Songs, eurythmy, and …
The training seminar for teachers and educators in Istanbul has published a songbook with 81 Turkish songs, some of them newly composed. A selection of songs was performed in eurythmy by the students.
Bringing out a songbook for Waldorf kindergartens and lower school classes in Turkey has been a long-felt wish and it is the more special that it has come out in the year when we celebrate not only 100 years of Waldorf Education but also 10 years of Waldorf Educator and Teacher training in Istanbul.
A year was spent composing new tunes and collecting traditional Turkish children’s songs. The book also includes tried and tested poems and songs – for instance by Hedwig Diestel, Marianne Garff, Alfred Baur, and Rudolf Steiner – that are widely used in German kindergartens and have been translated into Turkish and set to music. Pictures kindly made available by Bettina Stietencron, Angela Kočonda and five Waldorf pupils illustrate the songbook which could only be printed thanks to donations from Waldorf parents in Hamburg/Nienstedten.
The seminar’s second-year students used seventeen of the songs in the book for a eurythmy performance in Istanbul on 4 August. After two weeks of eurythmy and drama lessons, sixty students were ready to perform the Turkish alphabet and basic elements of eurythmy. Then they sang and played the children’s songs and in the end also presented them in eurythmy, as well as Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite. Here too, the students demonstrated their talent for movement: in Turkey everyone lives in music! Under the direction of the Turkish theatre director Muzaffer Aksoy, the students also performed short scenes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice.
The songbook Dağda Gece (Night on the mountain) can be purchased from egitimsanatidostlaridernegi@gmail.com (Istanbul) or pellacini@gmx.net (Hamburg)