Personal stories…
marts 6th, 2009 | Published in Participants, Personal stories | 11 Comments
Now it really would be wonderful if you contribute with stories and ideas on this site!
And please come forward those of you, “veterans Idriarteers”, to tell us how and where you can help spread the message, this is very important to happen NOW!!!
Who do you know from old IDRIART times in different countries so we can reach them and tell them about Chartres? Thank you, see you all in Chartres!?
Miha
USE THE RESPONSE BOX BELOW
marts 6th, 2009 at 7:01 am (#)
From Treasa O’Driscoll (treasaodriscoll@sympatico.ca):
Extracted from Celtic Woman, a memoir of life’s poetic journey (Pg. 223-231), by Treasa O’Driscoll, available from http://www.bluebutterflybooks.ca
………..It was in March of 1985 that I received a call from pianist Graham Jackson, asking if he could introduce me to a Yugoslavian violinist who was visiting Toronto. Within half an hour I was opening my door to Miha Pogacnik and to a new chapter in my life. No sooner was he seated in my living room than he came straight to the point: “I wanted to meet you because I sensed as soon as I heard your name that you were the person who should represent IDRIART in Toronto.”
“What,” I asked, “is IDRIART?”
“IDRIART,” he replied, “is that which is not yet.”
I liked him instantly because I knew he spoke my language! What he had to say sounded strangely familiar although he was bringing me news of a revolutionary movement in the arts that had been officially named Institut pour le Development des Relations Interculturelles par l’ART. He told me that he became director of the Chartres Summer Festival in 1981, when the famous cathedral was used for the first time in recent history for the performance of music. By 1983, the annual festival was attracting up to two thousand people from thirty-five countries. Out of this event a vital concept in the performance and appreciation of the arts arose. People inspired by the Chartres experience carried on the initiative and chapters soon sprang up in over twenty countries where Miha inaugurated arts festivals prepared by volunteers. Pogacnik believed in breaking through cocoons of money and elitism, realizing that a well-dressed, affluent audience is not necessarily God’s gift to the artist. From a young age, Miha was determined to devote his time to educating audiences so that the experience of the listener might more closely match his own informed, focussed attention as a player. I reminded him of a statement of Gogol that seemed relevant to his aspirations: “If art does not accomplish the miracle of transforming the soul of the spectator it is not fulfilling its mission in the world.”
Miha responded in his heavily accented way: “I am in total agreement with that! We have set ourselves the goal to work in such a way that everybody participates inwardly so that new vistas may open for many and not just for the players. When artists and participants take on the responsible role of performer the festival itself becomes a work of art… lectures, artistic courses of various kinds, introductions to more active ways of participating in the arts, music, drama and eurythmy (an art of movement) are offered. Exhibitions are set up, possibilities arranged for meetings and discussions and we try to apply musical principles to all this work.”
I became aware of his deep sense of mission, when he said in an urgent tone, “Today the whole world is in a very dangerous and explosive state with one main problem being the isolation among peoples. Artists are called upon to take a more active social role. To use mythological language: we together with our Muses are called to serve the zeitgeist who does not want to know any national boundaries. What is unique about IDRIART festivals is that our audiences move along with us to different countries. We try to organize short but strong events at specially chosen places worldwide, always ready to change, to rethink, to improvise.”
His remarks reminded me of ideas I had while reading Becoming Aware of the Logos. But as he had not mentioned any connection with Hungary, I tentatively asked: “Does the name Georg Kühlewind mean anything to you? I have recently read a book of his that somehow has prepared me for what you are telling me…”
Miha gave a cry of delight. “Georg is my mentor! He and Jurgen Schrieffer are the godfathers of our movement! You will meet him at our festival in Sacramento, California if you will join us there next year.”
And thus the meeting with Kühlewind came about.
My life was greatly enhanced during the seven years I spent as an active co-worker for this exciting movement. Inspired to bring people together at a time of tremendous change in the world, Pognacnik’s visits to Canada brought us news of distant places where the need for social renewal was urgent. As the calls from our brothers and sisters in Central and Eastern Europe, in Russia, South America and Tibet, reached our chapters, IDRIART began to be acknowledged as the Red Cross of art. Miha’s letters to me were always punctuated with exhortations, urging us to travel with him. In a letter to co-workers in 1991 he wrote: “It is incredible what is wanted and needed in the USSR and Central Europe…. The greatest need of people everywhere is to meet you, to talk to you, to know you and to work together with you. Please do come. Your active participation is the core of IDRIART.”
