Music, movement, and the imagination of water brought a thousand young people from across the world into collective resonance during this year’s International Students Conference (ISC) at the Goetheanum. Ashton Arnoldy interviewed Gareth Dicker, organizer of the “Song of Water” project.
Ashton: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in youth work with the ISC.
Gareth: I’m a Waldorf physics and math teacher in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I also do a lot of music, musical improvisation, and songwriting. I got involved in the Youth Section of North America around the time of COVID. For the 2025 “Light Between” conference in New York, I’d been invited to bring joy and music and connection with the speakers by transforming what they brought into fun activities. So my original purpose was to make the conference joyful and interactive.
For the 2026 ISC conference, they wanted a larger participatory project centered on music. The theme of water became the central imagination for the planning group—how water has a capacity for confluences and also a capacity to evaporate—a kind of spiritualization and individualization in the form of droplets. Water is the substance that we can find commonality in. Our bodies are all water, and water moves through us and also moves us.
So in February, I took up artistic direction for the “Song of Water” event. It was initially envisioned on the banks of a river, but ended up being held on the Goetheanum campus. It became a social sculpture idea: how can we bring in elements of harmonization through the way that water itself can separate and come back together, and the way that water refracts light into colors? Color elements came in through the idea of the rainbow refracting from a sphere of water.
At midnight on the airplane on my way to Switzerland, I was reading some lectures on the Christian Mysteries where Steiner ends with a quote from Goethe’s Faust. He references being a drop in the ocean. It felt like confirmation that our imagination about water, including the color element, was on track. I decided to read the passage on opening night—right before our “Song of Water” introductory performance—so that we could honor Goethe and the Goetheanum, Steiner’s love of Goethe, and how the two of them appreciated the connection between human beings and water and the spirit that water carries: a kind of shared soul life.
Each of our thousand-some young people got a triangle of colored fabric. They split up into six long color lines that traversed the campus, like a rainbow, then swapped colors until everything was mixed and wove a connected web of triangles. We draped it over the Goetheanum’s West entrance—waving it, singing and dancing underneath it, and celebrating our shared humanity—how we were able to come together across the entire planet despite differences in political issues—celebrating what we might create as a shared future.
It was wonderful to see the young people hanging out by the building just having fun. What was that like for you and for the students?
Some students were unsure about having it at the Goetheanum and not in a public space like Basel, but they really enjoyed it. Some who had been in the public event in 2024, were especially happy to experience it with just the conference participants, bringing full consciousness to how amazing it was that we were all here together.
It was wonderful to witness young people being willing and excited about handing over their individual life paths for a moment to something harmoniously collective—everyone doing something wholesome together—and not having to go to a club to do that, being sober. A few told me that the spontaneous dance party at the end was the best they’d ever been to. They didn’t want to stop dancing.
We brought the event to a close with a song and a whole minute of silence, a kind of blessing. The capacity for going huge and then going still—being able to be quiet together—was a powerful experience for me and others. At one point 500 people were seated around me outside the Goetheanum singing three-part harmonies; I would change the vowel sound and then they would change the vowel, or I would change the tone and they would change the tone. It was so beautiful.
I feel a deep sense of gratitude toward everyone who held the event, especially my team—Julia and Anders—who helped with fabrics and direction while I focused on the music; without them it would have been something entirely different. I was just really pleased that it all came together as it did.
Young people have so much creative energy for life and want to share it with other young people in a safe and good situation. I thought: we really need more contexts for that to happen—with that kind of sobriety of spirit that was evident in how we all came right back down to absolute silence when it was time. It wasn’t a chaotic ecstasy—it was joyful ecstasy.
Image Impressions from the International Student Conference (ISC) 2026. Photo: Sabrina Xuan
