The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 18 January 1920, Dornach

41. Eurythmy Performance

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to say a few words about our eurythmic performance, not to explain what is to be presented, because an artistic work must evoke the direct impression for which it is intended through its own content. Of course, an art that requires explanation cannot be a true art. But here we are opening up a new source of art. And just as it would be ridiculous today to precede a concert with an introduction, it will also be ridiculous in the future when we are convinced from the corresponding cultural period, which is the source of this eurythmic art, to precede a eurythmic presentation with such an introduction. Today, however, the art of eurythmy is still in its infancy, and it is necessary to talk about the special nature and essence of the sources from which it draws.

Above all, what you will see on stage is a silent language, a language whose medium is the moving human being himself. You will see movements that are executed by the human limbs, that are executed by the fact that the human being executes movements in space, by the mutual positions of people in groups and so on and so forth. Now the question is how these movements can become a real language and then an artfully designed language.

You are able to do this, dear attendees, because the lawful connection that exists between what is revealed in audible speech and the whole being of the human being can indeed be found, but only if one delves deeper into what I would like to call here: Goethe's view of art, Goethe's artistic attitude. The person who, to use this Goethean expression, can use sensuous-supersensuous observation to place himself in the essence of the human form and the movements that are inherent in the human form as an organism, can know that the organization of the larynx, and how this organization is connected with neighboring organs, contains, so to speak, a repetition of everything that is present in the other organs of the whole human being, so that this organization tends towards the movements.

But also otherwise, when we study the nature of the sounds that you can make, we find a connection between the formation and especially between the way in which these sounds are placed in the world, and between the production and transformation of sounds. The one who truly possesses the gift of perceiving with both the senses and the supersenses will intuitively see a connection between the structure and, in particular, the movements as they reveal themselves from the entire muscle system, say, in the case of predators and their roar. Or one will intuitively discover an intimate connection between the way a bird sails on the waves of the air and the kind of intense inner movement that comes to expression in its tone production and tone transformation. If one studies this mysterious connection between movement and tone production in nature, one can also extend such a study to the human being. And then one penetrates ever further and further into that which really lives far below the threshold of ordinary consciousness: into the connection between human movement and audible speech. One can study the movement of the larynx, the tongue, the palate and so on and so on. You can study how these movements are transmitted to the vibrations of the air – as I speak here, the air is in motion. You can then study how everything else that a person can do can become an expression of a similar kind, just as sound becomes an expression of human soul experiences.

In our audible speech, two things flow together: thoughts, as it were, from the head, and will from the whole human being. The fact that thoughts come from the head makes our speech somewhat inartistic. For the artistic is all the more profound the less it has content of thought, the more we penetrate directly into the secrets of things, without the mediation of thought. But if we omit the element of thought from audible speech, we come more and more to understand how speech is based on the movement potentialities contained in the human vocal organ. Then we can transfer this to the mobility that exists in the whole human organism. In this way, when we bring movement and mobility into the human being to such an extent that these movements of the whole body reveal something similar to the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs, the whole human being, or a group of people, becomes a living, moving larynx.

You see, that is what is attempted in eurythmy: not inventing arbitrary gestures that are somehow assigned to some soul moods or soul feelings — that would only be an arbitrary , but inwardly lawful movements, which are expressed in a gesture-like way, but such gestures that do not depend on the individual human consciousness, but that come deeply from the subconscious, from what is universally human, not from the individual human being. Therefore, when two people or groups of people in two places perform the same thing in eurythmy, the individual interpretation can only be of significance to the extent that two pianists in different places play the same music. Anything arbitrary, anything pantomime-like or mimic-like is excluded here. Just as music is based on the inner progression of melody or harmony, so here everything is based on the inner laws of movement, which are drawn from human nature itself, in that the movement of one organ – the larynx or its neighboring organs – is transferred to the whole human being and a silent, lawful language takes the place of audible speech.

All this makes it possible for you to see here, on the one hand, a stage presentation in silent language, in eurythmy, poetry or music. The music will be performed alongside the eurythmy – or poetry in recitation. However, for this to happen, the recitation must be specially arranged. And that is why there will be just as much opposition today to the kind of accompanying recitation as there is to eurythmy itself.

For today one has a special preference, I would say for a kind of prosaic recitation, which one wants to shape into beautiful recitation, whereby one particularly emphasizes the inner literal meaning when reciting. This is not the actual artistic element, this prosaic quality of the content. The actual artistic element of the poetry is precisely the inner, intense movement that is depicted outwardly for the eye in eurythmy. But then the accompanying recitation in eurythmy must also particularly emphasize this element of the rhythmic. That this is justified in relation to poetry can be seen from the fact that, for example, a real poet like Schiller — today, of course, 99% of what poets write is not really poetry, as we shall see later. - a real poet like Schiller did not first have the literal content in his soul when his poems were created, but he had a kind of melodious experience in his soul, and the literal content only arose from it. Just because people today believe that they are being very artistic – although in truth this is not very much represented in our education of the mind today – the truly artistic feeling for poetry does not rest on the content of a poem, but on the rhythmic, on the formal, on what is behind it. Goethe rehearsed his Iphigenia with a baton, in the same way as an orchestra is rehearsed, although it was a play and not poetry.

In this way, eurythmy will in turn have a fruitful effect on artistic perception in other fields as well. Today we will attempt to show you a series of poems in a eurythmic presentation, which perhaps particularly lend themselves to this eurythmic presentation because they have already been felt to such an extent that that inner eurhythmy is already in them, or because they are so faithfully modeled on nature, as for example Goethe's 'Metamorphosis of Plants' is, that eurhythmy arises of its own accord. That is the peculiar thing: With poor poetry, eurythmy will not easily follow; but with poetry that is artistically felt from the outset – for which, however, our time has very little feeling – eurythmy will be able to follow. In particular, if they are what I would like to call nature impressions, which in creation presupposes a real going along of the human soul with nature.

And so I have tried to show you the sources of our eurythmy. What I have set out will make it clear how the actual instrument of representation in the eurythmic art is the human being itself, a musical, linguistic instrument of an extraordinary kind. For in this way we achieve what Goethe so beautifully expressed as a fundamental artistic sentiment in his observations to Winckelmann: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself as a whole nature that has to produce a summit within itself again. To do this, he rises to the challenge by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art.

How can a person rise to the production of a work of art when he regards his own organism as an artistic instrument! But all that is intended by this is only just beginning. And as much as we are convinced that this beginning will experience a significant perfection more and more, we are still the strictest judges today and know that we are at the very beginning. And so I would ask you to be indulgent in your judgment of what we are able to present to you today, even though we are convinced that eurythmy, once it has been perfected by us or by others, will be able to stand as a fully-fledged art form alongside other, older art forms.