# The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

## GA 277b — 17 August 1919, Dornach

### 20. Eurythmy Performance

Dear attendees! The eurythmic art that we are going to present to you is based on the Goethean artistic ethos. Everything that is striven for in this building and everything that is connected with it essentially wants to be a continuation of everything that is inherent in the Goethean worldview. The attempt to create eurythmy is based on the artistic application of the great and comprehensive aspects of Goethe's world view to a specific, narrowly defined field. And in order to make clear how the artistic forms of expression brought about by the human limbs and by the movement of people or groups of people in space, in order to make understandable how these artistic forms of expression forms of artistic expression are used in eurythmy, I have to sketch in a few lines what underlies Goethe's world view, something that is still not sufficiently appreciated today.

What Goethe's world view is capable of is not something that arises one-sidedly from a merely theoretical observation of the world. Everything in Goethe that leads to an idea about nature and the human world is at the same time imbued with a true artistic feeling. In Goethe, art is scientifically illuminated, and science is artistically formed in thought. Therefore, his world view can be used to bridge the gap in artistic expression everywhere.

Now, it is easy to express how he views the development of life in nature. In the individual plant leaf, no matter how simply formed, Goethe saw the blueprint for an entire plant. And in turn, he saw the whole plant as nothing more than a plant leaf with a complicated structure. So, Goethe imagined that the entire plant consists of many, many individual plants. This is a view that can be applied to all living things, especially to the pinnacle of life in nature, to humans. In doing so, one can initially think only of the metamorphosis of forms, as Goethe did as a morphologist. One can think that the overall form of an organism is a more complicated design than the form of a single organ. This is how Goethe initially developed the idea.

But one can also consider that what an organ performs in a living organism is, in miniature, the same as what the whole organism performs, and vice versa. One can think that the activity of the whole organism is a more complicated manifestation of what the individual organ performs. This thought, the fruitfulness of which, as already mentioned, will only be fully recognized in the future, also by science, this thought underlies our eurythmic art.

When we listen to a person speaking, our attention is naturally drawn first to the sequence of sounds, to what is expressed in speech in the tones. But for those who see the supersensible in the sensory, for those who have intuitive vision and can penetrate the secrets of nature through this intuitive vision, there is an invisible movement in the larynx and neighboring organs with each individual sound. And the sequence of sounds is manifested in invisible movements.

We can also visualize how, although not in the visible, the movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs is expressed in terms of what is known to science. You know that what one speaks, what sounds out of the speech organism, is transformed into waves of movement in the air. We do not see these waves of movement; we hear what has been spoken. The person with supersensible vision sees what lies in the waves of the air while we speak. He sees it in the mysterious movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs. The larynx is a single organ of the human organism.

Just as the whole plant is a more complex leaf in the Goethean sense, so the whole human being with his limbs can be called upon to move, which only more complexly represent that which the larynx represents as a single organ when speaking. Then that essence of the whole human being will be expressed which one can call a visible language. And this eurythmy is the visible language we are striving for. What you see of the individual person on the stage through the movements of the limbs of the human organism is, so to speak, the visible, moving larynx and its neighboring organs: the whole person becomes the larynx through eurythmy. Thus, what is otherwise present supersensibly in the larynx's movement patterns is revealed outwardly.

One could also express it differently: you will know, esteemed attendees, if you practice even a little self-knowledge, that actually, when we listen to a person, there is always an inner supersensible art of imitation in us. We hold back, and it is simply true that we listen by holding back certain supersensible movements in our organism that resonate with the vibrations of the speaker. These movements, which we hold back when we listen in the usual way, standing or sitting still, are presented to the eye in eurythmy. The listener who moves, who, as it were, shows the reflection of what is being said everywhere in the way he listens, that is the eurythmist.

In addition to what I have already mentioned, “the whole person becomes the larynx”, so that what is spoken by the person is warmed by the feeling of the soul, that it is imbued with joy, enthusiasm, pain, suffering; that moods vibrate through. All this can also be expressed through eurythmy. We express it, not by setting a stationary human being in motion or having a human being in one place perform eurythmy, but by having the individual human being move in space, or having groups of people in space form certain shapes or perform certain movements in relation to each other. When the human being moves in space, it expresses what vibrates through language in the soul as mood, as enthusiasm, as suffering and as joy. All that is expressed in artistically formed language by the poet in rhythm and rhyme – all this is expressed through movement.

