The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920
GA 277b — 8 February 1920, Dornach
47. Eurythmy Performance
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.
As always, I would like to say a few words today for those of you who have not yet been to a performance of this kind. Please do not think that I am doing this to explain what is to be artistically presented. That would, of course, be a thoroughly unartistic approach from the outset, because everything that aspires to be art must make an immediate impression. But here, in this eurythmic art, it is a matter of opening up truly new sources of art and, I would say, using a new artistic tool. And some information about these two things must indeed be provided in advance in order to understand the presentation itself.
What is being striven for here will be seen on stage in the form of all kinds of seemingly incomprehensible movements, which are performed by individual people by moving their limbs - namely the arms and hands, moving as a whole, and also movements that are performed by groups of people put together and so on. All that is being attempted here is not just a further development of a sum of, let us say, random gestures, not something pantomime-like, but it is actually about the artistic expression of a very specific kind of lawfulness that is rooted in the human organism itself.
Like everything that should proceed from the movement that this structure represents, our eurythmy also goes back in its intention to the Goethean worldview, to the Goethean view of art and to the Goethean artistic ethos. However, ask you not to understand my reference to Goetheanism as if Goethe were the only thing we have to consider, insofar as he lived in the 18th century and the first third of the 19th century. For us, Goethe is a living cultural factor that continues to have an effect. And the Goethe who is alive for us today everywhere, the Goethe of 1920, is something quite different from the Goethe who died in 1832.
What is at issue now is that all arbitrariness is excluded from the development of our eurythmic art. If I may use Goethe's expression, I would like to say: through sensual and supersensory observation, it has first been investigated which movement systems – I say expressly movement systems – are present in the human larynx and its neighboring organs when the outer air is set in motion through this human larynx, palate, tongue and so on, and phonetic speech is created. Here we really make the remarkable discovery that everything that is attached to the larynx as an organ of expression for speech is, in a sense, a metamorphosed repetition of the organization of the whole human being, in the sense that Goethe developed his theory of metamorphosis, which is really still not properly appreciated today, as a method of understanding the living. He said: the whole plant is basically nothing more than a complex leaf, and each leaf is an elementary whole plant. So you can say: everything that is a function of the larynx is actually a metamorphosed function of the whole human organism.
What can be shaped as the movement system that, when excited, moves the air in the speech sounds, can be transferred to the whole person. So here on stage, you have, as it were, the individual person or whole groups of people with everything that goes with them, like a large walking larynx in the silent language that this eurythmy speaks. Eurythmy is therefore a silent language that is formed according to the same laws as spoken language. However, it must be taken into account that when the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs are transmitted to the air, the movement impulses are converted into movements at the lowest speed, so that the individual movement is not perceived. Strangely enough – one can, of course, find a more fortunate word for what I want to say – strangely enough, one can now find that the volitional element that works in man behaves in such an agitating way towards the movements of the individual limbs of the human organism, which of course naturally offer greater resistance, and therefore have to move more slowly – and not, in a manner imperceptible to the eyes, to cause only audible movements, but visible ones. of the human organism, which naturally offer greater resistance and therefore have to move more slowly – and not, as is imperceptible to the eyes, to evoke only audible movements, but to evoke visible movements. This transformation, this metamorphosis of what takes place in the human speech organs into movements of the whole human organism, that is our eurythmy.
Therefore, there is nothing arbitrary about this eurythmic art. On the contrary, everything can be found in the regular, lawful succession of movements, just as everything can be found in the musical element itself in the lawful succession of the melodious element. It is music that has become visible or language that has become visible, especially.
One can say that precisely by striving for this, one achieves a stronger artistic effect than through the spoken language when this spoken language becomes the expression of poetry. In our civilized languages, poetry, in terms of its artistic element, already suffers from the fact that, to a large extent, a conventional element flows into our languages, that which only serves for social communication from person to person. Of course, the poet must use all of this, but it is an unartistic element of language formation, and it becomes particularly unartistic to the extent that the thought element, the element of ideas, mixes with the linguistic element. In the linguistic element, the thought element and the will element, which both reveal themselves from the human soul, flow together. But now one can say: something is all the more artistic the more the thought element recedes. The more we are able to empathize with an object or process in such a way that we do so to the exclusion of the ideal, to the exclusion of the abstract, to the exclusion of the thought element, the more the impression is an artistic one, which is particularly achieved in eurythmy by the fact that the thought element is completely excluded and only the will impulses that otherwise accompany the thought element are transferred into the movements of the limbs.
I could also characterize the matter from a different perspective. You just need to think about how our thinking life is structured. It is the case in our time that in our ordinary [dreams] images play a role. Our ordinary [dreams], if one is not directly pathological, are accompanied by images of movement. We move in our dreams, but the movements are only images. The element of movement recedes completely into the element of the dream. The opposite is the case with eurythmy. There the element of thought recedes completely and the element of will comes to the fore. Therefore one can say: in an ordinary dream there is a consciousness that is tuned down; in eurythmy there is an over-consciousness, a stronger waking up than the everyday waking up of consciousness. That is the essential point: there is absolutely nothing dream-like in the language that is given as a silent language in eurythmy.
You know that [humanity actually developed language at a time when people had not yet awakened to full consciousness] – people developed the element of language in their childhood period, and the individual also develops language with a still dream-like childlike consciousness before the actual abstract awakens. Thus, language really does grow out of a kind of subconscious. This can also be seen from the fact that it is not the civilized languages that have the most developed logical grammar, but precisely the less civilized languages. Thus we can see how the organization of language reveals itself out of the unconscious, just as eurythmy reveals itself as a visible, thoroughly conscious, and no less artistic element.
