By the time I arrived in 1993, the Academy had already been functioning for a year. The first year had graduated to second and there was a new beginning class. Lessons were not situated in one building, as it had not been possible to locate one with two or more large rooms suitable for movement classes. One room was situated not far from Novodevichy Monaster', to the southwest of the Kremlin center. It was on the first floor of an apartment building, in a series of rooms that had been a club of sorts for years. The other room was in a similar sort of building with an unused club off of Leninsky Prospect ten or so miles directly to the east of the other. There was no straightforward way to get between the rooms, so the students and teachers had to take the metro to the center and out again for different classes.
That spring a course was given for those wishing to apply for admittance into the third beginning class. This course served as an entrance examination. I taught them eurythmy. They also had lessons in gymnastics, clay modeling, and speech. The students came from many different parts of Russia: Vologda, Novogorod, Samara, Yaroslavl, St. Petersburg, Syktyvkar in the northern province of Komi, Novosibirsk and as far away as Irkutsk on the shores of Lake Baikal. Somf of them were just out of high school, others had finished university, still others had already worked for some years. It was fascinating getting to know young people from such varied parts of Russia. I received invitations from my students to visit them at home, which is how I managed to afford to travel so much while in Russia.
When I asked them why they chose to come to Moscow to study eurythmy, invariably I got similar answers. They came to follow a new ideal in the study of eurythmy, which fostered a spiritual perspective of man, or they came because of the beauty they saw in eurythmy. Either answer revealed the vacuum of ideals young people felt before the fall of communism. During these years in Moscow, I watched many new things from the West rush into fill this vacuum, unfortunately, not always the best the West had to offer.