I organised a memorable concert for Miha at the Toronto Waldorf School and maintained a spirited connection with him for several years before moving to British Columbia. Classical violinist Victor Costanzi and his harpist wife, Rita, were Miha’s representatives in Western Canada. As distinguished and popular musicians, they played a vital role in the artistic life of Vancouver. They invited me to visit them and interrupted their own busy concert schedule to organize a concert for me on January 19, 1990. The warmth of their welcome, the ambience of the city, the fact that my younger children, Declan and Emer—now teenagers, could be enrolled at the Waldorf High School near their home, all contributed to my decision to move to North Vancouver the following summer and live close to my new friends. My fruitful collaboration with the Costanzis over the next six years, paved the way for more Canadian visits by Miha and his associates. Accomplished harpist, Rita Costanzi, and I presented annual winter solstice concerts together—in the IDRIART spirit—to capacity audiences at Vancouver’s Christ Church Cathedral and forged our bond of friendship.
The tenth anniversary of the founding of IDRIART occurred in 1991. A major festival was held in Chartres cathedral that I attended along with other Canadians. Participants were drawn from the many countries in which the movement was by then established. I was happy to be amongst them.
Chartres stands as the most complete, architecturally and iconographically, of all the great Gothic cathedrals of the world. It is a monument to human striving, love and devotion; it is also a place of great spiritual resonance, its site Celtic in origin, constituting geometry in space and musical in all its aspects. Chartres has become, in the words of August Rodin “a hymn of praise for eternity… When faced with a marvel… the sublime summary of centuries… one is hushed by an admiration that surpasses words.”
It was this hush which set the tone for E. Peppings’s St. Matthews Passion, a choral work of unearthly purity and one of the most remarkable of the twentieth century, performed on this occasion by a choir schooled in Werbeck singing and conducted by their teacher, Jurgen Schrieffer. This method of singing involves the cultivation of inner hearing and releases therapeutic forces, which were powerfully experienced by the listeners that night. Participants in the choir were drawn from many walks of life, as indeed were the builders of Chartres Cathedral, amongst them the hundreds who chanted as they hauled huge stones from quarries some five kilometres away.
Georg Kühlewind’s arresting talk at Chartres arose out of the spirit of the moment and I took some notes at the time. “Attention is the natural prayer which we perform towards the truth that is living in us, to bring it to show itself. Our power of attentiveness is our sacred power force but it is threatened from many sides. It has the possibility of growing more and more autonomous. If attention is concentrated on a theme of a man-made object or a line of sacred text, it has the power of changing from grasping to opening. If attentiveness is empty, then something can fill it from above.”
Kühlewind would expand on this theme at every opportunity and continued to do so in the course of our collaboration in his several workshops that I hosted and the “long friendship” which lasted until his death on January 15, 2006. His book From Normal to Healthy, an outline of his spiritual psychology that provides a rich source of insights for the healing of anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses, would have been of invaluable help to me in coping with my husband’s syndrome. However, it had not appeared in English translation before I left Bob but I have since come to appreciate the practicality of its contents.
Instead of focussing on a patient’s behavioural symptoms, Kühlewind’s method, now embraced by many professional therapists, relies on a self-conscious re-experiencing of the true self, of presence and of connectedness with the whole, in the patient. He advocates the development of faculties of receptive attention and cognitive feeling through meditation and other specific exercises tailored to the patient, many of them artistic. For Kühlewind, the activity of thinking is raised to the level of art because the free faculty of attention is our source of creativity and love and the activity of a spirit in us that is never ‘sick.’
My most abiding memory of the festival was of a rather unusual outing, which had a peculiar druidic fitness to it. An excursion was planned whereby hundreds of people set out in the dead of night from Chartres, in a convoy of buses and cars, led pied-piper-like by Miha Pogacnik, the strains of whose violin lured us on. In the gathering dawn, I could barely discern a large Celtic dolman upon which Miha admonished me to stand. With feet firmly placed on this stony altar of time, I felt empowered to speak and sing sounds appropriate to the occasion, while hundreds stood with their backs to me, our faces now raised in homage to the rising sun. I recited “Remembrance” by Robert Masterson, a Vancouver poet whom I had come to know.
The waves return,
Glittering with remembered sun,
Ancient songs seizing our tongues,
The broken pillars standing anew,
The temple rising, rising, rising,
The circle shining true….
Gongs began to sound, their diminishing tones drawing us with them into meditative silence. It was a beautiful Sunday morning; with open hearts and happy faces, we formed a circle and quietly ate the abundance of good croissants and hot coffee, which seemed to appear out of nowhere. Then Miha played again. I sang all the way back to the car, field after field of glorious sunflowers lighting our way. I remembered more words of Pogacnik’s: “Every landscape on this earth carries within itself a memory and its own story that seeks to reveal itself, and in that way to contribute to the diversity of human society.”
