Rhythmics / Music and Movement

Don’t we all know it? You hear music and your body immediately starts to react. Maybe it’s just a foot tapping along to the rhythm, maybe it’s your fingers which automatically start moving. Sometimes, the music sets the whole body in motion. The brain is reacting, too. Depending on the musical genre and our listening habits we become more active or relaxed, and emotions surge.

These and similar phenomena are what we are talking about in the subject area known as “Eurhythmics”, these days also called „Rhythmics“ or „Music and Movement“. Let’s have a quick historical overview before we talk about what Rhythmics means today.

Around the year 1900 the Swiss composer and musician Emile Jaques-Dalcroze was the first to consciously make use of the connections between music and movement for learning processes. It was his aim to make the basics of music more accessible to his students, at the conservatory of Geneva, by using whole body movements. He called his method „rhythmic gymnastics“, seeing rhythm as the central element which unites music and movement, body and spirit. At the time, his approach was completely innovative and other artists also took an interest in it. Artistic pioneers like Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigmann in dance, Carl Orff in music pedagogy and Max Reinhardt in acting, just to name a few, were strongly influenced by Dalcroze's method and adopted ideas of it to their own work. Between 1911 and 1914, international and transdisciplinary exchange was at its peak at the Institute for Music and Rhythm, in Hellerau close to Dresden. Its centre was the Festspielhaus, specially designed for this purpose. Architecture, music, acting, dance and light installations merged into one great artistic concept at the School for Music and Rhythmics. Through the warmth of these encounters in Hellerau, “Rhythmics” spread into the rest of Europe. Within Germany the reforms in music pedagogy, initiated by Leo Kestenberg, paved the way for Rhythmics into conservatories, universities and other pedagogical and artistic institutions.

Music and movement not only initiate artistic processes, they can also accompany learning processes. It was mostly female students of Dalcroze who applied the method to their work and, in this way, developed it further into a wider pedagogical approach, especially in the German-speaking parts of Europe. Mimi Scheiblauer in the area of Special Education and Rehabilitation Studies, Dore Jacobs in her work with Movement Education, Elfriede Feudel in General Pedagogy and Charlotte Pfeffer in Psychomotricity all contributed greatly to shaping the current appearance of Rhythmics.

Rhythmics mostly takes place in groups, and uses music, movement, language and materials as pedagogical tools. Improvisation with all these elements is one part of the work, as is the translation of musical patterns into movement and language, or vice versa. Many of the tasks comprise four parameters — space, time, energy and form — in a flexible and dynamic way when working creatively with music, movement and language.

The method has various aims: to support musical and motor development, refine the senses, expand personal and creative expression, develop social skills, educate the aesthetic perception in different artistic disciplines, as well as to expand improvisation and communication abilities through different sensory channels and in diverse forms of expression.

Depending on the aim, Rhythmics is employed in different areas and with different target groups. Examples include creative musical work with senior citizens, especially in preventing accidents like falling, or working with dementia patients; supporting the learning process for children in kindergarten; and creative projects in dance, music and theatre with adolescents. In schools, Rhythmics is not only employed in supporting first language development, but is also made use of in foreign language classes. Furthermore there are teaching methods that combine music, movement and language for various subjects. Finally, Rhythmics is also a subject in university courses in pedagogy, education and social work. Here, Rhythmics supports students' personal development and helps to develop their methodological competences. 

Today, the subject is also a standard component of artistic courses at university, like acting, and is used to support basic music education and body perception in other courses.

Performers working with Rhythmics tend to develop hybrid forms of art, using the principle of improvisation and moving fluidly between dance, acting and different types of sound-based stage performance. For that, they are often recognized in, and associated with, more than one artistic field.

Many practitioners have also been able to build up another profession by drawing on their expertise in order to connect Rhythmics with other disciplines. Examples of this can be found in music therapy or elementary music pedagogy, as well as with people working as primary school teachers or as music teachers, in music outreach programmes of concert halls, in cultural education, social work, choreography and dance, as well as in bodywork and movement techniques.

It is this principle of connecting music and movement and the integration of body and personal expression which allows for this colorful spectrum of Rhythmics in practice, and continues to keep it highly relevant today. 

For more on Laban, Wigman, and Reinhardt, see Lee (2003); on Reinhardt, see Rogers (1966): Wigman was a student of Dalcroze and worked closely with Laban and his partner Suzanne Perrottet, who was also a student of Dalcroze, at the artists' colony Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland. Even though the work of Laban and Wigman emphasized freeing dance from musical constraints and focusing on inner rhythm — thus moving away from Dalcroze’s concept — his influence must still be taken into account (cf. Lee, 2003). Max Reinhardt also brought Gertrud Gottschalk Wegmann, another student of Dalcroze, to the drama school of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, after he — like Laban — had had the opportunity to attend demonstrations at the Festspielhaus in Hellerau. The Günther School, founded in the 1920s by Dorothee Günther and Carl Orff, from which the Orff Schulwerk later emerged, belongs to a second generation. Günther — who was primarily responsible for the movement aspects of the training — had engaged with the methods of both Laban and Dalcroze (Kugler, 2020). Undoubtedly, influences from Dalcroze’s contemporaries and their successors can still be found in today’s subject "Rhythmics / Music and Movement" (cf. e.g., Hauser-Dellefant, 2023, p. 23). Thus, in many cases, one can speak of mutually interdependent influences — although in-depth research on this topic is still lacking. 

References

• Hauser-Dellefant, A. (2023). On the origin of musicality and its significance for pedagogy. In: Hauser-Dellefant, A. & Witoszynszkyj, E. (Eds.) (2023). Life is Movement is Music. Education in Music and Movement at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Wiesbaden: Reichert, pp. 21–45.
• Kugler, M. (2020). Günther-Schule. In: Online-Lexikon der Orff-Schulwerk Gesellschaft Deutschland e.V. https://orff-schulwerk.de/lexikon/guenther-schule/
• Lee, J. W. (2003). Dalcroze by any other name: Eurhythmics in early modern theatre and dance, Doctoral dissertation, Texas Tech University. https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/handle/2346/15905
• Rogers, C. M. (1966). The Influence of Dalcroze Eurhythmics in the Contemporary Theatre. LSU Historical Thesis and Dissertations. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2215&context=gradschool_disstheses