The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1912–1918

GA 277a — 26 April 1913, Düsseldorf

Notes on the Development of Eurythmy

On April 26, 1913, Lory Smits presented the work she had done so far with her students to Rudolf Steiner and his companions for the first time. Rudolf Steiner was able to give some new exercises and also the text “Der Wolkendurchleuchter” (The Cloud Illuminator). - Additions from “Die Anfänge der Eurythmie” (The Beginnings of Eurythmy) were included in Lory Maier-Smits' notes; they are indented in the print for better recognition.

Erna van Deventer-Woifram, from: “The Origin and Task of Eurythmy”

On a rainy afternoon, I arrived at the Smits family home [...]. The first thing I heard upon entering the house was the sound of very steady, rhythmic footsteps, accompanied by a woman's voice chanting, rather than reciting, a poem in time with the footsteps. Stepping from the entrance hall into the room, I saw a sight that was as remarkable as it was deeply moving: several children and a few adults were solemnly walking in a circle, one behind the other, all except the teacher dressed in light sea-green robes held together by fine gold cords. The teacher herself (Lory Smits) wore a white robe in the same style, also held together with a gold cord. These figures walked in time to the very metrical poem: -v -v -v -v -v -v “Deep silence reigns in the water” (Meeresstille, by Goethe), in trochaic meter. With their hands, they accompanied the rhythm of their feet with almost geometric shapes, which they performed with their hands and arms.

Lory Maier-Smits, notes from 1965, with additions from: “The Beginnings of Eurythmy”

But how much easier, even more lively, the whole work became when Annemarie Donath-Dubach joined us in mid-March 1913 and immediately participated in everything so quickly and naturally that one could only marvel and rejoice. With her arrival, the often very difficult, lonely mornings came to an end, because now everything was worked out in a joyful community, and for me it was a great benefit to experience everything anew with someone who was almost the same age and, above all, so artistic. In mid-April, Erna Wolfram-van Deventer joined us as the third member of the group. The poor woman had less than two weeks until the long-awaited day when we were finally allowed to show Rudolf Steiner what we had been working on and how we had prepared ourselves.

He arrived on April 26, 1913, exactly seven months after we had begun our work following our return from Basel. Dr. Steiner came to see us shortly before lunch, accompanied by Mrs. Helene Röchling and Miss Mieta Waller, the first performer of “Thomasius” in the four Mystery Dramas. The two ladies and a third gentleman, Adolf Arenson, who was staying with us during Rudolf Steiner's visit to Düsseldorf, got to know our new art on that day — and loved it [.. .]. Unfortunately, Miss Marie von Sivers did not arrive in Düsseldorf until the evening, returning from a long stay in the north; so she was not present on this festive and significant day for us, but we were able to welcome her in the evening during the lecture.

Soon after lunch, which was, as usual in Rudolf Steiner's presence, very cheerful (once, when only “ladies” graced the table besides him, he offered my sister, who was barely six years old at the time, his arm and said, “Now let's make a colorful row”), we disappeared to “change clothes.” Except for me, who had a white dress because in some exercises a conducting, sometimes also somewhat encouraging figure stands in the middle, and I also had to show my two poems afterwards, everyone wore light green dresses – in Dionysian green – which my mother, not Dr. Steiner, had chosen to match the copper, the metal of Venus, with which our rods were wrapped. How well the fresh young birch branches with which our eurythmy room was decorated matched this. A few comfortable armchairs were ready for our guests – yes – and then we just had to begin! The carefully arranged program began with alliterations, control exercises, and rhythms. When we performed “Chor der Schmiede” (Chorus of the Smiths) from Goethe's Pandora – that is, when we performed a dactyl – Dr. Steiner took the book from my mother's hand and read it himself! And how he read! I have often recounted, both verbally and in writing, how he did it. How he began slowly, so that we could really draw our “measure” in front of us in the room, how he then spoke faster and faster, finally so fast and yet so controlled and clearly accented, as I have never heard anyone speak again, how – at least for me – every effort to make clear, distinct movements disappeared, and only dactylus, the living being dactylus in the room, seized us and moved and carried away our limbs! But then this prestissimo quickly subsided again, so that we could form a dactylus again and the dactylus no longer us! This is how tempo increases should be handled, Dr. Steiner then explained: slowly, gradually fast, and then quickly slow again. [...] Afterwards, we showed how his instruction: “Suddenly transition from a fast run to a strict standstill” – good for one-sided sanguine children and people – had been trained by us. The exercise: one step – stand still, two steps – stand still, three steps – stand still, and so on up to seven steps – stand still. The steps as fast and light as possible, the standstill as sudden and tight as possible! This form of exercise does not originate from Rudolf Steiner and can therefore quite legitimately be done differently, and has already been done differently by many, including us.