As well as affording me the opportunity to meet with Kühlewind and providing me with the chance to perform in many different settings and contexts, my involvement with IDRIART brought me into contact with the Camphill movement, which carried the artistic impulse forward in several countries. This association began for me when I was planning the Dublin IDRIART Festival of 1987 in collaboration with members of a community for young adults with developmental disabilities, located in Dunshane, County Kildare. With the help of Camphill co-workers I mounted a very successful event and introduced Pogacnik, Schrieffer and other IDRIART stars (amongst them the late Derek Bell of the Chieftains) to Irish audiences which now included many of Miha’s European fans.
Camphill was founded in Scotland in 1940 by an Austrian doctor of Jewish background, Karl König, and some colleagues of his who were determined to take ”a morsel of the true European destiny and make it into a seed so that some of its real task might be preserved.” As political refugees, they formed a symbiotic relationship with handicapped children, who seemed to them the social refugees of their time and place. König pioneered a movement for curative education in a residential setting with a view to helping these children—adults were also embraced by the movement in later years. Camphill emphasizes community in a social and spiritual sense, its methods and goals primarily based on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and his ‘fundamental social law’ which states: ‘The well-being of a community of human beings working together is greater the less an individual claims for himself and the more his requirements are met out of the work of others.” Hospitality is one of the hallmarks of a Camphill community, the well-appointed and environmentally friendly facilities allow for a healthy flourishing of artistic activity and meaningful social exchange. The existence of Camphill communities and Waldorf schools guaranteed the success of every festival, I noticed, providing setting, grace and ground for planning and preparatory events.
When I returned to Ontario in 2001, led by serendipity once again, I settled in downtown Barrie, where an urban Camphill development was in the process of forming. Diane Kyd, who, with her husband Chuck, had led the Camphill initiative in the area for many years, invited me to put the principles of IDRIART into practice in a community outreach that came to be known as ‘The Novalis Project.’ We adopted the slogan of “arts inspiring social renewal” and were guided by the many epigrammatic sayings of Novalis, around which I would form our seasonal programmes………
marts 6th, 2009 at 7:02 am (#)
From Tadeu Caldas:
Well my first IDRIART was in 1989 in Belém Brazil where I gave a workshop on the “Amazonia a Cultural Landscape” and there I met my dear wife Gisela Pauli who helped IDRIART in previous festivals all over Europe. We also took part together in Siberia/ Irkutsky and Mongolia 1990 where I gave workshops on biodynamic agriculture.
We now have 5 children and live in Cologne. We are of course planning to come to Chartres.
marts 11th, 2009 at 5:58 pm (#)
From Hannes Heyne aus Dresden:
Liebe Freunde und Mitstreiter von Idriart,
ich habe mich sehr über diese Idee von Miha gefreut, sich nach 28 Jahren wieder in Chartres zu treffen. Gut erinnere ich mich an das 10-jährige-Jubiläum 1991,
wo wir von Dresden aus mit den Rumänen im Bus kamen. Und der Idriart -Impuls
hat mein Leben wirklich nachhaltig verändert ! 1986 in Budapest das erste Mal dabei, lernte
ich meinen späteren Lehrer Andreas Delor kennen und war begeistert von seiner musikalischen Improvisation mit selbstgebauten Instrumenten, die eine wirkliche
Bewußtseinsveränderung bewirkte. Durch Idriart lernte ich Menschen “aus dem Westen”
kennen, die mir teilweise bis heute gute Freunde sind.1988 in Tiflis/Georgien auch meine
damalige Frau Diana, mit der ich in Hamburg studierte, u.a. bei Andreas Delor. Vorher als Hydrologe 7 Jahre tätig, wechselte ich ab 1992 zum hauptamtlichen Improvisateur
und Instrumentenbauer im Sinne von Idriart und war und bin stets in diesem Sinne
unterwegs, um Musik, Ökologie, Naturwissenschaften und (Heil)Kunstgemeinsam erfahrbar zu machen. Idriart ist mir also Hauptberuf und Lebensaufgabe geworden.
Insgesamt war ich wohl auf über 15 Festivals dabei und auf den meisten dann mit eigenen Beiträgen. Bereits 1991 hatte ich dafür plädiert, Idriart in mehreren Bereichen zu
strukturieren, mein Anteil war das “Dranbleiben an kleineren Küchen”, d.h.Menschenkreise,
die die künstlerische und improvisatorische Arbeit fortsetzen wollten, immer wieder zu besuchen. Bis heute reise ich so regelmäßig in viele Länder, z.B. nach Estland, Georgien,
Rumänien, Rußland u.a. Die Metamorphose hin zu festen Kulturzentren in den Kontinenten
mit Borl als Hauptzentrum hat mich begeistert und ich war recht oft in Borl dabei, 2003 das letzte Mal. Umso trauriger hat mich die dann folgende Entwicklung gemacht. Immer wieder
bat ich Hilfe an, den letzten dort noch Verbliebenen, versuchte herauszufinden, was los ist
und warum es nicht weitergeht. Nie kam eine Antwort. In Cuernavaca 1997/98 war ich dabei wie wir eine riesige Milliardärsvilla anschauten, als pontentielles Kulturzentrum beider
Amerika, wie Miha dort unterm Orangenbaum geigte, und auch Marco war mit dabei.