Therefore, I ask you to appreciate the fact that eurythmy excludes all pantomime, all gesticulation, all dance-like movements, and that it is therefore a real, silent language, developed in accordance with its own inner laws. That is why this eurythmy is accompanied on the one hand by musical instruments, which basically express the same thing by different means as is presented on stage on the other hand, and on the other hand why eurythmy is accompanied by the art of poetry.
In doing so, you will see that when we have what is presented on stage in eurythmy accompanied by recitation and declamation, we are obliged to fall back on the old, better forms of recitation and declamation as were customary in a less unartistic age than our own, where people worked out of rhythm, out of tact, not only everyday craftsmanship but also almost all artistic perception of nature and the world. One can feel and sense how a form of eurythmy was already at the root of everything artistic in primitive cultures.
With truly great poets, let us say with Schiller, for example, we find that with his most significant poems he did not have the literal content in his soul first – that only came later – but rather a kind of indeterminate, melodious element that was there like a ladder, to which the words then joined. And as we know, Goethe rehearsed his “Iphigenia” with his actors himself, baton in hand like a conductor.
This artistic sensibility has been completely lost today. Today we know very little about the fact that there is only as much art in poetry as there is musicality in it, or as there are echoes of beat, rhythm and melody in it – everything that is literal is basically inartistic – or even [that] the formative element is to be thought of as already shaping movement, just as it is presented to us in eurythmy, by the way.
Therefore, we must also refrain from the art of recitation, which is still so popular today, and which places the main emphasis on the prose content of the poetry, on its emphasis and its form, but we must place emphasis on overcoming this in the art of recitation and to return to the understanding of rhythm and meter in recitation and declamation – the actual artistic element that underlies the literal content and which, in reality, is the aesthetic element in poetry.
From this point of view, it will also be quite understandable to you, dear attendees, that both our art of recitation and declamation, as we must use it here in the company of eurythmy, and our eurythmic art itself, are still met with misunderstanding today. But that is, after all, the case with every new cultural phenomenon – especially with spiritual cultural phenomena. These misunderstandings will be overcome in time.
In the first part of the program, we will present you with all kinds of nature imaginations. First you will see how something that has already been thought mainly in eurythmy — even if it is eurythmically conceived in the soul process —, and that is how it has already been thought in eurythmy, can be automatically translated into eurythmy. This is the case with the “miracle of the source” from my “mystery dramas”, which will be presented afterwards.
In the second part, I will show how to present in eurythmy what I have tried to express as a kind of chorus of gnomes and sylphs, to show how necessary it is – this is an extract from one of my 'mystery dr » – if we really want to understand nature, we must go beyond the abstract concepts that are the only ones provided by today's method of knowledge and which are actually far too limited to encompass the full richness of nature's being and becoming. This still sounds paradoxical to most people today, but in the course of time it will have to be recognized that the inner weaving and essence of nature cannot be grasped with the abstractions of the intellect, which then find expression in the laws of nature.
Of course, in our eurythmy performance today, something like this is still very, very imperfectly portrayed, as it is, for example, in the form of a choir of sylphs and gnomes. But instead of merely abstractly presenting the laws of nature, we will see things in the living artistic realm, and we will see that they can then also be portrayed. And as paradoxical as it may still appear to modern man, especially to the scientific man of today, that in order to fully comprehend nature, one must strive to transform abstract ideas into artistic, pictorial conceptions of natural and other world events, it will still have to happen.
And so you see that the instrument for eurythmy must be the human being itself. Just as one instrument or another is used in the other arts, eurythmy uses the human being itself as an instrument. And today we will still accompany that which appears as a silent language in music and recitation. But we use the human being in such a way that through him, who is in fact a microcosm, that which, I would say, the world itself wants to express as its riddles, as its secrets, and which can never be expressed through mere ideas or abstract understanding. In this way one achieves what I believe to be a Goethean artistic attitude, which he expresses in his beautiful book on Winckelmann when he says: “When man's healthy nature works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight - then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.” And indeed, if we truly bring to expression what man, placed at the summit of nature, can achieve by transforming his otherwise artistic nature, then we have attained something of that can be said to be the case when the individual human being does not express himself in his egoistic unity, but makes himself into a tool, a means of expression for what nature and the world want to convey to us. In this sense, eurythmy can indeed be considered the beginning of something promising, in the Goethean sense of art. Goethe says so beautifully: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to him, man feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Real art cannot be sought in the merely arbitrary, but real art can only be sought in representations of what has been overheard from nature's riddles. But all that we can offer you today through our silent language, which we call eurythmy, I ask you to take with indulgence. Because it is only a beginning, perhaps even just an attempt at a beginning. Everything still needs to be further developed. But we are convinced that if our contemporaries take an interest in the matter - we are our own harshest critics and can only see it as a weak beginning today - and if, based on this interest, suggestions can be received for further development , then through us, or probably through others, this eurythmic art will be developed to such an extent that it can stand fully justified, perhaps only after a long time, alongside other fully justified but older art forms.
As I said, we are our own harshest critics, and we know that what we are able to offer of this art form so far is just a beginning. This is not just a figure of speech, but something we say in all honesty and sincerity.