Then came our varied stick exercise, which we had already developed quite extensively for reasons of “poor posture,” in a wide variety of rhythms, walking forward and backward in pairs. And when we were finished, Dr. Steiner himself asked for a stick, i.e., he simply took mine out of my hand and demonstrated a series of new possibilities for stick exercises, different grips, postures, and movements. From the starting position of the exercise just demonstrated—i.e., holding the stick down with arms outstretched—he lifted it up to his shoulder by moving his upper arms wide out to the sides, not forward, and said: “This is a very healthy movement!” Then he grasped the stick behind his back, palms facing inward, threw it up as high as possible and caught it between his upper arm and shoulder blade: “And that is also a healthy movement!” Thirdly, he quickly brought the stick from the front over his head to the back, let it go and caught it again with his arms stretched out behind him! “And you have to be skilled to keep the stick from falling to the ground!” Since we all tried it right away, of course, sticks kept falling to the floor – sometimes even Dr. Steiner's. It became very cheerful and noisy – especially when he demonstrated other “skill exercises.” Not only did he whirl the staff, holding it with three fingers in front of him, sideways, up and down, turning it from his wrist, but he also let it circle his hand, alternately running it over the back of his hand and through his palm. And then “Qui!”. First, he let go of the stick completely in order to change the grip, holding it once from above and once from below, giving the stick a very slight impulse forward, not upward.

Then he threw the stick forward with his arms slightly outstretched, holding it from above, only to grasp it again from below and throw it forward again, thus constantly changing his grip as if walking behind the stick.

“If you practice this a lot, it can eventually look as if the stick is floating in front of you in space. Your hands just have to make sure it doesn't fall!” “But you can also do it this way!” He performed this second type, the well-known “Qui,” with his arms stretched forward lightly and softly, and said: “This must be done as lightly and delicately as the call of a bird on a branch: ‘Qui! Qui!’ You mustn't get too close, otherwise the bird will fly away! And if you do it too close and ‘short-sightedly’ in front of your nose, the ‘lightness’ will also fly away!”

Finally, he showed the spiral, which should also be done in the “seven-beat rhythm” that arises most naturally from the human organism and, in a spiral ascending and descending in the same direction, giving strength and form, effectively circles the average person. - How beautiful and important it would be if one could really do all this with “Greek music” as accompaniment, that is, in the correct “seven-beat rhythm,” because, as Rudolf Steiner once said: “It is not possible in our tonal system, but Greek music tolerates this 7/8 rhythm very well.” Wouldn't that be a reason to incorporate this music into eurythmy?

Dr. Steiner also demonstrated a kind of lapwing step (as he called it), but without striking the back of the knee, as would later be practiced in curative eurythmy exercises. But he called it that and only did long, short, long. But how long those lengths were! How joyful he was and how elegant his movements! So much of his information and inspiration has been left behind, not only because of the abundance of what was given, but also because of our human inadequacy and sluggishness.

After this refreshing interlude, our “program” continued smoothly through several numbers without any additions or new ideas. We did the “energy and peace dance,” then “I and You,” and then “We.” At first, I stood in the middle, as indicated in the drawings for these group dances, but then, as usual when practicing, I joined the circle out of “joy in being together,” and suddenly Dr. Steiner said to the audience: “Lory is walking just right! She walks like a tightrope walker or like a savage in the jungle.” And then, turning to me, he said: "But it's not enough that you walk correctly, you also have to know how you do it, you have to be able to explain it to your students. If you can't do that, you'll have to take a Kodak and record every phase of your steps so that you can show it to your students later.“ However, he didn't expect me to know this right away, so I'll have to present the results of our efforts later.

After ”Wir" came various lemniscates, of course, stepped together in a circle and also spoken together. Annemarie Donath-Dubach and I even performed the “Harmonious Eight.” Dr. Steiner became more and more cheerful with each number, and we became more and more elated and happy with his joyful and loving approval. Yes, and then it suddenly became apparent that we had forgotten both the singular and plural forms of the third-person pronoun, ‘he’ and “they,” in our program. “Sie” forms. Dr. Steiner's only reaction was: “I see what you are missing are texts! But I will create them for you!”

