The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 25 August 1918, Dornach

1. Eurythmy Address

In honor of the visit of Hendrik zu Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Prince of the Netherlands (1876–1934) at the Goetheanum, the “Prologue in Heaven” from Goethe's “Faust” was performed and introduced by an address by Rudolf Steiner.

Program of the performance

Perhaps I may take the liberty of saying a few words in advance about the following ideas about the meaning and intentions that we associate with the art of eurythmy. A piece of this eurythmic art is to be presented.

We see this eurythmic art as something, I would say, like a renewal, but in a thoroughly modern form, a renewal of the ancient temple dance art. If we think of inaugurating something of this kind today, it is of course necessary to consider the whole meaning of human artistic development and the meaning of human cultural development in general, if anything that is to be new is to come into the present. If we look at the various branches of human spiritual development today, we see that they coexist side by side. Art, religion, science, in fact all human spiritual movements, actually arise from one root. And if you look at the divine-sacred secrets of humanity in older epochs, in the original cultures, so to speak – they could be regarded, insofar as they could be taken from the senses, as beautiful art. The same thing could also be seen as having an effect on the capacity for knowledge, and then it was science. But the same thing could also be seen as having an effect on human devotion, and then it was religion.

In this way, religion, art and science were divided, and the individual cultural branches were in turn divided into the individual arts. When we consider an individual branch of art today, especially one that is to exist, then it is a matter of placing ourselves in this whole spiritual context, which shines and glimmers up to us from the history of humanity.

Something like this approached us when we were prompted, one might say by fate, to think about inaugurating this eurythmy. This is not about creating something arbitrary, purely out of fantasy, but about placing something into the world that is taken from the spiritual, from the spiritual laws of the world's existence itself. But everything that can be placed into the world can be found in some form in the human being. The human being is truly a small world, a microcosm within the great world of the macrocosm. This is taken from the workings and weaving of an organic system of the human being, the workings and weaving of the invisible forces that are always at work — we call them the etheric forces in our spiritual science — that are always at work when we speak or think. We not only have this visible physical larynx, which anatomy or physiology has at hand, but behind it the invisible mass of forces of the larynx and the organs that connect to it. There, as we speak, movements of a locally limited part of this organism are revealed to the seeing eye.

Now it is a matter of elevating to art that which is otherwise there by nature, entirely in the style and sense in which Goethe conceived a modified concept of art in the manner of his theory of metamorphosis. After all, when he wanted to form an idea of Greek works of art in Italy, he said: There is necessity, there is God. There, he said, the divine is revealed in man. And for him it was about man coming to an awareness of his connection with the whole universe in every art. We act in his spirit when we transfer that which works in the invisible part of the larynx in local demarcation in nature to the whole human being.

And so we first transfer into movements of the human limbs what is otherwise only carried out in speaking, singing, and music by the invisible part of the larynx and its neighboring organs. There is no pantomime here, but everything is strictly logical. Every single vowel returns, returns in its corresponding contexts, sentence forms, and structure of language and music. All this should also be expressed in this spatial-movement art of the human being.

Now, when we speak and sing, we not only move the invisible larynx, but we also send, into the movements of the larynx, I would say our soul, our heart, our whole being. This is only in the undertones, one would like to say, in the undertone of what we express. When we bring warmth, enthusiasm, rhythm, artistic expression into what we say, then there is something contained in the speaking. We dissolve this and it appears in the group dances. The movements that the group performs, which arise from the position of the individual personalities in the groups, correspond to what is not actually performed by the person, but only predisposed in this invisible larynx, what is undertone. What the individual person performs for themselves in space is a complete reflection of what the invisible larynx performs in every speech of the person. So it is essentially a transformation of the whole person into a living larynx, a bringing into relationship with the individual person, just as the larynx comes into relationship in mutual discussion. Nature has moved up into art. One could say: art is higher nature in nature. - That is meant here in the corresponding art.

I would ask you to consider this branch, which is an episode, an insertion, of our actual spiritual scientific work, in such a way that it is only just beginning as it is now presented. And they are only weak attempts that are to be carried out. But everything that comes into the world can only come into the world in a germinal way, especially when it appears as a first attempt. It is as such quite unassuming attempts that we are permitted to present what we now offer in individual poems and in a eurythmic arrangement of Goethe's “Prologue in Heaven”, the beginning of “Faust”.