The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1912–1918

GA 277a — 19 February 1918, Munich

Address on Eurythmy

As eurythmist Annemarie Donath writes in her memoirs, the short eurythmy performance that followed the address, in which she herself participated, took place “in a private home.”

When, a number of years ago, Mrs. Smits suggested that we should first create something within our movement that would spiritualize the art of dance, the question was: How could we approach this special art form today? — It is true that on such an occasion one must consider that in our time there is much in the artistic field that, I would say, is a very late product of something that goes back to times long past. One could say that in our time there are certain endeavors of which we only know the later stages, nothing of the origin. If our movement is to have greater significance, it must gain this, among other things, by connecting in some way to the origins of humanity. And so it is a matter of searching, as it were, for the sources of this art form. The most diverse artistic endeavors have actually arisen — as one becomes convinced when one goes back to the sources through occult science — when, to put it briefly, human beings express their own nature, which is initially immediate to them, in a certain way and imitate it in the physical world. This is how all artistic endeavors have arisen. Experiences that take place in the subconscious are made visible in the outer world.

This led to the idea of observing that part of the human etheric body that is always dancing in a regular manner, namely the area of the human etheric or formative body that surrounds the larynx and the organs of speech in general. And because it is in the nature of the world that metamorphosis takes place everywhere, that the part strives everywhere to become a whole, and human life lies precisely in demystifying the whole of the part, it was natural to come up with the idea of highlighting what is realized supersensibly in the human etheric body while it speaks and sings in the entire human organization.

Just as the sculptor outwardly realizes what is expressed in the human form, so the spiritual researcher realizes what is brought about in the human larynx and the adjacent organs by the forces of the etheric body. And so eurythmy came into being through the combination of the movements that the human limbs can make, which can perform what the larynx organism performs when it speaks or sings.

But then, in addition to this movement, there is something else that lives in the same part of the human image-forming body, something that is held back, something that passes through our soul when we feel, when we experience impulses of will that can be translated into actions or simply felt. All this is not expressed in the same way in the image-forming body of the larynx as the word, the sound itself, but is expressed in a very formative way. We color, we permeate our speech and our singing with the tone of our will. But this does not translate into movement; it stalls the movement, so to speak. In the etheric body, a certain sound causes a swing, a movement of some kind to be performed. Feeling enters into the matter through the fact that this movement is dulled in a certain way and a form arises in the movement. While the movements of the etheric body are directly reflected in our eurythmy, what is contained in natural speech pours into the sounds, and eurythmy attempts to dissolve this, to bring it out. So, in eurythmy, we translate real movement into movements of the human limbs, or we dissolve movements that are latent while a person is speaking into real movements, into movements that the human organism then performs outside of its limbs by bending the head forward and backward, or by doing group dances. But you see that what we do is not something invented, but a reflection of what is present in the human organism. In this way, we really go back to the principles of ancient temple dance; for everything that was originally true temple art had as its principle the permeation of human life with the power of the word. But “word” was not understood in the way we understand it today, but rather the wisdom that resounds through the world in the sound of the spheres, which finds expression in the most diverse areas, which has a pure expression in human language, a somewhat more abstract expression in human song, which has a materialization in instrumental music, which can be redeemed when the whole human organism is brought into form and movement in the manner described. That is actually the principle at stake.

I believe that this has at least inaugurated something, even if it has not yet been achieved, that is capable of development. And over the last few years, we have seen how our members who practice eurythmy have advanced the cause, how they have been able to add the resonance of feeling and will to it. The matter can be taken further, can gradually be brought into the public eye. However, it must be assumed that there will be terrible criticism of the matter; but that is only to be expected. We must persevere. But we should not believe that eurythmy, when it is said that it should be brought into the public eye, should be transferred into the world of contemporary philistinism. If you believe that anything serious can be done in today's educational institutions, which are permeated by the worst kind of philistinism, by introducing a part of it, you would be indulging in terrible illusions. What I meant yesterday by bringing it into the public sphere was that this art should be presented to the public by those who are skilled in it, and then we should wait and see how it is received. I did not mean that it should be transferred immediately into the philistine world. Transferring our cause to the vast land of philistinism, which now surrounds all endeavors that are found there only as isolated oases—the land of philistinism can only learn about things little by little in an extremely cautious manner and be impressed by them.

We ourselves have learned something over the years from our eurythmy activities. At first, we thought of making it a mere art of expression. That was questionable, because such a thing cannot actually exist. But eurythmy is protected from this; it has a life of its own. It is protected by the fact that it is borrowed from reality, that is, from that which cannot be mere expression, but can be permeated by an inner life of its own. Therefore, it was only natural that recitation, which was initially more in the background, should stand alongside eurythmy as an independent art form, as was the case in earlier times, when the individual arts supported each other and were links in a total impression that was actually only evoked in the soul by the receptive human being himself. One must remember that the artistic process of reception, like that of creation, is an extraordinarily complicated one. When we receive or create art, there is never just one thing going on in the soul, but something subconscious and rhythmic. And if one analyzes psychologically what goes on in the soul in artistic creation and reception, one finds, like a string vibrating in two directions, a swinging of the mood in two directions. The only thing that prevents this from becoming conscious is that one paralyzes the other. It is a swinging back and forth between feelings of shame and fear. Fear is predisposed, shame is predisposed. This swinging of the soul is mutually paralyzed by the fact that the swing takes place in both directions. Those who live artistically are noticeable in that they actually always have two tendencies. One tends to blush, and when it wants to blush, it holds back the organism. It leaves its state of calm, but not to swing to one side, rather this is simultaneously paralyzed. This is also expressed in the interaction between purely expressionist art, which would cause a stronger blushing and would always swing more strongly to one side of blushing, and impressionist art, which would swing more strongly toward blushing. This results in a wonderful compensation when both things are allowed to interact.

The psychological process involved in the simplest things in life is already a complicated one. And as little as one might suspect it, in real artistic life, souls are actually torn between fear and shame, between blushing and turning pale. But the fact that the peculiarity of life in art presents itself to consciousness in a different way is based on something in the soul—as in the sea—that is difficult to describe and that must be known by those who want to engage in art as in the times when artistic forms were not created arbitrarily, but from the depths of spiritual life itself.