The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 12 October 1919, Dornach

25. Eurythmy Performance

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

When you read or hear about those cultural endeavors that connect with or join our building, this Goetheanum, then you can actually always assume in this case that the opposite of what is said in the world is being striven for here. In fact, the aim here is to strive for that which is fundamentally the longing, the unconscious, instinctive longing of many people, in the most diverse branches of contemporary civilization and culture.

What we are able to present to you today is only a small, narrowly defined part of the whole of our cultural and spiritual endeavors of our time. Eurythmic art should not be seen as a dance art alongside other things that look similar to what is done here, but our eurythmic art should be something completely independent. It is, like all our striving, actually based on what I would call Goetheanism, Goethe's artistic attitude, Goethe's world view. Only we are not dealing with the Goethe who died in 1832. We leave it to those who want to deal with it more in a scholarly way. We are dealing, I would say, with the genius of Goethe, how he lives on and how he also lives in the early 20th century.

And what is to be presented here in our eurythmic art - albeit only in its beginnings, in first attempts - is the realization of Goethe's artistic view in a very specific field, in an artistic field that makes use of the human being's own movement potential as its means of art. An art of movement of the human organism in space is what underlies this. And if I am to express what the sources of this particular art form are, I will speak at first in seemingly theoretical terms, but only seemingly so.

Everything artistic should be immediately comprehensible to the aesthetic sense. All theorizing has no justification in the face of art. In direct observation, the beauty of some art must reveal itself. But what Goethe said, based on his artistic and ideological convictions, is true, deeply true: when nature begins to reveal its secrets to someone, they feel the deepest yearning for its most worthy interpreter, art.

And what is to be presented here directly through the human organism itself can best be explained by reminding you of the comprehensive idea of Goethe's metamorphosis. This idea of Goethe's metamorphosis is something that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated by our school of thought, by our intellectual life. This Goethean idea of metamorphosis will enable us to move from the science of the dead, in which we now find ourselves, to a real science of the living.

What can be called the Goethean idea of metamorphosis still appears simple today. The whole plant with all its complications, with all its complicated structures, whether it is a tree or a green foliage plant: for Goethe, everything that is a plant is a transformed leaf; whether it is a colored petal or a green leaf, for Goethe it is a whole plant. As I said, it still sounds very abstract and primitive today; but there is an enormous amount in this view that the organism in its complexity is a transformation of a single link in the organism, an enormous amount of future world view is in this.

Now, Goethe initially applied this only to the forms of the organism. We want to apply it to the artistic thought and the spiritualized one by applying it to human movement; and we assume that what the human larynx and its neighboring organs do when we listen to a person speaking, especially an artistically speaking person, that these are actually invisible movement patterns.

The one who is able to see such things, who is able to look at what does not reveal itself externally, but only to a spiritual faculty of perception, knows that there are movement patterns in the human larynx and its neighboring organs. We do not see them in ordinary life – we listen as these movement patterns produce the words and word combinations, the sounds and sound combinations. But it is possible to really see the movement systems of the larynx. You just need to remember the physical fact that when I speak here, the air is set in motion.

Imagine this movement being grasped and looked at, and you have a visible language. We try to reveal this visible language through our eurythmy by making the whole human being the larynx, that is, by moving the limbs in space as the limbs of the larynx want to move. And when we speak in the spoken language, it goes into the audible.

We want to place the person on the stage so that they move their arms and hands in the same way that the larynx is designed to move, or how the air is moved when we speak. That is to say, we try to make the whole person move in such a way that the larynx is transformed, just as Goethe looks at the whole plant as a transformed leaf. That is the source of our eurythmic art. So that everything you will see here in the movements of the individual person is the same movements that remain invisible only when one speaks. But other movements still come into consideration.

That which lies in human language is ensouled: joy and suffering, delight and pain, sorrow and enthusiasm, warmth of soul, and everything else that the soul contains, resonates through and vibrates our language. Rhythm and meter, artistic form – that is what the poet immerses language in. Just as language is artistically shaped in song, just as the human capacity for suffering is artistically shaped in song, so the poet artistically shapes language in a different way. Everything that runs through our speech as pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, warmth and enthusiasm, everything that vibrates through our speech from the soul, everything that sounds through our speech artistically, is expressed in the movements that the human being now makes in space, either alone or in relation to each other, when groups perform dance-like movements here on stage. What the human being does in relation to these movements of people in groups or alone is the basic principle.

I am only saying this to give you an indication of the source from which this eurythmic art draws. For everything that is performed in movement should have an immediate aesthetic effect. And this only comes about when we truly reveal the inner workings of nature in this way, when we seek it out, and then, by revealing the formative regularity of the world, the artistic and beautiful is truly expressed.

All arbitrariness is avoided in this eurythmic art. While you otherwise see all kinds of similar arts today, which connect a momentary gesture with some kind of soul movement or the like, there is no question of such pantomime or mime or such momentary gestures here, but everything is inwardly lawful as in the metamorphosis idea itself. Just as in music it is the moving tone and in language the moving sound, so here it is the moving of the human soul itself, that human soul that constantly wants to move in this way, only becomes still when it hears the tone of music, the tonal shaping, or when it hears the artistically shaped language.