And then came the most beautiful thing that happened on this beautiful day! He called us three “big ones” together, had us form a small circle, and while he spoke the words in a strong, resonant voice:

The cloud illuminator —
He illuminates
He shines through
He glows through
He warms through
Me too!

he directed our steps in the room. At “the cloud-piercer,” we were to take two steps back reverently to form a second, larger circle around the deity, walk the four petitions anapestic on this circle, and at “me too” take two steps again to “approach the deity imploringly.” "Even though there were three of us ‘beggars,’ Dr. Steiner said ‘also me’ and not ‘also us.’ We had to do it several times, and I know that everyone who witnessed it has never forgotten that moment. At that time, we all sensed the profound human-forming and human-healing power of this new mystery art inaugurated for our time.

After a very brief silence and reflection, he called us three “great ones.” We had to stand in a small circle, facing the center, and then he recited the first poem created for eurythmy in a resonant, powerful voice, while simultaneously directing our movements in space: “The cloud illuminator —” As you do so, take two steps back to form a larger circle. Now four anapaests on this extended circle: He illuminates
He suns —
He glows
He warms through And now two steps forward again toward the center: Me too!" We then repeated it several times, and I believe that all the spectators and we performers had the same moving and joyful experience: now true eurythmy is born; it has come alive in all its sacred and formative power.

Actually, we should have ended our performances there, but there was still so much to show! “Ball and spread” was still missing – “serpentines” were still missing. Erna Wolfram, who of course could not yet participate in everything, demonstrated, despite her very short “apprenticeship,” the large enveloping serpentine, which, in addition to “strongly anchoring the ego,” is very good for people suffering from pallor. At that time, she was the “paleest” among us. She made a sequence of consonants chosen only by us, namely d f g k h, in order to then, once all disturbing influences from the outside world had been rejected and repelled, arrive at the final position “with hands placed on the heart” eu via small l movements.

We also demonstrated Evoe: first in a circle with a huge piece of pyrite in the middle. [...] After an Evoe, which Annemarie Donath and I performed, greeting each other solemnly, and an “accompanied by music” l exercise, we demonstrated "Hallelujah... h“ and, after a break in which I armed myself with a ”veil stole“ as I was still facing the somewhat indecisive struggle with the consonant poem, I presented my two Goethe poems and a little ”lullaby" by Clemens Brentano, which we performed as a group of three.

At the mystery plays in Munich, Philia, Astrid, and Luna always spoke in a minor triad when they spoke together. Luna, the prim, Astrid, as the intellectual and emotional soul, the minor third, and Philia, the fifth. It was performed as reeitando, as spoken song, not really sung. [...] We liked this way of speaking with the soul's powers so much that we did the same in our lullaby. Not even Rudolf Steiner objected to that at the time! Nor to our musical finale!

When I was searching through the music literature available to me for music that would be suitable for us, first to find an accompaniment for the round dances in the preliminary exercises, and later also for the stick exercise, for “balling and spreading,” and even for rhythms, I noticed a little piece called ‘Semplice’ in Schumann's “Papillons.” “Semplice” begins with a rhythmic motif of two bars each, which is repeated four times. The first bar has six eighth notes and the second three quarter notes, which are always based on the penultimate note of the first bar. We now began with six quick running steps, arms in “Innig,” but then not only did we suddenly stop, we also made a three-quarter turn in the opposite direction on the spot, transitioning into the “lovely” position. The four of us ran in a square, and since we never wanted to show ourselves completely from behind, one side had to be run backwards. When my youngest sister (eight years old) came to this “difficult spot” and visibly struggled to reach the right place at the back, Dr. Steiner suddenly exclaimed, beaming, “Just look how gracefully little Thea is running!” Even before that, he had happily noticed the most insignificant, random little things: “That's quite something, doing it so skillfully!” he said once, for example, when I drew eights or serpentines on the floor for my young “colleagues,” using myself as a kind of compass. And so our first eurythmy performance, which ended with “Semplice,” dissolved into loud, satisfied, lively, cheerful conversations. When the initial joy, and for us performers also excitement, had subsided, we were finally able to ask a few questions, especially about the “self-invented” ö, ö, and sch movements. Rudolf Steiner had no objections, but did not give any further explanations, as he had done in 1924, for example, with regard to the sch “das Wegblasende” (the blowing away) or the ä: a # and the movement of the arms themselves as i frisieren. We had already had to use the i very clearly in “Er durchglühe” (He glows through), and my half-fearful, half-guilty glance at Dr. Steiner had not even detected any surprise or bewilderment in his expression. Nevertheless, it was better to receive a clear confirmation or rejection and correction.

