The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 30 November 1919, Dornach

36. Eurythmy Performance

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Before we take the liberty of presenting a small sample of our eurythmic art, allow me to say a few words about the source of this eurythmic art. It is this small area from the spiritual current that we represent here and for which our building is the external representation. Like everything else, this small piece actually originated from the whole world view. This world view also encompasses, in the broadest sense, a certain artistic attitude towards the world.

Now, of course, it is not immediately apparent how exactly what we call eurythmy here flows out of the whole world view; but I will be able to make myself understood in the following way.

What we express through our human language – whether in ordinary life, when we simply communicate with words and sentences in human interaction, or when we express ourselves artistically in poetry or recitation – what we express in these two ways through language, that flows together in the human being from two currents: From a stream that could be called the stream of thought, the stream of imagination - in a sense, from everything that pours out of the organs of our head into the larynx, palate and so on - everything that belongs to language. Into this, now, mingles, interpenetrating with the element of imagination, that which comes from the whole human being – the element of will. In speech, the elements of perception and will truly flow together. And the two are only permeated by the element of feeling, by the feelings, by pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, which we pour into what comes about as a perceptual and volitional movement in speaking, also in artistic speaking.

By listening to this speech, we naturally turn our attention to what we hear. But while the human being makes himself audible through speech, his speech organs – larynx, tongue, palate and so on – are in motion. And what is even stronger than this movement is the disposition to move. Furthermore, everyone can understand the connection between the movement in the tone – even in ordinary speech outside of music – if they realize that when I speak here, I set the air in motion, in vibration. And hearing is based precisely on that.

And if, through what Goethe calls sensory-supersensory perception, you focus your attention on what underlies speaking in the larynx and in the other speech organs, you can see precisely that through a certain supersensory spiritual recognition, to which you do not pay attention when you simply listen to what you hear. What we hear in terms of the possible movements of the larynx, tongue, palate and so on can be applied to the limbs of the whole human being. And the people you see here on stage doing eurythmy will then perform movements with their arms, hands and so on. These movements are not arbitrary. It is not like ordinary dance or ordinary pantomime. These are not momentary gestures, but rather what is brought out of the human being in accordance with the laws of nature, which is also the basis of the laws of movement in the larynx and its neighboring organs when speaking.

So in our eurythmy there is nothing invented, but everything is drawn from the secrets of human existence, of nature. In a sense, the whole human being becomes a larynx; only, of course, a mute language is produced by this. This silent language is what we call eurythmy. But in this silent language, the element of imagination that we have when we understand what we are saying is absent, and it is taken over by the limbs. When they move, only the will element is expressed, which is otherwise more or less even stimulated when speaking.

If you now consider that everything truly artistic actually consists in this, that you recognize everything truly artistic by letting the secrets that are in things reveal themselves in direct contemplation, to the exclusion of representations, ideas and thoughts, you will admit that precisely by using the secrets of the human being, which you yourself use like a musical instrument for your inner movements, that precisely by doing so, the artistic is taken into account to the highest degree through eurythmy — precisely by excluding the conceptual and including the mysterious will, which we can only sense. By seeing the movement, that which is most eminently artistic for the beholder is generated.

And so in this silent language, which we call eurythmy, the possibility of working artistically comes about in a very special way. You see, our ordinary everyday language, which the poet must also use, has increasingly deviated from its original character. If we go back to the early days of humanity, we find that the original languages were much more poetic, much more artistically shaped in themselves. Our language has become very abstract, very prosaic. As a result, we no longer feel in all cases where people write poetry that language can produce something truly artistic. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that 99 percent of all poetry could just as well be left out of our intellectual culture. Perhaps only one percent of what is written today is truly worthy of being performed. For our language, and almost all European languages, with the exception of the eastern ones, is already beyond the stage where it can fully express the actual formal artistic aspect.

Therefore, it is precisely possible, through this silent language of eurythmy, to fulfill something that corresponds to Goethe's artistic ethos. Goethe said so beautifully in his book on Winckelmann: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn sees himself as a whole of nature, and once again brings forth the one natural summit within himself, by taking up the order, measure, harmony and meaning of things and rising to the production of the work of art. And if we use the whole human being as an instrument – this most perfect instrument of our earthly existence – then we can certainly find secrets of the universe within him that can be shaped artistically much more than what we can get out of our conventional language today.

And so we can say that this eurythmy is - only that it is for the eyes and not for the ears - permeated by an inner lawfulness, just like music. Just as the artistic element in music does not consist in tone painting but in the lawful succession of tones, so too in eurythmy everything is built on the lawful sequence of movements; nothing is arbitrary - everything must be so. Just as it must be in music, as it is always formed according to law, it is no more arbitrary that when two groups or two individuals perform the same eurythmic action in two different places, their subjective perception cannot be more different than, for example, the subjective perception of two pianists playing the same piece of music.

All pantomime and all arbitrariness has been removed; if something still occurs, it is only because we are only at the beginning of our eurythmic art and some things are not as perfect as we would like them to be in our eurythmic performances.

But in eurythmy language we can also express everything that gives life to language, everything that streams out of our soul through human speech as enthusiasm, as passion and suffering, as joy and pain. We express this through what the individual does in space, what is done through the relationships of the group movement to one another. So on the one hand, what moves the soul is presented on stage. You will hear it accompanied in part by music, which is just another expression, an audible expression of what is expressed in silent language through eurythmy.

