This Christmas, the current production of Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Dramas will be performed for the last time at the Goetheanum. We asked Gioia Falk to tell us something about the artistic process behind the production. Questions by Louis Defèche.
How did your work on this production of the Mystery Plays begin 15 years ago?
A group of eurythmists who’d joined the Goetheanum in 2000 asked me, “Can you work on colors with us?” I agreed, gladly. We worked on a few themes related to the movement of color and finally came to the colors of the Mystery Dramas. In the stage directions for World Midnight in the fourth Drama, Rudolf Steiner describes how the group of souls appear—each soul’s head is surrounded by an aura: one is blue with orange stars, another reddish, another blue-yellow, etc. We were inspired by this because it was such an unusual task. And it was wonderful that Rudolf Steiner provided such details on how the moving waves at the back and front of the stage frame the action. Then there was another riddle: “blue-yellow”—that’s not yellow-blue. What’s the difference? Does such a color exist? Can it be found in nature?
And did you find it?
It’s rare. In some sunsets, the sun has already disappeared, but the sunlight still overlays the sky with its last rays. The blue is behind it, and the yellow can no longer shine fully, so it just suffuses the sky. But it’s still not quite green. Sometimes there is a greenish atmosphere during thunderstorms, but in that case, it’s still something different. This is like a selfless yellow that no longer shines fully and lets the sky come through. Maybe there are other instances, but we found this after-sunset moment. And then we realized that this is exactly what Rudolf Steiner described for Theodora. Theodora is in parallel with the character of the bird that still reflects the last rays of the sun in Goethe’s “Fairy Tale.” To find a moment in nature and use it to characterize an entire individuality—that’s remarkable.
Was this also applied specifically to the colors?
Once, when I met the actor Christiaan Stuten, I said, “Look, we’ve worked out the aura of Capesius!” He was interested and astonished, having himself been active with colors and speech for many years. He was the director of the Mystery Dramas at the time and had often played Capesius, so he knew the text by heart. Capesius’ aura is blue, and red or orange impulses repeatedly emerge from this blue. Then we practiced this with him. Suddenly, he said, “Well, when you have the color around you, you actually speak very differently. I also understand the text very differently.” So now we were all truly astonished.
This experience stayed with me; it didn’t end there. Steiner talks about the whole World Midnight as being “floods of colors full of meaning.” “Floods of color”—that’s something we can conceive of abstractly. The colors should change. We’re all familiar with that: a new thought, a new mood, a new color. But, according to the stage directions, it should also be “full of meaning.” Would it be possible to create something tangible, something concrete, from that?
At the time, no one thought of incorporating this into the design of the Mystery Dramas. I was a eurythmist then in Christiaan Stuten’s production. A few years later, in 2008, I was given the task of restaging the Dramas “out of the spirit of eurythmy.” I only used a little of what we’d implemented into movement as color qualities. And yet this work had a fundamental influence as a kind of background for the new concept, especially for the scenes in the spiritual realms.
Were there any other things in the “background” besides the colors during your design process?
The Dramas are based upon infinite depths. And of course, for me, the printed text was the external basis. But especially with this work, the task is to approach the place from which it originates. Where it lived and was created is also the future—the whole of anthroposophy is the path. There’s no contradiction between the Dramas and anthroposophy; everything strives to become part of the background, part of the creative potential, and that then becomes the new foreground, a revelation, when it succeeds. In 1923, Rudolf Steiner described this path of the arts, how one can approach the innermost, the core, the intuition, in order to then find a more original way to externalize it. Just as eurythmy attempts to go where the Word currently lives, we can attempt to go where the Dramas come from and are currently relevant. This is full of background and full of “underground.”
What does “underground” mean?
For example, what we absorb, for the most part unconsciously, through everything that goes into the composition of our speech and language, along with the informal paths of thinking. We have investigated what we call concordances. There’s something that resonates very quietly with every vowel, which can be captured musically. Deeper-sounding and brighter-sounding vowels, just as we have dark and light colors.
For example?
