The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920
GA 277b — 10 January 1920, Dornach
38. Address on Eurythmy and the Passion Play
Dear attendees!
As always before these performances, I would like to take the liberty of saying a few words today, first about our eurythmic art, for those of the honored audience who were not present at earlier performances.
Goethe said of his artistic sensibilities: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he feels himself to be a whole nature, bringing forth a higher nature from within himself by extracting order, measure, harmony and meaning from all phenomena and ultimately rising to the production of the work of art. It is out of this spirit, out of true Goetheanism, that our eurythmic art was born. I do not wish to give you a theoretical discussion in these few words, for it is self-evident that something truly artistic needs no explanation but must commend itself and be understood directly in the act of presentation. But the way in which an attempt is being made here to create an art form must be discussed in order to be understood.
They will show all kinds of movements performed by people and groups of people. You will see the way individuals within the groups relate to one another. All the movements that appear are born out of the human organism and the interaction between people. They are not contrived or arbitrary in any way, but are a real, silent language.
The development of this art is based on a deeper - to use Goethe's expression - [sensual-transcendental insight into the human being and its connection with the world. With such a sensory-supersensory insight into the human being, one can recognize which lawful movements the human larynx and its neighboring organs carry out when a person reveals the sounding, audible language or singing of himself. It is precisely those things to which we do not pay attention when we listen to spoken language, the internal movement and especially the movement patterns, that have been studied here according to Goethe's principle of metamorphosis, according to which what is formed or takes place in one organ system can be transferred to other organ systems or to the whole organism. According to this deeply significant law of Goethe's metamorphosis, what otherwise underlies movements or the potential for movement is quite naturally transferred to human speech, [via] the movements of the limbs of the human being in the world. And this is precisely how the possibility arises that the sight of such a mute language must have an artistic effect. For what is the artistic in human beings actually based on? It is based on the fact that we receive impressions of the life of nature and of human beings without the abstract imagination, or imagination at all, mixing into these impressions.
In ordinary language – even when expressed poetically – two elements of the human organism are embodied: on the one hand, the element of thought, which in more advanced, civilized language has already taken on a strongly conventional character, and on the other hand, the more subconscious will element, the emotional element, is at the root of it. If one can eliminate the thought element from speech, which crystallizes into the tone of the heard language and thus does not allow the heard language to be completely artistic, then one achieves something that can be believed to be particularly artistic. And so all the movements of speech are transferred to the human limbs; but only the will element is incorporated. The human being as a whole expresses itself, not through sharp gestures as in other dance or similar arts, but the human being as a whole expresses itself in a lawful way.
Therefore, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing merely pantomime or mimic in this eurythmy. If two people or groups of people in completely different places express one and the same piece of poetry or one and the same piece of music through this formal language of eurythmy, there is no more individuality in the two different performances than there is in the performance of one and the same Beethoven sonata by two different pianists. All arbitrariness is avoided. There are inner laws in the sequence of movements that could not be otherwise, because they are derived from the essence of nature itself. Just as the harmony and melody of music have an inner lawfulness, so here everything that is revealed in the movements has an inner, musical lawfulness. We are dealing here with a visible musical art.
Thus you will find many things presented in two ways, either at the same time through music and eurythmy or through recitation and eurythmy. In this, recitation must return to its old, good element, where it is not cultivated only for its prosaic, literal content, as it is today, but for the rhythmic, the measured quality of the sound, which is what actually constitutes the artistry of the poem. For what is felt today as poetry is not, in the first instance, the actual artistry of the poetry, but the prose content of the poem. It is the formal, the rhythmic, the metrical that underlies it, and an inner lawfulness of the essence of the world is revealed.
In the second part, we will present Christmas plays today and tomorrow, today a Paradise Play.
We resumed these plays several years ago. I can say that I myself have a very close connection with the revival of the plays in our family. It is now almost forty years since I became acquainted with these plays through one of the men who has rendered the greatest service to their collection, through my revered friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer. Schröer was one of the first to collect these games together with Weinhold, Schröer in particular. While Weinhold collected them in Silesia, Karl Julius Schröer collected them in the Oberufer region near Pressburg [Bratislava], where Germans had advanced towards the parts of European territories where other languages were spoken as a result of emigration from more western European areas.
