Wake up your Soul and Step into the world of Colours!
(Movie: The Giver 2014) At the beginning of the movie, everything is set in black and white. There is no color. Humans live in a community where everyone is rendered equal (in terms of possessions) and every job is assigned to the most suitable person according to the observations made by the Elders as to their capabilities. A youth is chosen to be the new “receiver” of all the memories of humanity. There was the recognition by the Elders that it was important to keep this collective memory alive for the good of the community, to help guide decisions in new or difficult situations. But only one person is assigned this important task and no one else is allowed to share any of the memories. Memories and the emotions attached to them are considered to be the seed for jealousy, hatred, and violence, all the things that destroyed the previous world prior to the creation of this new one. Any emotions that develop while one is sleeping from the experiences of the day are removed every morning by a mandatory injection.
The movie makes the connection between the experience of color and emotions. Emotions are what we can call the life of the soul. The emotional body is where the soul resides, much like the physical body as vessel of the spirit and soul. When emotions are removed, there is no aboding for inner life. And without emotions, we live in a colorless world of shadows. External colors are brought about by the internal colors of our emotions. Without the experiencing within of “leaping out for joy”, for example, there would be no color “yellow” in the world about us.
Without this inner life, which is chaotic and full of struggles at times, life seems to be peaceful, much as the orderly life of a machine. Humans in this community are mere robots made up of organic matter. They eat, go to work, play, and produce things. They have physical sense experience during the day. At night these experiences are processed and internalized and become part of the soul life, but these are removed every morning by the injection. (Of course this kind of enforcement can never completely work.) Abnormality is “released to elsewhere”. A world of no memory. A world of no emotions. A world of no colors. Without inner soul life, we lose the very essence of being human. It is the life of the soul that gives us “color” of the world! If the so-called negative emotions were artificially taken away, we live an empty life.
Eurythmy is consciously working with the life of the soul. We now have come to a time to be able to consciously working with the life of the soul, besides the life of the body.
Colors are manifestations of inner soul life and eurythmy works with the inner essence of color. Eurythmy movements are colors in movement. You can imagine how the color blue might move differently than the color yellow. The original indications for eurythmy sound gestures were given with different colors to describe the movement characteristics of sounds. In eurythmy performance, lighting is not about giving a physically visible color, but more about the movement of color of a piece of music or a poem. As music can be appreciated by hearing, it can be also appreciated by color (lighting), and by movement (eurythmy). Different sense organ and sensory experience are waken.