Philia speaks to two souls in the World Midnight, in the fifth and sixth scenes. She says to Johannes, “So seize the moment” [so nütz den Augenblick]. At the end, it becomes very bright in the “I” [pronounced “ee”]. She expresses the same thought to Capesius in a different way: “So seize the right time” [so nutz die Zeitengunst]. Here we enter the darkness of the “U” [pronounced “oo”]. For me, this was an immediate experience. Johannes has to wake up. He must enlighten himself—as becomes apparent in the “I” sound. But to Capesius, one must say, “No, you must still look within yourself, you must still find your roots”—in the darkness, in the “U”. The thought is the same: be attentive to the moment. But Capesius should go into the “U” and Johannes into the “I”.
And Lucifer, the “light bringer,” says about himself, “The beings who from me flee, love me” [Die Wesen, die mich fliehen, lieben mich].1 That is a meditation in itself: ten bright vowels, only “E” [pronounced “ay,” as in “hay”] and “I”. Try saying that for a while! The concordances work from the “underground” of poetry.
Doesn’t it get confusing with so many different aspects and effects?
I don’t experience it that way. With the Dramas, it’s like an orchestra you can hear and appreciate without knowing all the details. The Dramas have many layers. Over time, you can discover how different levels interact with one another—an energetic, soul level, a synesthesia where color and sound come together. Spiritual beings are constantly active, and it’s as if this life is composed in the lines we try to bring into the present.
How do you experience these Dramas in our time?
I was struck by the fact that the fourth Drama, in particular, talks a lot about energies. That’s quite modern, actually, but it means something different from what we normally understand by energy. Our technology has developed rapidly since the Dramas were written. But the abilities of the main characters are much more advanced than what we can generally carry out ourselves today. Take Strader, for example, who sees these little flames around Capesius and Felix. These are—according to our standards—very futuristic abilities of perception. The themes address technical questions of energy production, economic issues, and business management. However, the inner development goes much further than our times; these are abilities that are already present here and there but still seem rather restrained.
In general, we are now completely overwhelmed by Ahriman, and the question is how we can discover our way out of this situation. In your article,2 you mentioned the lectures3 that show the way forward; the musician is mentioned as a pioneer. It’s essential to understand the experiences that accompany initiation. The overcoming, the liberations, the resistances, and the redemptions. One can find a general description of this there, and it is demonstrated concretely in the Dramas.
I found your production to be “modern.” How did that come about?
I asked myself: What would it be like if I broke away from old conceptions? What new conceptions do I have when I read the Dramas? Then this image came to me, that it always comes from silence—again and again. Not spatial transformations but a dark space from which everything wants to emerge. There is also something threatening about that. It’s not simply there. No stage set is simply there. We always have to let everything emerge from the darkness. We are familiar with darkness from our inner meditative work: when I leave all external beauty behind and immerse myself in this darkness, I find an inner light.
Is eurythmy a background for you?
For me, it is both background and foreground. Over the past 15 years, we’ve repeatedly pointed out that Rudolf Steiner considered eurythmy to be the appropriate means of bringing the suprasensory into manifestation. I’ve now incorporated this more into the Dramas, following suggestions from the author that we found. And we can now say from experience that this has been confirmed in many ways, even by people in the audience who were unfamiliar with either the Dramas or eurythmy. When it succeeds, it’s completely natural, completely “consistent” for spiritual beings to “speak” through this kind of movement.
What is most exciting for you when you perform these Dramas in front of an audience?
There are always people who are seeing the Dramas for the first time—relatives, friends, and complete strangers. I’m especially interested in what happens in these instances. And I have the impression that it’s not just the performances that have changed in recent years, but also the audience. Yes, there is a certain reserved attitude. But there’s also the other side: there are more and more open-minded, unbiased people in the audience who want to just let it all sink in. All viewers bring something of their own biography with them, as well as certain capacities, feelings, and perceptions. And we on stage bring something. No prior knowledge is necessary. What happens is individual. I was told that someone missed their child who had passed away. And then they sat in the performance and felt: now, they’re here.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Images Mysterien Dramas 2023. Photos: Georg Tedeschi
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner, The Guardian of the Threshold, scene 6, in Four Modern Mystery Dramas, CW 14 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2023).
- Louis Defèche, “Learning from the Coldness of the Machine,” Das Goetheanum: English Edition (Oct. 16, 2025)
- Rudolf Steiner, Art as Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom, CW 275 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2010), lectures in Dornach, Dec. 28, 1914–Jan. 4, 1915.
