The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 31 October 1919, Zurich

27. Eurythmy Performance

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

The art of eurythmy, a sample of which we would like to present to you this evening, is something that is still in its infancy. Therefore, I ask you to be indulgent in your reception of today's attempt. It is a matter of developing an art movement that seeks to make use of the means of movement of the human organism itself. And it is about continuing this art movement in such a way that it is in line with a worldview and artistic attitude that can be traced back to Goethe's worldview and artistic attitude. It is not meant to be said that something similar to what Goethe himself gave to the world up to the year 1832, but it is about thinking of Goetheanism in a much broader sense. It is a matter of understanding that Goetheanism is the revelation of a certain artistic and ideological direction that has, so to speak, an eternal value. So that one can speak of a conception of Goethe that nevertheless goes back to Goethe's own individuality, but which is definitely from 1919.

If I would like to address a few words to you for the very reason that we are dealing with a first attempt, it is truly not to give a theoretical explanation, to interpret this attempt in terms of art history, but to point to the actual source of this eurythmic art. For it is self-evident that everything artistic must immediately prove itself to the senses. Art that had to prove its right to exist through theoretical explanation would not be art at all.

But that is not the point. The point is that, in the Goethean sense, art has been brought forth today from the deep secrets of the existence of nature and the world itself, and that Goethe considers art and knowledge to be closely related. In one of his most significant sayings about art, he says so beautifully that style is based on a kind of recognition, on becoming aware of the deeper secrets of life and things, insofar as we are able to grasp them in visible, tangible forms, and that Nature begins to reveal its apparent secret, he feels the deepest longing for its interpreter in art, he points out that one should penetrate into the secrets of the world through art, which is also the point of knowledge. But knowledge seeks to give here that which rests below in things, up to the concept, up to the idea. Wherever something is worked up to the point of being conceptualized, conceptualized, there is nothing that we could call art.

Now, in the spirit of Goethe's worldview, we want to bring out what can be sensed as the essence of the human being; we want to work out the inner possibilities of movement of the human organism and bring them to direct perception. I may illustrate the principle whereby this comes about by pointing out the significance of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, that part of Goethe's world view that will certainly continue to play a major role in the spiritual development of humanity. For Goethe, the whole plant in its complexity is only a transformation of a simple plant leaf, and in turn, for Goethe, a plant leaf is an entire plant, only more simply formed. And every single organ of an organism is a transformation of some other organ that looks quite different to the senses. You just have to look at things very clearly to recognize the metamorphic character of organisms.

What Goethe applied to the form of living things should be applied to human movement and transformed into a true artistic vision.

When we listen to a person speaking, we do not pay attention to what is happening at the same time as the person is speaking: the movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs. But these movements of the larynx can only be seen with supersensible vision. Through the movement of the speech organs, the audible word enters the air and is represented by them.

These possibilities of movement of the larynx can be transferred to the whole human being by going back to what is inherent in his limbs, by bringing to sensory perception what the larynx invisibly performs. In this way, a visible language comes into being that is brought to view through the whole human being. When the whole human being becomes a larynx through the same thing that lives as rhythm, rhyme, warmth of soul, and tact in poetic language, then a real art comes into being that becomes a vessel for expressing what is mysteriously hidden in the whole human being. That is what we want. What is otherwise suppressed in the human being – must be suppressed because, when speaking, more of the imaginative enters into our word connections – that which is actually suppressed by the will, should be made manifest through the eurythmic art.

So one can also say that this eurythmic art cannot be compared with any neighboring arts. It does not want to compete with other neighboring arts either. It is not a matter of an arbitrary, momentary attunement of a gesture or the like with the content of the soul, but of a very definite lawfulness that lives in the successive movements just as a lawfulness lives in the successive tones of music. The eurythmic art is modeled on this musical art, only it moves in a different realm. The lawfulness of this art is parallel to that of music. If, for example, two different groups in different places were to present a particular piece of eurythmic art today, there would be as little difference in the presentation as there is between a piece of music played by two artists.

Eurythmic art should be a language or music that has become visible through the whole human being. The development of this art is not yet so far advanced that we can present eurythmic art in its own right to a larger audience. We still use recitation to present eurythmy art, but we are trying to go further than modern recitation art does today. Recitation art has reached a certain decadence today. Today, the recitation particularly emphasizes what is not actually artistic in the poetic language, and recites poetry like prose, while the actual musicality of the artistic language is suppressed. It would not be possible to present eurythmic art in parallel with this modern way of reciting. We must go back to that art of recitation which did not primarily consider the content of the words in the artistic language, but which above all tried to express the musicality of the poetic language. The justification for such an art of recitation could easily be demonstrated from the development of the arts themselves. One need only consider the way in which the work of great poets of the relatively recent past was presented, for example Goethe, who, with the baton in his hand, not only rehearsed the most beautiful of his lyrical poems but also rehearsed his Iphigenia with the baton.

In this way eurythmy will also become a signpost for other arts, pointing the way to and leading back to the essential nature of the arts.

If you should see some mimicry even today, consider it an imperfection. This imperfection will gradually disappear. We ourselves are the strictest critics in this. As I said, today's performance is only an experiment. From this point of view, I would like to ask you to watch the performance. We are also convinced that this experiment is only a beginning, but that, if our experiment meets with some interest, it should be continued by us or others. And we are also convinced that eurythmy, once it has reached a certain level of perfection, will be able to present itself as a fully-fledged art alongside other fully-fledged contemporary arts.

After a short break, we will attempt to perform a small scene from Goethe's “Faust”, part two, with the help of the eurythmic art. This attempt to perform such scenes from the second part of “Faust” with the help of the eurythmic art is, so to speak, an experiment for this art. For anyone who has seen the whole range of attempts to bring the second part of Goethe's “Faust” to the stage knows how extraordinarily difficult it is to really present this most mature expression of Goethe's art and world view in such a way that, through the artistic means of representation, everything that is in the poetry according to Goethe's own expression comes out in reality. If, for example, one takes Wilbrandt's extraordinarily charming production or refers to Devrient's performance, it becomes clear how extraordinarily difficult it is to do justice to this great work of poetry in an artistic performance. This has led to a failure to recognize what lies in Goethe's development, and it has led – and even people as sensitive as the Swabian poet [Friedrich] Theodor Vischer went so far as to say – to finding Goethe's youthful art, that is, the first part of Faust, but could not follow him to what Goethe himself had secretly included as his most mature work in the second part of Faust. And as people are: what they cannot find, they attribute not to a deficiency in themselves, but to a deficiency in the work of art or in the artist. Goethe himself had to recognize something similar during his lifetime, when he had to see how people went along with their understanding until the time when Goethe experienced a rebirth of his poetic being through his Italian journey. And he felt a certain annoyance at the fact that his youthful works were preferred at the expense of his more mature works.

So, in order to do justice to Goethe's mature art, we have tried to present those scenes, or parts of scenes in the second part of 'Faust', in which Goethe rises to represent that which cannot be represented by ordinary everyday means, which does not live in the ordinary world of the senses but plays into life, through the art of eurythmy. Where such magnificent tragedy is expressed, it shows that one can achieve many things that would otherwise be impossible. And perhaps it also makes clear how the means of eurythmic art can be used where the means of expression popular today fail.