In this context, I would ask you to bear in mind that the art of eurythmy is not facial expression, pantomime or the art of gestures, and that it has nothing to do with ordinary dance. In all these art forms, what lives in the soul is expressed through a direct gesture or the like, through a direct movement. Eurythmy is something like music itself. There is nothing arbitrary about the movement that is performed, but something so lawful in the individual movement and sequence of movements that one can say: just as the harmonies are in music, how the melody, the sequence of notes reveal themselves, so there is an inner lawfulness in what is represented by eurythmy.

Therefore, it may well be that you see each eurythmist expressing only their own individual possibilities – nothing arbitrary. The opposite is the case. Just as when a Beethoven sonata is performed by two people on the piano, different individual elements arise, but the thing performed is the same, so it is when two people or two groups of people perform the same thing in eurythmy. There is an individual conception in it, but fundamentally it goes beyond any arbitrariness - as in music itself.

What the human being otherwise reveals in speaking, singing, and music, in fact in all artistically shaped speech, becomes visible speech in eurythmy. Therefore, on the one hand, you will see parallels between music, which expresses what lives in the human soul in a different way, and what is expressed in eurythmy, which is done in a different way. You will see the eurythmic presentation accompanied by a recitation that is intended to reflect the artistic, poetic language, which is then presented in the eurythmic art as an accompaniment to the recitation. It shows that, when eurythmy is accompanied by recitation, this recitation itself must go back to better times of the art of recitation than we have today. Today, one loves to recite, I would say, prosaically, emphasizing the prose content, placing the main emphasis on the content being expressed poetically. If we go further back in the development of the art of recitation, we see how the content is, so to speak, only taken as an opportunity to present rhythms, inner movement, the actual artistic element. Not only that in certain primeval times of art the reciters who performed, I would like to say in primitive eurythmy accompanied what they recited, and placed the highest value on the structure of the verses, on that which is otherwise artistic design. In actual poetry, we also find that the poem arises out of an inner music, that is, out of the rhythm and formation of the sound. We know that Schiller did not begin with the content of many of his poems in his soul, but that the content of the poem could be quite distant for him. But there was a melodious element in his soul, and this still wordless, still thought-free melodious element, he then put it into words and added, so to speak, the content of the poem. Today, the recitation is based on prose, on the novella. This would not work with eurythmy.

That is why it is so easily misunderstood that what had to emerge as an art of recitation in eurythmy. This art of recitation must in turn emphasize the true artistic nature of the shaped language, not what today so easily loves the merely prosaic in terms of content.

In so far as you will still see mimicry or pantomime, I ask you to regard it as something that is still imperfect. For I may well, having said these words about the intentions of the eurythmic art, I may well emphasize that we know very well that the eurythmic art is only just beginning, that it is perhaps only the will of an intention. But in this intention lies something that can become an art, that can stand alongside the other arts as fully entitled. Not only can the artistic be grasped by people in a truly Goethean sense through this eurythmic art, but one can also believe that it can have an educational and didactic effect in the future: as a soul-filled form of exercise alongside gymnastics that is purely based on physiology and physicality. And in education, as soul-inspired physical exercise that is also an art (it can also be seen as eurythmy), we will gradually introduce a soul-inspired art of movement for the human organism into our education and pedagogy at the Waldorf school – in contrast to soulless physical exercise that is aimed purely at physical culture. Eurythmy can be fruitful in these two ways.

Essentially, of course, it depends on the fact that the human being is the highest being on the scale of the organic, of the living, that we know on earth for the time being, and that therefore a truly supreme expression of natural law can come about in him. Therefore, if we educate the human being himself to be an instrument of artistic expression, what Goethe hopes for from human artistic activity can be fulfilled to the highest degree, in that he says: “By being placed at the pinnacle of nature, man in turn produces a pinnacle within himself, taking measure, harmony, order and meaning together, and finally rising to the production of the work of art. In this, Goethe sees something like the solution to the riddle of the world, when humanity can, in the mirror of art, receive back what the world holds in its secrets. And when man regards himself as the instrument of this reflection, then he is evidently fulfilling something that can be understood as a summary of the most diverse artistic motifs.

But I ask you again to look at what we are able to offer with some leniency, because it is a beginning, and we are our own harshest critics, we are well aware of what is still imperfect, but we believe that this imperfection, if it is further developed by ourselves or by others, will become a fully-fledged art form alongside other art forms.