I would also have liked to receive confirmation and correction on another matter: I mentioned that I sometimes “tested” our poets to see if there were passages that would be suitable for practicing a particular sound in different inflections, such as a in “Barbara saß stracks am Abhang” or “Lass' ahnend nahn am Abend Phantasie.” Now, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the third part, in the section “Im Vorübergehen” (In Passing), there is a sentence with nothing but umlauts, especially with a deliberately intended accumulation of ö, “where everything that is broken, lustful, gloomy, overripe, ulcerous, conspiratorial comes together!” At first I was very enthusiastic, but when I tried it, it turned out to be a great disappointment, unsatisfactory and impossible to experience something ü-like, as I had always felt so strongly in my favorite ö exercise – in the words of the doppelganger: “I will equip you well with my strength.” How relieved I was when Dr. Steiner agreed emphatically: “You are quite right, this is simply a ‘sound game’ in Nietzsche, which comes from the head and not from a real sound sensation; it cannot be expressed in a meaningful way.” Could this be a sign that I had taken a small step on the path of “learning to feel”? And now, since 1924, we have had the following motto for ü and the whole of eurythmy: “Examine yourself, student, practice with effort”; phonetically, ö is also used here in connection with i, as in: “I will equip you well with my strength” and Richard Dehmel's “Hieroglyph.”

Finally, we asked Dr. Steiner to give us a new poem. He took a book, an anthology of modern poets, which was lying on the piano with his small book Zyrik der Gegenwart (Contemporary Poetry) and other books. Although almost all the poets he had discussed in his book were represented in this collection, he had to search for a long time, often shaking his head, until he came across a short poem by Richard Dehmel and pointed to it. “You can do that.” -[...] The Dehmel poem he chose, which begins with three interesting pairs of rhymes, is called:

Hieroglyph
In all depths
you must test yourself,
To feel your way
clearly to your goals.
But love
is the murky one. Every boat,
in which longing sings,
is also the throat
that devours it.
But whether surrounded by teeth
Life sits and rejoices:
Love!

So we had shown everything we had learned up to that point. And then it was time for Rudolf Steiner and his companions to return to Düsseldorf. Miss von Sivers had to be picked up at the train station, and in the evening was the first of the two lectures. And now something happened that I am not telling for my own sake, but only to describe his greatness, kindness, and human positivity. He took my hand in both of his and... thanked me. When I stammered, completely shocked and stunned, " But Doctor, we must thank you!“ he took my hand again and repeated: ”No, I thank you.“ And again at the front door, before he got into the car, that handshake and: ”Thank you." - He also exemplified this virtue of gratitude and thankfulness, which has been so largely lost in our time, with natural greatness and sustaining warmth. But we remained very happy and filled with gratitude, newly inspired and ready to devote all our energies to our work, to eurythmy.

How fortunate it was that we were only at the beginning of our days with Rudolf Steiner, that we still had two lectures ahead of us, otherwise one might truly have believed that this day had been nothing but a blissful dream. But there were various tasks to be done, and in the evening after the last lecture there was another one. I was to try to work out “Charon” from Goethe's New Greek-Epirote heroic songs in eurythmy. He gave an introduction based on vowels and consonants, and the first part up to “No, it is Charon” was to be done vocally, from there on consonantically, and then the conclusion “I do not stand still at the enclosure ...”, i.e. Charon's words, was to be done vocally again. I had to find the forms in space myself, and I also had to choose “the object for joint movement and shaping,” which I hold in my hand. Since I had read somewhere that Charon was often depicted with a hammer, I chose one made of gilded wood, which looked almost like a “tau.”

And that wasn't all! Rudolf Steiner was coming to Düsseldorf from Elberfeld at the time, and my mother and I had already greeted him in Elberfeld and asked him to visit us out at Haus Meer, which he scheduled for the very next day. After the lecture, I was allowed to walk part of the way with him Dr. Steiner took us to the train station. On the way, he suddenly asked me, even though he would not see the results of our work until the next day, whether I had ever thought of trying my hand at a French poem: “Your father loved France and the French language so much, he spoke French better than German. He would certainly be delighted!” — However, it was not until January 1914, at the second general meeting of the Anthroposophical Society, that I was ready to perform a poem by Lamartine, “Le Matin,” at a performance in Berlin. When I had finished, he stood up and said, “You see, a French eurythmized poem really looks very different from a German one!”

After Dr. Steiner's visit, we continued to work together with renewed enthusiasm for almost two months. We tried to find certain forms for the various “healthy movements” or those for which one already “had to be skilled.” This joint effort resulted in the “Twelve-part Exercise” and the exercise later called ‘Waterfall’ – neither by Dr. Steiner nor by us. We tried hard not to create a “waterfall of sticks,” even though we tried to increase the tempo more and more and make the intermediate movements faster and faster. So these last two exercises show only a form chosen by us and not by Rudolf Steiner, and he was always the first to rejoice in new ideas, complaining: “None of you have any imagination!”

