# The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

## GA 277b — 14 September 1919, Berlin

### 21. Eurythmy Performance

Dear attendees! The art of eurythmy is still in the early stages of development. One could even call it an experiment in intent. Therefore, it will be permitted to say a few words about the nature of the same before the presentation.

Everything that is being attempted and that will probably be perfected in the future with regard to this eurythmic art is based on Goethe's conception of the world and life. This Goethean view of the world and life is accompanied by a very special artistic attitude and a special concept of art. And it is precisely this that is so special about Goethe: he understood how to bridge the gap between artistic attitude, artistic power and general world view for his own perspective. In this way, it could also be attempted on the basis of Goetheanism, on which we stand with our entire anthroposophically oriented spiritual science; it could be attempted in a very special field – in the field of human movement art – to create something ourselves that will be an expression of Goethe's artistic attitude. Therefore, I ask you not to look at what we can offer today in this direction as if we wanted to compete with any of the arts and art forms that are in some sense related to our eurythmic art. We certainly do not want to do that. We know very well that the art of dance and similar arts, which one might confuse with ours, have now reached such a high level of perfection that we cannot compete at all. But we do not want to compete; rather, our aim is to introduce something fundamentally new into the general artistic development of humanity. And without becoming theoretical, I would like to explain very briefly how our attempt is connected with the greatness of Goethe's world view.

The truly significant, the great and decisive aspect of Goethe's world view has by no means been sufficiently appreciated. Goethe was able to orient his world of ideas, his world of cognitive sensation, in such a way that he could truly make the ascent from the science of the non-living – which basically still includes all of today's science – to a certain knowledge of the living. It only appears to be a theoretical matter when everything points to Goethe's great idea of the metamorphosis of organic beings and a single organic entity. In Goethe's sense, one need only imagine how a single plant comes into being as a living being, how it grows, perfects itself and reaches the summit of its becoming. For Goethe, every single plant leaf – whether a green plant leaf or a colored flower petal – is basically a whole plant, only more simply formed than the whole plant, and again the whole plant is for him only an intricate leaf.

This view, which is tremendously significant, applied to everything that is alive for Goethe. Every living being is formed in such a way that, as a whole, it is the more complicated formation of each of its individual parts; and each individual part, in turn, reveals – in a simpler form – the whole living being. This view can now be applied to the expressions and activities of a living being, and in particular of the highest living being known to man within his world: man himself.

And so, based on Goethe, we can also say: in what human language is, a single element of the entire human nature is also given. In what a person expresses through the larynx and its neighboring organs, speaking from the depths of his soul, something is given that is a single organ expression, a revelation of the human being. For those who are able to see what forces, possibilities for activity and movement are actually present in the human larynx when speaking, especially when speaking artistically, when speaking poetry as well as when singing, for those who can see this and are not limited to looking beyond what the larynx accomplishes in terms of movements, and merely listening to what is accomplished in terms of movements, it is possible for the person to transfer to the whole human being what otherwise only comes to expression in the individual organ - in the larynx and its neighborhood - in speaking.

It is possible to make the whole person a larynx, so that he moves in his limbs as, I would say, the larynx is predisposed to move when a person speaks or sings. One could also say: when one speaks, one is dealing with the wave motion of the air. Sounds are movements of the air. Of course, in everyday life we do not see these movements of the air. Those who look can therefore perceive the possibilities of movement that they can transfer to the whole human being, to his limbs. Then a visible language arises in which the arms and other limbs of the human being move in a lawful way. And through this visible language, the poetic-artistic aspect of language, the song-like aspect of music, is brought to revelation, and a completely new art form arises. This is to be our eurythmy.

What you see here is, in the first instance, nothing other than the human being's laryngeal movement transferred to the whole human being in an artistic way. What is now supposed to be art and must make a corresponding aesthetic impression when it is directly observed, if it is to have an artistic effect when observed directly, has of course arisen from the depths of human nature at its source. Thus one can say: what is simply there in man because he is a human organism should be brought forth from him.

There is nothing artificial in eurythmy. All gestures and pantomime are avoided. Just as in music it is not about expressing something through any old note, but about observing a lawfulness in the succession of notes, so here it is also not about the hand or something similar making any old movement, but about the human limbs making lawful eurythmic movements in succession. Thus everything arbitrary is avoided, and where something still occurs, you can regard it as a sign that something imperfect still exists there. If two people or two groups of people were to represent one and the same thing, they would only differ in the way they presented it, just as two different piano players will play a Beethoven sonata differently.

In eurythmy, everything is modeled on the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs. But human speech is imbued with warmth of soul, with enthusiasm, with joy, with pain and suffering, with all kinds of inner crises. Everything that resonates through human language as an inner expression of the soul can be expressed by us in the relationships between the various forms, the groups, and through what a person can reveal through movements in space. In the same way, the inner mood of the soul, what penetrates from the depths of the soul to the surface, comes to expression. On the one hand, you will see what visible speech is.

We will let it be accompanied either by music, which is only the other, parallel expression of the same thing, or mainly by recitation, by poetry. In this context, I must note that, while the art of eurythmy is accompanied by poetry, it must be borne in mind that what is today the art of declamation, the art of recitation, is very much in decline. If one wants to accompany the art of eurythmy with poetry, one must go back to the old, good forms of recitation, the art of recitation. It is not a matter of expressing the ordinary narrative, the content of a poem through emphasis, but rather of expressing the actual artistic element through the recitation, apart from the purely narrative, from the content: the rhythm, the rhyme, the artistic vibrancy of a poem, everything that exists outside of the content, in other words - the poetic and musical.

There is little understanding of this today. But one need only remember that Goethe conducted his “Iphigenia” with a baton, and one need only keep in mind that Schiller, before he even brought the prose content of a poem to life in his writing, had a general melody in his soul, that is, he started from the general artistic idea. Today's emphasis on content when reciting is, so to speak, nonsense, it is decadent. It would not be possible to accompany eurythmy with this art of recitation, which only focuses on content. Therefore, we must return to what is little understood by our contemporaries as an art of recitation. But in this way we believe we can emphasize an element in the present that is as artistic as possible through this eurythmic art and thereby bring to life something of Goethe's artistic spirit. Goethe says so beautifully: “When nature begins to reveal her secret to someone, they feel an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter: art.” He sees in art a revelation of the secret laws of nature, which would not be revealed without art.

This is particularly evident when we see how man himself, in his movement, becomes the expression of a visible, living language. Goethe says elsewhere: Art consists in a kind of recognition, in that we grasp the essence of things in tangible and visible forms. And the highest of external nature, the human being, is revealed to us when we can visualize what is in his movements and present it to our eyes. Therefore, we feel Goethe's saying so much: “[In that man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in itself has to produce a summit again. To do so, he elevates himself by permeating himself with all perfection and virtue, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art [...].

We believe that through this eurythmic art, which is brought forth from the human being himself, at the same time something is visibly placed before the human eye like an artistic revelation of the mystery of the world, which is expressed in the highest sense in the human being. So far, however, only a beginning of all this exists. We know this very well and we are the harshest critics of the imperfections that still cling to our eurythmic artistic experiment. With this in mind, I ask you to also take in today's presentation. If it finds understanding among our contemporaries, then it will lead to it being further perfected. For however convinced we are that it is still in its infancy today, we are equally convinced that it has such principles within it that it can be brought to such perfection, either by ourselves or by others, that this eurythmic art, among other things, will be able to present itself as fully justified.