The Hungarian countryside is permeated by old German colonists: in Transylvania, where the Saxons settled, in the Banat, where the Swabians came from the areas around Lake Constance, in Alsace, in what is now southern Württemberg, in northern Switzerland – numerous colonists moved into the areas of northwestern Hungary. And they brought with them those Christmas plays, those Bible plays, which were performed in their original form in the German motherland until the 16th century, and later only remained in a few places, fairly unnoticed by the educated world. In the colonies, especially in the Oberufer region, near the island of Schütt, near Pressburg, the practice of playing these Christmas games in a dignified manner every year around Christmas time has become established and was preserved until the forties, fifties and even sixties of the last century. And when they began to disappear from the scene, Karl Julius Schröer collected these Christmas games in the Hungarian region of Oberufer.
It is extremely interesting to observe these Christmas plays. They provide cultural-historical evidence of the way in which Christianity was actually introduced in Europe in centuries past, and how it affected the entire spiritual life of the people. Schröer had still observed it himself, and we often talked about these things, and he told me with what dignity, with what inner participation the people celebrated these Christmas games. They were well preserved by particularly select farmers in the village concerned, by particularly respected people. They were passed down from father to son, from son to grandson, and were held sacred; they were not easily shared with outsiders. It took a great deal of effort for Karl Julius Schröer to get them out. But, as I said, it was already the dawn of this play for the German colonists in Hungary.
When October, the harvest season, approached, the person who was considered the master of the arts in these farming and working-class areas – these were mostly extremely poor communities even back then, these German communities in Hungary – he gathered the local boys he considered most worthy, and he rehearsed these Christmas plays with them. The dignity with which this was done may be gathered from the fact that, under strict disciplinary laws, those who were allowed to participate were not allowed to leave during the entire period of the play. This is expressly prescribed for those who were allowed to participate: that they are not allowed to go to the pub or indulge in any other debauchery during the entire time. During the whole time, that meant a lot: it was immediately after the grape harvest was over that one was not allowed to get drunk. Anyone who somehow violated these rules was immediately dismissed.
All the roles were played by young men. The old custom of not allowing women to participate in comedy plays, including sacred comedies, was still in place, although the educated world had long since abandoned it. However, it was still preserved and noticeable at these festival plays. And from this one can see how ancient and sacred customs have been preserved in the performance of these plays. So tomorrow, for example, we will perform a play for you, a pastoral play, in which the Rhine is mentioned, from which one can see how these plays were originally, at least as late as the sixteenth century, were performed near Lake Constance. These things take us back, I would say, to the sixth century, so that we have before us the living out of Christian life as if it were happening right in front of us.
To present something like this, I would say, as a directly revealing story to the contemporary world, that is what we would like to make our task. Now that everything that is cultural life has become so sober, so dry and so abstract, now is the time to go back to such things, which, in directly vivid imagery, by raising the old into the present, transport us back into the becoming, into the development of humanity.
Of course, since we are not dealing with trained actors, I would ask you to receive this performance, as well as the eurythmy performance itself, as one of our modest attempts. We ourselves believe that what our eurythmy art has become today is only a beginning. It is indeed a supreme artistic aspiration to apply the human being as an instrument in art, not the violin, not the piano, not the trumpet, but the human being. Especially when you consider how all the laws of nature are somehow in action in the speaking human being, then you will know how to appreciate the ideal on which eurythmy is based. But it is only just beginning. We are our own harshest critics, and so I ask you to please be very indulgent as you take it all in.
It should also be mentioned that the eurythmy performance will include not only individual pieces but also the Norwegian “Dream Song of Olaf Ästeson”. It comes from the oldest Nordic folk myth that can be expressed artistically; it was rediscovered when, alongside the Statsmäl [Riksmäl], the Landsmäl of the old Norwegian language, the popular Norwegian language, was cultivated. This dream song, this Traumlied, gave the impression of genuine Norwegian folklore, and with the help of friends in high places, I tried to express in our present language that which leads back to ancient European-Nordic times in this poem.
I would like to say that this “Dream Song” expresses a very popular worldview, a worldview that is particularly loved in those cultures that have developed on the one hand in the particularly shaped way of life in Norway and in the influence of the neighboring cultures. I would say that here, too, we can see into the depths of human feeling – especially in the way that the relationship between Nordic, clairvoyant paganism and the Christianity that was spreading there flows into one another here in the 'Dream Song'. What has emerged from the confluence of these two world currents, taken up as an elementary, original folklore and its worldviews, is actually enshrouded in mystery in this “Dream Song of Olaf Åsteson”.