Gut erinnere ich den Disput: Miha war für das Landen von Hubschraubern für die Geldleute und VIPs , die Mexikaner für ein einfacheres Objekt in der Nähe der Stadt. Und es gab die
Idee und Realität eines International Board, einer Professionalisierung. Irgendjemand muß ja die tausende von Adressen verwalten. Gäbe es sie, müßten wir nun nicht mühsam auf die
Suche gehen. Miha schreibt: „We celebrate the 28th birthday of Idriart in Chartres. Our intention is to search for “next level” and a new beginning of Idriart…” Was heißt denn 28
Jahre im Lebenslauf des Menschen ? Rudolf Steiner sagt: „die Zeit für den Menschen, wo er
so recht vom Leben lernen kann, die Entwicklung zu den Meisterjahren hin” , aber auch über eine bedeutsame Krise: wenn die Möglichkeit der autonomen Selbstgestaltung nach dem 28.
Jahr nicht ergriffen wird, kommt es zu konkreten „Fehlleistungen”, die sich ebenfalls gesellschaftsbildend auswirken. Dagegen muß die Individualität Quelle der Kreativität sein,
die auch die Gesellschaft befruchtet. (aus „Vom Lebenslauf des Menschen” VfG Bd 4)
Nun frage ich mich, wo war denn Idriart zwischen 21 und 28 ? Bevor es zu einem neuen
Niveau/Level geht, müßte auch das angeschaut werden. Und wo bleiben all die hunderte
Zuschriften und Anmeldungen, die doch zu erwarten wären ? Haben wirklich erst zwei
geschrieben ? Das ist doch sehr frustrierend ! Wenn ich nach Chartres fahre, möchte ich dort
viele von früher wiedersehen aber auch neue Menschen kennenlernen und von meinen
früheren Erfahrungen berichten. Ich könnte z.B. eine Kleingruppe leiten. Ich finde das Gespräch in kleinen Gruppen wesentlich, um wirklich zum persönlichen Austausch zu
kommen. Auch könnten Arbeitsformen wie Workshops dazu kommen, in der auf unterschied-
liche Art Idriart praktisch erlebbar ist. Wenn nur wenige kommen, wäre es schön, die Aktivisten mit je einer halben oder einer Stunde gemeinsamer künstlerischer Arbeit zu
erleben. Ich kann anbieten: Spiel – Musikalische Improvisation und Schulung der Sinne.
Unklar ist mir der Preis. Was ist alles in den 100 Euro (oder 200) enthalten ? Eintritt,
Workshops, Essen, … ? Wenn ich die Fahrtkosten dazurechne, ist das für mich viel Geld.
Bitte also genauer beschreiben. Auch das Programm könnte detaillierter sein. (z.B.
andere Workshops ?)
Wie wäre es ,wenn and dieser Stelle ein Forum entsteht, um Idriart weiterzuentwickeln ! ?
Also Leute, meldet Euch !
Herzliche Grüße aus Dresden, Hannes Heyne
marts 17th, 2009 at 9:23 pm (#)
The first time I met Miha was in 1980 in The Hague while I still was a student at the Academy of Eurythmie. He had lunch at my house and we spoke about his intentions and plans. That is, he talked and I listened. I was impressed by the passion he showed. That evening I heard him play during a small concert with Einar Nøkleberg at the school and decided there and then that I was going to organize his first public concert in Holland. It was the first of many concerts for full houses. The year after -1981- I took my 11 year old nephew to the first Chartres festival where especially the evening with Bach’s solo-sonate nr. 1 for violin was burned in me as an unforgettable memory. A chathedral packed with 1200 people, completely silent. Tones that were almost literally flowing around feet, bodies, hands and heads, touching everyone deeply. Music everywhere and that seldom feeling of complete unity. For my nephew, 27 years later, Bach’s solo-sonata is still his most favorite piece of music.
During the years after I was at several ‘Arts in Business’-Idriart festivals at Castle Borl conducting dialogue workgroups with eurythmy as a metaphor to visualize and understand sosial processes.
These festivals were always intens and very inspiring experiences. It had large influence on many person’s biography and work.
Is it time to re-vitalize IDRIART’s mission? Yes it is!
Warm greetings from Norway,
Winfried Deijmann
maj 3rd, 2010 at 11:44 am (#)
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