The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 25 May 1919, Stuttgart

13. Eurythmy Performance

Note: The shorthand for this address was sometimes difficult to decipher and incomplete; the following text bears the traces of this.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Allow me to say a few words about our performance of eurythmic art. This is all the more necessary because this demonstration is not just about something that is already complete in itself today, but rather it is just a rehearsal, or perhaps I could say it is an attempt at a rehearsal. It might be tempting to compare what is on offer today with all kinds of neighboring arts. We are fully aware that we must not compete with such neighboring arts. From their point of view, such neighboring arts have already reached a certain level of perfection today. We do not want to place something alongside it that is meant to compete with it, but rather something that is quite different, that also needs quite different artistic foundations and also /illegible word/ a different artistic ethos.

If I may express in a few words what the eurythmy art seeks to achieve in its efforts to take its place in contemporary cultural life, I would say: Goethe's artistic attitude and that which we believe to be his artistic conviction must live and breathe in it. Goethe, after all, spoke beautifully of all things artistic: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to someone, they feel the most ardent longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” And it was only from his great, comprehensive worldview that he was able to develop such an artistic conviction.

What Goethe's all-embracing mind has actually achieved for humanity in a single area of life and world view is still not sufficiently appreciated, and is far from being fully developed in the development of culture. One need only look at one thing, my dear ladies and gentlemen, in Goethe's work, at what is said with the words: The whole plant is nothing more than a more complicated plant leaf, and the plant leaf is nothing more than a simplified plant. And what Goethe says about plants from his comprehensive and penetrating world view can be applied to all living things, not only for spiritual insight (gap in text), but also, in particular, to everything artistic and intuitive up to the human being.

From this basis, what eurythmy art wants to be emerges. It is meant to reveal a secret, the great secret, ladies and gentlemen, that remains hidden in ordinary life - like all artistic secrets - and that takes place between the humanly spoken words, the sung sounds, the musically played tone and the listening. In the prose of everyday life, the listener must suppress much of what lives in him. There is a mysterious resonance in the hearing person's speech organs when the spoken, sung or played tone sounds to them. But it is not just a reverberation and resonance – mysterious next to the human organism of the larynx and its neighboring organs – but [a reverberation and resonance] of the whole human being. Looking at these secrets [between the listener and the speaker, the singer and that which reveals itself in music], he recognizes what lies in the movements of the whole human being, when they can be grasped from the whole being of the human being: a larynx that has completely merged with the whole human being and his movement. The whole human being can become a larynx; by becoming it, it expresses what is suppressed in the prose of life.

That which vibrates and weaves within him, that which is suppressed there, is to be brought to [representation] through the art of eurythmy. On the stage, the whole human being should become a larynx. But that which resonates through the artistically designed language, the musically artistically designed sound as a human soul mood, as rhythm, alliteration, rhyme, assonance, as soul feeling and soul life, that is to come to revelation in the group eurythmy movements, in the movements in space, which are performed by a number of performers. In this way something can be achieved that, like music, has its own inner laws.

In this eurythmic art nothing is an expression of a mere momentary inner soul stirring, nothing is mere gesture, nothing is mere pantomime; if you see something like that, it is only because it has not yet been fully developed. What follows on from each other in the individual movements is absolutely rooted in the laws of these successive movements themselves – as in the art of music. /[Unintelligible passage, see notes.] When two eurythmic performers [illegible word] or [two eurythmic] groups present an [identical] poem or piece of music, the difference is no greater than there is [between two performances] of Beethoven's music.

Of course, this also sets an important task for the accompanying recitation and music. This task is still difficult to grasp today, since the [recitation today] has, by law, been reduced to a mere [rendition of what is] prosaically in the poetry, which [...] is illegible words]. I would like to take this opportunity to remind you of something [...] /illegible words] a poet like Schiller. Schiller always felt an indeterminate melody in his soul before [he created a] poem, and the transformation of this [melody], the transformation of this movement, that, [what] passes into that, what he then rhyming and the overall form of the poem, is what recitation will bring out again, for example, if it draws on our spatial movement art, our eurythmy.

This is what must have a fertilizing effect, derived from human words and music to the movement of the human body, but in turn must have an effect from the movement of the human [body] into the artistically spoken words and music. For basically, just as a single leaf only lives in the whole plant, in the same way, that which an individual human being brings to artistic recitation or artistic speech, is part of the whole.

But all that I have been able to explain in these few intimate words as the essence of this eurythmic art, I ask you to consider it in such a way that we really are at the very beginning of this art today. We are aware of all the imperfections and mistakes we ourselves have made, and we can be criticized for them. We are most certainly the strictest critics of what is offered here. But we also hope that what is only meant to be a beginning, a /illegible words/, so that from this collaboration of the artistically intended and the public, that which, if it satisfies us, /illegible] perhaps [...] /illegible words] will arise from this collaboration between the artistically intended and the public, where a perfection of a human art of movement will arise that is not a dance art but something that is intended to inspire what a person is able to reveal through the external movement of his body.

Then this art will also [...] /illegible words] be able to have an extraordinarily healing effect on [the] social] conditions. People [...] /illegible words] can be inspired when eurythmy enters them [in this way] as it [already] lay in the primal movements of primeval man, when these [...] / unreadable; gap?] are started again /unreadable word] in our developed culture, then many things that today live uninspired in life will be inspired, and this will have a social effect. In this sense, I ask that what we can offer now not be seen as complete, but rather as a sample, yes, I say it openly, initially as an attempt at a sample, from which we hope, however, that it could flourish into ever greater perfection.