Eurythmy in the frame again

I had a wound clinic visit this afternoon, primarily to collect supplies, as we are managing well at home without need to use a full dressing this past week or so. Unfortunately, supplies deliveries to the clinic haven't recovered from the last bank holiday. Again. This is worrying for the nursing team. In addition, nearly half of the district nursing team is off sick at the moment, and some of the regular local clinics have not been able to open, so all those patients who must have treatment are redirected to Riverside clinic, so their appointment diary is over full. I'm crossing my fingers that we don't run out before my visit, a week today.

This evening there was a Eurythmy performance by the West Midlands Stage group in the Steiner School, which Clare had been instrumental in arranging. It's a couple of years since they last visited. She was picked up early and driven there, as our car is still in the garage for repairs. I followed on the bus a little later, with my trust Sony HX300 in hand, to video the performance. As there was no suitable place to rig it on a tripod, I had to film hand-held, for an hours worth of performance time. This was taxing, but the results were fairly good considering. The performances by members of the six strong student touring group were excellent and powerful. Tomorrow, I have the task of extracting, editing and consigning to a web platform for our friends Marin and Alan Stott who run the West Midlands Eurythmy School to review and approve before publishing them to YouTube. I was pleased to have the opportunity to do this, even if it meant watching only through the camera.

We were home in good time to watch 'Berlin Station' on More Four. Broadcast time has moved from ten until eleven, which meant a late night that I didn't need, but it's too good to defer watching.

Eurythmy first at Hawthorn

Having bid farewell to Peter and Sebastien about to set off to the Devon coast for a weekend of camping, Clare and I drove to Hawthorn Steiner school to prepare the meals for the ten strong team of musicians and eurythmists who'd come to perform twice today - once before lunch for children, and the second full length evening performance which Clare has spent a lot of her time organising and publicising recently. The eurythmists are students at the West Midlands Eurythmy Association school in Stourbridge, doing their end of year performance tour with their teacher. They'd left home at seven this morning to arrive in time to set up the performance area in the school's main hall, and rehearse themselves into the space.

For the children, they did a folk tale called 'Jack and the North Wind'. It was visually stunning, and such a new experience for them, that most were held spellbound for the half an hour it lasted. I took over a hundred photos with my Lumix LX5, and was thrilled at its responsiveness, given I had it on automatic settings and simply pressed the button at every eye-catching moment possible. It was exciting to get such good results indoors, with so much movement going on.

Thirty people attended the evening performance, which was a many as the hall could contain without encroaching on the stage area. There was a repeat of 'Jack' in the second half, and in the first half some performance pieces with poetry and with music, plus an extraordinary dramatic rendering of an edited passage from Tolkein's 'The Hobbit' in which Bilbo and Gollum set each other riddles.

For the evening performance the lighting wasn't as kind to the camera, and the bulb popped in one of just two stage floodlights I'd collected from Crane's music shop in town early in the day. However, I set up the little Sony W690 on a tripod on a step ladder in a corner, and let it run throughout the evening, and to my surprise the results were very good indeed, except that it switched itself off after recording video continuously for half and hour - a massive 2 gigabyte file! The hour and ten minute performance drained the battery completely, but nevertheless, delivered the goods. Editing may take some time.

What a day. I can't remember when last I saw a full Eurythmy performance - was it Clare's graduation? It's such a powerful disciplined medium of expression. I must make an effort to find time to attend more eurythmy performances, as it's so uplifting and inspiring an art form, visually, dramatically, spiritually.