In May and June 1913, after Dr. Steiner's visit, we also worked more on an exercise that I can't remember exactly whether we had already shown him when he was with us. “Every sound must correspond to a foot movement in the dance,” was written on the last page of the Bottminger notes. And so this was also a set task, and we had to work on it and “learn to feel” what it meant in the context of eurythmy.

On the other hand, the anapaest was very much at the center of Dionysian forms and group dances, and so anapaestic exercises were developed in which the length always corresponded to and was followed by a “sound.” There were energetic, tragic, and cheerful, even “bacchanalian” anapaests, unfortunately, for the time being, only with hand clapping. Later, we used beautiful authentic Chinese bronze cymbals, which were a real delight in terms of sound and form. But what could be learned and experienced through these exercises could also be achieved in this way: for it was not only the “sounding” followed the movement of the feet, but the movement of the whole body, pouring out into the arms and hands, received its impulse and character from the way in which this impulse, whether energetic and taut, tragic and heavy, or cheerful and lively, was triggered by the movement of the feet in connection with the earth, and from there, like a sound and a flow, took hold of the whole figure unbroken! I don't really need to write down the explanation we found together at that time for “walking correctly like a tightrope walker.” After much searching, trying, and discarding, it was exactly the same as the one that can be read in the 1924 eurythmy course. Only we explicitly called the first phase “rebelling against being bound to the earth” or “will impulse,” and the second phase “thought or path,” which led to the third phase, “action, touching the earth again.” Completely focused on the active foot. One actually felt one's feet as animated, consciously willing beings that tested the set goal with all their intensity in order to then connect powerfully with it.

When Dr. Steiner made the remark at the time: "She walks correctly, she walks like a tightrope walker,“ it was during the ‘we’ exercise, and I felt a great deal of joy and momentum within me, and really had no time to switch to what he called the ”Egyptian earthbound phase." Therefore, a four-part step had to be rejected as unsatisfactory, in which the whole foot was placed fully on the ground as the fourth phase. This only happened when the “revolt” of the second foot meant that the entire weight had to be caught and carried by the first foot.

Ever since the day in Kassel when Rudolf Steiner showed me the two statues, so different in their relationship to the earth: the Apollo of Tenea and the Apollo Sauroktonos, I had a happy inkling that walking involved a living interaction between the foot and the earth, and not the activation of a " mechanism,“ as a ‘gymnast’ had tried to explain to me shortly before: ”If you want to take a step, you first have to ‘shorten’ the leg in question by pulling it up at the hip. This lifts the foot off the ground and now the leg can swing three times" and take a corresponding step with a smaller or larger swing! - In contrast, what one experienced with these two statues was so exhilarating because the feet were no longer just some lifeless weight swinging along at the bottom of the leg, but rather active, conscious, feeling limbs. They had to activate the impulse of “revolting” and free themselves from their “earthbound” state through their actions.

We had also tried a “four-part” step, in which the fourth phase was when the foot was placed fully on the ground, and not only when, due to the “revolt” of the second foot, it now had to take up and carry the weight of the whole body. However, this seemed very unnatural to us and interrupted the flow of movement in an unattractive way. Dr. Steiner had also commented at the time during the “we” exercise that “she walks correctly, she walks like a tightrope walker,” and I felt a great deal of joy and momentum within myself and really had no time to insert a fourth phase and thus interrupt the very conscious forward and backward movement. And so we finally arrived at the explanation of the “three-part” step that satisfied all three of us.

In this context, I would like to quote an interpretation of the word “teaching” that Dr. Steiner once gave: “Something is corrected, rectified, brought into the direction desired by the teacher, but – beneath the surface. A child” – and in eurythmy we were all ‘children’ – “is taught, not by appealing to intellectual understanding, but by letting it do.” Perhaps we should view the last two points from this perspective!

He encouraged the experience of “letting sound resonate in dance” in the manner described, unspoken as an exercise, unbroken by movements flowing through the whole figure. He encouraged us to experience and act on the difference between “earthboundness” through the Egyptian-archaic form and voluntary, careful “earth connection” – through writing with our feet – in a fruitful direction. In the Greek figure, he emphasized the “revolt against earthboundness” and thus showed that all progress, even in space, must arise through the alternation of freedom and bondage—but also voluntarily.