The '39 Series'

If we compare the '39 Series' with Gurdjieff's earlier Movements, we find the same components: strong dervish dances, beautiful and quiet women's dances, powerful geometrically patterned Movements, as well as sacred prayer rituals. However, the ancient religious and ethnological components are markedly reduced while abstract gestures and positions, performed in mathematical displacements, now prevail. It is as if, during the fifteen-year interval since his first efforts, Gurdjieff had digested his earlier impressions and reflected upon them. When he continued his work on the Movements, they reappeared with an even more personal style, in which mathematical and geometrical crystallisations are now dominant.
The drama of the human condition, so poignantly captured in a number of the old Movements, seems to have given way to a more abstract construction, but one that gives immediate and plentiful opportunity for work on oneself and work for the class as a whole. The later Movements were even more difficult to perform than the earlier ones and demanded a huge effort from a class in terms of precision, quickness, discipline and sustaining attention.
The 39 Movements have been called Gurdjieff's magnum opus; many have felt that they summarised his whole teaching to mankind.