be like a math or a science class. Precise, exact and with a definitively correct way of doing it. This mindset made the classes incredibly difficult for me, and I remember when I first saw our junior year schedule with Eurythmy twice a week, I nearly cried.
So I began incredibly slowly, the process of accepting that Eurythmy was not a precise mechanical endeavor, but a way to express oneself, to work together with others, and to reflect on the space we inhabit as humans. And when performing Eurythmy with this mindset, I discovered a feeling in a moment when the group tunes into something, tunes into some unexplainable connection or force, a moment when the movement becomes bigger than any individual or even the group as a whole. It’s not something I can neatly fit into a scientific explanation or even explain clearly. But since when has Eurythmy been easy to explain?
I think my experience with Eurythmy is a microcosm of my experience with Waldorf as a whole. I came in with incredibly rigid ideas about how high school should look and how it should act and behave as a person. Time and time again, these preconceived notions were challenged, and I was forced to grow, to push myself to be more understanding and well rounded. There are so many things I’ve learned from this Waldorf school, and even if I never do Eurythmy ever again in my whole life, I know that I now have the skills to try something new, to fail, to not understand, to withhold my judgment and to let myself just feel as I walk into the next chapter of my life. So thank you to my classmates for sticking with me while I was argumentative or frustrated. Thank you Ms. Bergmann for being such a lovely, incredible Eurythmy teacher. And thank you Waldorf for helping push me out of my comfort zone and letting me try something kind of strange, but really cool. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your gift.