On the other hand, you will also hear it accompanied by recitation. We are essentially presenting poetry, but precisely when recitation or declamation is used on stage as an accompaniment to the silent language of eurythmy, we have to go back to the good old forms of recitation and declamation. We must go back to the times when people were not yet as abstract as they are today. Today, great importance is attached to emphasizing the prosaic content of language in poetry in the art of recitation. This achieves a certain refinement. But that was never what really mattered to the poet.

We need only recall how Schiller, when he wrote his most important poems, did not first have the literal content in his soul, but something melodious that hummed in his soul. And only when he had this melodious, musical element within him, still entirely without words, did he then add words, which are, so to speak, only of secondary importance to the inner meter and rhythm. If we go back to certain stages [of recitation] that we can hardly see or hear today, we can see, I would say — how a certain primitive eurythmy was already present. The people, balladeers mostly, as one could still hear them in our youth in the countryside, sing, could hear, they walked reciting, gesticulating up and down, in which they often presented their quite inferior poems.

The actual artistic element of human life has indeed been greatly reduced, and few people today still have any idea that in relatively recent times - at least for certain areas of the world - work was strongly connected with rhythm. When one did this or that work, one moved rhythmically. This actual rhythmic element was then also applied to what is actually artistic about spoken language.

We must go back to this artistic, rhythmic element in spoken language, in the art of recitation and declamation, and emphasize it again. Therefore, you will notice how we emphasize the rhythmic, the element of meter in recitation, which accompanies the eurythmy here. Otherwise, it would not be possible to accompany eurythmy with today's art of recitation and recitation, because eurythmy, which is essentially born of the element of will, demands that prose recitation, the emphasis of the literal content, recedes and the direct perception of what lies in rhyme, rhythm and so on comes to the fore, that this is expressed precisely through recitation and declamation.

Now, before the break, we will present a dramatic scene from the first part of Goethe's “Faust”, in the study, where he [Faust] is translating the Bible and is disturbed by the poodle. What we are presenting here is not, of course, done in a very eurythmic way, but is done as it is usually done, for the stage. But in Goethe, especially in this world poem of his, in Faust, we come across elemental moments that enter into the supersensible, into the spiritual. The spiritual world continually intrudes into the human world.

It is extremely difficult to present. And in the second part of Faust, Goethe always thought in terms of the stage – by then he had already somewhat modified his own artistic vision – but in the first part of Faust, he did not think of a performance at all. He simply wanted to infuse these works of art, on which he had been working for decades, with the kind of human soul-life, pleasure and suffering, the kind of oppression and sublimity that could be brought to bear on them.

And as I said, he really did not think of the first part of his “Faust” as a stage performance. The result was that parts were performed – and especially the music relatively soon – but that there was never a complete performance of the first part of “Faust”, that – the second part was not published until after Goethe's death – no one even tried. But in the 1820s, a group of respected people in Weimar put together a troupe, putting the great actor La Roche at its head. This deputation then went to Goethe to propose that his “Faust”, which had been around for decades, should now be staged.

Goethe had been a Weimar courtier for decades, had already become the “fat privy councilor with the double chin,” a well-mannered gentleman – really a well-mannered gentleman who knew how to behave otherwise. And lo and behold: when the esteemed La Roche, at the head of a petition of otherwise also esteemed Weimarers, suggested staging Faust, Goethe had one of his outbursts and shouted at them, these people: “You fools!” The actor La Roche still knew my revered friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer, to whom he personally said: “Yes, yes, old Goethe, he still called us ‘donkeys’ back then!” He couldn't have imagined – not even himself – that “Faust” could be brought to the stage.

And we know how much effort has been made, how much effort people like the amiable director Adolf Wilbrandt or Devrient with his mystery-like structure of “Faust” or others have put into it. They have tried to bring “Faust I” to the stage. And of course it is fully justified to perform that which Goethe himself did not yet think of.

But we are convinced that one can only succeed if one uses eurythmy movements, because the supersensible element in 'Faust', which is expressed, for example, in the appearance of spirits and sprites of various kinds in this scene in the 'study', can only be properly portrayed with the help of eurythmy movements. Because something comes into play that ordinary language and ordinary directorial skills cannot actually achieve.

And in this respect, it seems to me – although what we are doing here can also be seen as an experiment – that a way can be found with the help of eurythmy, in which, of course, everything else that is purely earthly dialogue is presented in a purely earthly sense. Only where the supersensible world plays a part, I believe that a way can be found, with the help of eurythmy, to present these scenes on the stage, because of the strange interplay of the sensual and the supersensible in a dramatic poem such as Faust. At least I have the feeling that we have sometimes succeeded in doing this. And eight days ago today, when it seemed that there was a good mood here on stage, I had the feeling that what was played into the study of ghostly scenes, that it was something that could express what Goethe had secretly put into this ghost play. I hope that today, too, we will be able to let the mood come to the fore. This, ladies and gentlemen, indicates how the dramatic arts can also be enlivened by the silent language of eurythmy.

After the break, we will then perform individual poems, rehearsed by eurythmists, which are also partly by Goethe, from which you will then see how the poems can be presented through eurythmic performance. We hope that our contemporaries will take an interest in the art of eurythmy and that it will be supported by people paying attention to this art of eurythmy – even if we still have to ask for their forbearance today because it is only just beginning to emerge. We hope that one day, either through ourselves or more likely through others, this eurythmic art can be so perfected that it can stand alongside the other, older arts as a fully realized new art.