So that one can say: There is so little that is arbitrary here that when two people or two groups of people in different places perform one and the same piece of poetry or one and the same piece of music in eurythmy, there is no more individual difference than when two pianists play one and the same Beethoven sonata in two different places, because the arbitrariness here is only individually limited. But there is an inner lawfulness in this visible language, which is eurythmy, just as in music, even in melody and harmony, there is an inner lawfulness that wants to be shaped, that wants to be grasped, that cannot be shaped arbitrarily in the moment.

If you therefore see something pantomime-like or mimetic in our performances today, it is only for the reason that today it may still be present - we are our own strictest critics - because our eurythmic art is only just beginning. Once it is fully developed, all that is arbitrary and mimic will be out, just as everything that is musically picturesque, all tone painting and the like, must and will be out as something dilettantish.

Now you will see, on the one hand, my dear audience, what is presented in the visible language of eurythmy, which you will simultaneously hear as pieces of music or also simultaneously hear as the recited poem. But it must also be considered that the art of recitation itself, which is supposed to accompany our eurythmic performances, that this art of recitation and declamation must go back to earlier good forms of recitation and declamation. It can be said, even if many people do not like it: the actual art of recitation is in decline today. The person reciting today actually only tries to bring out the prose element in many ways. He tries to express what lies in the content of the words through emphasis or warmth or the like.

One need only recall the better days of the art of poetry to feel that recitation must nevertheless take a different path, that today, to a certain extent, it has gone astray. I would like to remind you that Schiller, in most of his poetry, especially in those that speak most warmly to our souls, did not initially have the meaning of the words in his soul; the meaning of the words was not there at all at first. He had something melodious, something musical, and only to the music that lived in his soul did he find the meaning of the words to go with it. And then I would like to mention something else: when Goethe rehearsed his “Iphigenia” - even a dramatic poem - with his actors in Weimar, he rehearsed it with a baton like a conductor, just as one rehearses a piece of music.

So it was important to these true artists to seek the poetic, the recitative, not in the content, but in the form, in the rhythm, in the beat. This must also be the basis of recitation. Anyone who knows how the art of recitation was in primitive ages and still is among primitive people, at least quite recently, knows how justified this is. In such primitive ages, when this or that was recited in a simple way before villagers, one would like to say that , in a primitive eurhythmy, with a primitive movement of his entire human organism, the reciter walked up and down and expressed what lies in the form of language, on the one hand through the sound itself, on the other hand through the movement with which he accompanied it.

We shall only return to such things when we take a deeper look at the actual essence of culture, of intellectual culture and its connection to material culture. How many people today still know that in more primitive times, work was accompanied by rhythm; everything that was done, the work, was accompanied by rhythm. Everything that was done was accompanied by rhythm. In the culture of the past, work and rhythm belonged together.

We will try to do this first by bringing the present into relation with consciousness, by presenting poetry and recitation to accompany eurythmy, because we cannot do it any other way. We could not present our visible language of eurythmy and have it accompanied by poetry and recitation if we did not shape it in such a way that we do not arrive at the literal literal content of the prose, which is mostly popular today in the art of recitation, which has gone astray, but which is only the starting point for the actual artistic element. Instead, the main emphasis is on meter, rhythm, that is, on the truly artistic, on that which the poet lends to his language as a melodious element. The content is only the opportunity to express this actual artistic element.

So you will see – as I said, on the one hand, but central to our presentation – the art of eurythmic movement on the one hand accompanied by music, on the other hand the accompanying recitation and declamation. All three should only be the expression of one and the same. For this very reason, it is hoped that a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk can be achieved with this eurythmic art, because the human being is a kind of extract, a kind of essence of the whole universe in its conformity to law.

If we do not look at the laws of the world with our minds, but look at them with our capacity for contemplation, then we grasp the world artistically. But the human being is a real microcosm, a small world in itself. That which lives in him as a basis for movement, that which metamorphoses into art, must also have a truly artistic effect in the highest sense on any unbiased person. Therefore one can say: this eurythmy fulfills Goethe's artistic spirit. Goethe once put it so beautifully when he said: “For man, having been placed at the summit of nature, sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit within itself. To do this, he rises by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, harmony, order and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art.”

And when man not only proceeds to produce another work of art, but elevates himself and makes himself a work of art, then the deepest secrets of the world must come to revelation in direct contemplation. And that must, in a sense, summarize what the most diverse arts in their various fields seek.

However, what we are able to offer you will have to be judged with leniency, my dear attendees, for we are only at the beginning of everything I have outlined here; perhaps it is only the attempt at a beginning. We are our own harshest critics and we know that what we have already developed must be taken further and further. But if our contemporaries have an understanding for new phenomena – but for real, not merely apparent new phenomena – if our contemporaries have an understanding for new phenomena, as this eurythmy is supposed to be, then we hope that – perhaps no longer through ourselves, but through others who will take our place – this eurythmic art will be developed to ever greater and greater perfection.

Much as we realize that today we can only give what we actually want to give inadequately, by leaning on Goethe's artistic attitude, which does not separate cognition and artistic perception completely, but sees something of real cognition in the artistic - the apprehension of things in visible and tangible forms - as we know that we can only give something very elementary in comparison to this progress today, but we do believe – and it is our deepest conviction – that something will develop from what has been started in our time with this eurythmic art, which will be able to stand alongside other fully justified arts as a fully justified newer art. In this sense, I ask you today to accept this attempt at a eurythmic presentation of something that is to be developed more and more fully.