The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 2 November 1919, Dornach

28. Eurythmy Performance

The program was the same as for the performance in Zurich on October 31, 1919, see p. 194. However, in keeping with the character of the day (All Souls' Day), without Christian Morgenstern's “Galgenlieder”.

Dear ladies and gentlemen.

Today we would also like to present a sample of our eurythmy art. This eurythmy art should be kept entirely in line with everything that is connected with this building of ours, with all that we call Goetheanism in connection with this Goetheanum of ours, in terms of world view and artistic endeavors. In this connection, I would ask you to bear in mind that we are dealing here with the very beginnings of this eurythmy art movement, with a first attempt that for the time being must be treated with forbearance. What we are striving for is not meant to compete with neighboring arts, dance-like arts and the like. We know very well that these are much more complete in their way than what can be achieved here. But it is something completely different. And I would not like to give these few words as some theoretical introduction, but rather to point out the sources from which this particular art form is drawn, which uses the human limbs themselves and the human possibilities of movement in space as artistic means.

So it is a kind of movement art that we are striving for in this eurythmy. And we will most easily understand how what we are striving for here has been brought forth out of Goethean sentiment and Goethean world view if I remind you of what is known as Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Goethe achieved something with it that is still far, far from being appreciated enough. In the future, it will become a basis for an understanding of the living. Because the view that we have precisely through our so-glorious science – I mean this quite seriously, because for these areas to which it is applicable, this science is glorious – what we have through contemporary science, that basically only relates to the dead mineral, not to the living. Goethe tried to grasp the living. And as simple as it still looks today, it will one day lead deep into life: what Goethe saw, that the whole plant in all its complexity, even if it is a whole tree, is only a complicated, transformed individual leaf, and the individual leaf is in turn only a primitive whole plant. And again, if we look at an organ of the plant, for example, the colored petal of a flower, and compare it to the green leaf of a plant, for Goethe it was essentially the same, one and the same, only different in its outer form.

What Goethe applied to form and shape in this way could now be applied to the whole human being and his or her potential for movement if it is imbued with artistic sense at the same time. And that is precisely what the eurythmic art attempts to do. When we listen to a person, we direct our attention through the ear to what is spoken or sung. But then we do not perceive what is also present: the movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs. All of this vibrates - larynx, palate, tongue, lip and so on - by itself. And in turn, the ability to move, which is expressed in the larynx, extends to the lungs and their wings and so on. And we only need to remember from the physical that, while I am speaking here, the air is in motion. And each sequence of movements expresses something of the sound and so on.

What is expressed in the larynx in a single organ and its neighboring organs, what cannot be seen, can be perceived by those who have supersensible vision. And then one can express the way in which a word or that which is expressed in the word is connected: just as it is audibly expressed through the larynx, through which one hears the sound and does not see the movement, so one can express it through the movement of the human limbs, the hands, the feet, the whole body. Then what the whole person does becomes a visible language, then the whole person becomes a part of the artistic expression, the artistic revelation. A person would be very surprised if they were to see, especially when speaking poetically or artistically, the wonderful movements – which are largely just movement efforts – in the larynx and neighboring organs for rhyme, for rhythm, and so on. This can be seen and transferred to the arms, to the feet of the person, to the head, and so on. And one can create something that fully corresponds to Goethe's artistic ethos, which Goethe once expressed with the beautiful words: 'Style is based on a kind of recognition, on a becoming visible of the essence of things, insofar as we are able to approach it in tangible and visible forms.

And especially that which is the mystery of human nature itself comes out when we want to reveal these secrets of human nature in eurythmy. In another context, Goethe has so beautifully drawn attention to the human being's relationship to artistic apprehension of the world. For him it was always clear that whoever nature - as he once said - reveals its manifest secret to, feels the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. Wherever we sense the secrets of nature, without going to concepts, ideas or the abstract, but in direct devotion to what lies in the lawfulness of natural things, we perceive art, art form, artistic design. We will be able to perceive this most when the human being becomes a means of art. For here too, Goethe says so beautifully: When the human being is placed at the summit of nature, he finds himself again as a whole nature, taking number, measure, harmony and meaning together, in order to rise to the production of the work of art by bringing forth a new summit. How much more must this be said when man himself becomes the means of art and expresses the secrets that lie in his own organism through the movements of his limbs, whereby a living language is brought to view.

However, that which is artistic must be perceived in direct aesthetic contemplation. It does not need to be explained. But it is precisely by taking a deeper sense of the lawfulness in things, which is not grasped conceptually but is directly contemplated, that one arrives at the artistic.

And this is to be done with that which lies within the human being, by bringing its limbs into a visible language, everything that otherwise expresses itself only through the laws of the larynx and its neighboring organs. Whether it is the individual moving their limbs, forming groups of people or the individual moving in space, relationships between people in groups are presented – everything that is otherwise expressed through speech in terms of warmth of soul, joy and sorrow, happiness and pain and enthusiasm, but also in terms of rhythm, rhyme, meter and so on, is incorporated into the language that has become visible. All of this is expressed through the movement of the person in space or is expressed through the movement of groups, while the word itself is expressed through the movement of the individual person, who, as it were, remains calm.

Now it is important to realize that this offers a new art form. There is nothing directly arbitrary between the gesture of the limbs and what the soul experiences or wants to express. Rather, just as music itself consists of the lawful succession of tones, of melody and so on, so the successive movements that you see here on stage are based on a very definite lawfulness. And if two people were to perform the same thing in eurythmy, there would be no arbitrariness in the movement, but these two representations at different places, by two people at completely different places, could only be as a Beethoven sonata is performed by two different people at the piano, each with their own individual interpretation, but in principle, of course, they must not differ.

All pantomime, all mimicry, all mere momentary gestures are avoided here. If any of this still seems to be the case, it is because we are still at the beginning of our work. All that is still pantomime and the like will be left out altogether later on, and the pure, natural laws of the human being speaking through its limbs and their possibilities of movement will emerge in the eurythmic art.

Today, the eurythmic is still accompanied on the one hand by the musical, because that is just another expression. So you will see on the stage the visible language of the human limbs, and at the same time hear how it is presented musically. On the other hand, you will see how it is presented by way of recitation, although it will become clear that we must return to the older art form of declamation and recitation. Today, people have more or less lost the actual artistic aspect of language. One could say that speaking artistically is in a state of decline, of decadence. Not only do many people think that speaking artistically is not art at all, that anyone can do it, but also the professional reciters, the professional actors themselves, they only emphasize in their present art of recitation the prose content, the literal meaning or that which is the content of the prose, not that which is the real art, what the poet actually has in mind – the rhythm of the language, the beat, the inner structure of the language. Schiller, I need only mention this, always had a melody, or at least a melodious tone, inside him before he had his poem literally written down. Only then did he find the words for it, because what mattered to him was the rhythm, the beat, the inner shaping of the language. And Goethe stood with his “Iphigenia”, although it is a drama, he stood with the baton and studied the iambs.

This is what leads back to the healthy old art of artistic recitation or declamation, where the shaping of language is in the foreground, not the prose content of the language, which underlies today's art of declamation. One could not accompany eurythmy, which has the task of revealing and expressing the inner art of movement, with today's art of declamation, but rather one must allow eurythmy to be accompanied by the right and good art of declamation, which looks less at the content than at the rhythm, at that which underlies the shaping of language.

All in all, I would ask you to view this presentation with some leniency, for we are just beginning in all areas, and I would ask you to consider what we are able to present today as an experiment that will certainly be continued, either by ourselves or by others, if our contemporaries give the necessary attention and interest to such an endeavor. The flourishing of the artistic depends on this, on the interest of our contemporaries. But if the interest of our contemporaries is present, if one will understand how a total work of art is striven for here through the evocation of that which lies hidden in the human being himself, who feels this will be able to be convinced that once the weak beginning that now exists is perfected by us or others, this eurythmic art will be able to present itself as a fully-fledged art form alongside other art forms.

[After the break:]

We will now present a scene from the second part of Goethe's “Faust”. The second part of “Faust” was only written in Goethe's old age and arose from the pinnacle of his artistic development. The manuscript was only discovered after his death and only then given to the world after Goethe's death, the manuscript of the second part of “Faust”. But Goethe would undoubtedly have been extremely annoyed, artistically speaking, if he had still been able to judge it, just as he was annoyed by the way in which some of his works from his youth, which he published in his youth without artistic maturity, were treated. There is a beautiful quatrain, which – I already mentioned it here the other day – Goethe left behind and in which he expressed how his early works, his “Iphigenia”, his “Tasso”, his “Natural Daughter” had been received, how people seem to reject what Goethe created from a state of maturity because they did not understand it. The words arose out of a certain annoyed mood.

But they praise my Faust
and what else

— he means the first part of his “Faust”

In my works roars
In their favor The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much,
And then the riffraff believes
They would no longer be.

Goethe would undoubtedly have judged the same way if he had thought of it about some of the things that otherwise quite clever people, for example the Swabian Vischer, whom I otherwise esteem very much, this V-Vischer, who, as I said, is a great esthete, he has written a tremendous work about aesthetics – nothing can be said to his disadvantage in his own field. But he understood nothing of the mature art of Goethe. He praised the first part at the expense of the second part, so he was one of those of whom Goethe said: “The old Mick and Mack, / That pleases them very much.” The great esthete also praised that very much, and that is why he also belonged to the “bunch of ragamuffins” of whom Goethe says: And there the bunch of ragamuffins believes that they are no longer! Vischer then wrote a third part of Faust himself – it is also after him! And the Faust that Goethe left behind, he called a cobbled-together, glued-together concoction of old age.

But, my dear attendees, there are artistic possibilities in there that lead from the ordinary, lowly existence of man into the supernatural, not by some kind of artistic use of an unhealthy mysticism or obscurantism, but by the fact that what man really experiences in his inner being when he goes beyond what is represented in everyday life.

And so we see how a scene like this one at “midnight”, where “Faust” also faces the four enemies of human life at the end of his life, namely worry, lack, guilt and need, and how everything that happens in “Faust” reflects this whole relationship to the supersensible world, how Goethe tries to express it in language. But if you take everything that has been tried so far to present the second part of 'Faust' on stage, you are always left unsatisfied. I myself have seen a lot, everything, for example, that came from the second part, especially in the 80s of the last century at the Vienna Burgtheater with the lovely Wilbrandt adaptation and direction, to the performances that then took music as an aid, for example, the Devrient's mystery play of “Faust”, part two, there was always something unsatisfactory about it, because Goethe had just discovered the deepest secrets of life in his mature years, and because he had incorporated these deepest secrets of life into the second part of “Faust”. Nevertheless, for those who understand it, this second part of Goethe's 'Faust' is a thoroughly artistic work. It contains not some kind of symbolic or abstract allegory, but life, but the life of the spirit. And I am convinced that this cannot be brought out by ordinary theatrical means; it can only be brought out by eurythmy. And such figures, which otherwise only look like allegorical or symbolic ones - want, guilt, sorrow, need - only come to full revelation through eurythmy when they mean what they are for human life.

Please also consider this presentation as a first attempt. But I do believe that if one turns to eurythmy as an aid – of course only where the everyday rises into the supersensible – you will see how we set this eurythmy in the dramatic art, where it is undoubtedly suitable when it is necessary to go beyond the ordinary human and enter the universal and the spiritual.