The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 14 February 1920, Dornach

48. Eurythmy Performance

Dear attendees,

Anyone observing the development of art in our time will find that a whole series of young people aspiring to art are striving towards certain new goals for the development of art, and you are of course aware that these new artistic endeavors appear under the most diverse slogans. If you look for the reasons, the deeper reasons for these often extraordinarily questionable endeavors, you find that in fact in all areas of art, artistic natures themselves feel today: The means of expression that the arts have used in the most diverse epochs are actually exhausted, and a new source of artistic inspiration must be sought in various fields; in a sense, there must be a renewed appeal to the elementary, to the primitive artistic experience of man.

But when such an endeavor arises, then one must at least start from a very specific perception of the artistic. Now, as far as it can be seen in world development, everything artistic has two essential sources. One is external observation. This external observation can only provide art with something that it can process if it does not first pass through concepts, ideas, or images as an observation of nature. In more recent times, attempts have been made in various artistic fields to create something artistic from the immediate first impression that, let us say, a landscape can make. It was found that the old methods of painting had also been exhausted in this respect, that people had painted far too much from ideas, from impressions of nature that had already been processed, that they had, I might say, captured the moment before they had time to reflect, what was revealed to them in nature through light and air and so on. In short, the underlying aim is to present something artistically that is the result of external observation, but an observation that does not make it to the thinking grasp, because the thinking grasp is the opposite of everything artistic, is actually the death of everything artistic. Where there is a lot of symbolizing, a lot of spinning, a lot of concocting ideas, where one is supposed to arrange forms and colors and the like, art is killed. That is why people have tried to capture immediate impressions. They called these “impressions” and strove for an impressionistic art.

But for the time being, an important obstacle stands in the way of painting and sculpture. It is difficult for us to find in the present – here in this building it has been attempted – to capture form and color so directly, in sculpture and painting, to the exclusion of everything symbolic, everything conceptual, that one can let the artistic take effect with the exclusion of everything ideal, with the exclusion of everything conceptual. And once this building is finished, it will be seen that no complicated mystical ideas were sought to be embodied here through sculptural or pictorial forms, at least not in the main, that no symbols , but that the impression – both the architectural-sculptural and the sculptural-pictorial – should be sought directly in form and color, skipping the conceptual.

On the other hand, another source of the artistic is the inner experience of the human being, the artistic that rises to inner contemplation, and this source of the artistic has also been appealed to again from various sides in the [present-day] era, in the present. One tried to bring to expression that which one can only feel inwardly, experience inwardly. They tried it, for example, in the field of painting. But one can say: in the circles of younger artists who have endeavored in this direction, only questionable forms have been expressed up to now – for the simple reason that everything that is line, that is color, that is form, in a truly extraordinary way, if one wants to handle it technically, is opposed to that which is inner human experience.

Now there are two arts that seek to express inner human experience directly: music and poetry. But even in these arts, it is apparent that the source that the newer sense of art seeks to open up cannot yet be found in broader circles, wherever it is sought. The musical, that is in its form in the harmonic, in the melodic element, is not designed to directly express the full inner life as experienced by man, so that the musical is extremely reluctant to be expressionistic, to be visionary, and even something unhealthy enters into the musical when it wants to move towards the visionary.

On the other hand, poetry is terribly dependent on the development of human language. And here we have to say that our civilized languages have already come so far that they have an extraordinary amount of conventional thought elements. So that the poet today is obliged to express himself literally, actually at the expense of the original elementary artistic feeling, but in so doing enters into the element of thought, which from the outset is the death of all that is truly artistic. So that one can say that a large part of the poetry that is being created today does not actually promote art, but rather represses and kills it. And this can be seen particularly in what people like about poetry today. They often accept poetry as if it were prose, as if it were something that should have an effect through its literal content. But the truly poetic is only to be found in the musical and formal-plastic elements.

Now, if we really delve into the source of our spiritual movement, for which this Goetheanum building is the external representative, if we really delve into it, we come to the development of Goetheanism. In Goethe's entire artistic work, there is one striking thing, ladies and gentlemen. I believe I may say this, for I myself worked for seven years in the Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar, and took part in all that, which more or less remains unknown to a larger public, although it is the best of the present. One can say that what has been published from Weimar makes Goethe an extraordinarily effective writer today. Today, we learn a great deal about Goethe from what he did not do. I was most impressed by everything Goethe undertook in the course of his life, not by what he brought to such perfection as his [dramatic] works, such as “Iphigenia”, “Faust” and so on, but by what was left behind, what got stuck in the early beginnings. This also proves outwardly that in Goetheanism one does not have something that died with Goethe himself, but in Goetheanism, my dear audience, one can have something that is still effective in our time and can be made fruitful in our time. Goethe simply had such great artistic intentions that he himself, as a mortal human being, was no longer able to bring these things to anything other than fragments, so that the unfinished actually plays an enormously important role in Goethe's work. That is why today one always has the feeling that there is still a lot to be gained from Goetheanism. Well, this eurythmy, which uses the human being himself as a new artistic instrument and which wants to open up a special new source of art, is taken out of Goetheanism.

One can say that everything you will see performed on stage here, executed by movements of the human arms and other human limbs, performed by groups of people, is by no means arbitrary, these are not random gestures that are invented to accompany some invented for some poem or musical motif; it is something that is inwardly composed and built upon such laws, just as music itself is when it lives out in harmony or reveals itself in the sequence of time in melodious elements. Just as there is nothing arbitrary in music, but everything is inwardly lawful, so it is also with this visible but mute language of eurythmy, which particularly allows itself to be artistically revealed, to be revealed through the most perfect artistic instrument: through the human being himself.

So, you will see a silent language here on stage through the movements of the human limbs or the movements of groups of people. And this silent language has come about through what I call a Goethean expression: sensual-supersensory observation, through a supersensory observation of what actually happens when we reveal the spoken language that underlies ordinary poetry and use it as a means of human expression. Something very peculiar is at work here. This spoken language is a confluence of that which comes from the human thought and that which comes from the human will.

Now, the larynx and its neighboring organs are such that, when the impulses for movement are carried out, they do not come into contact with muscles, but are directly communicated to the outer element of air. The wonderful thing about our larynx is that its cartilaginous structure is directly adjacent to the external element of air. Only this makes it possible for the impulses of the thought element to flow through what the human will exerts on the larynx and its neighboring organs. But this means that something inartistic comes about, especially in poetry, which has to make use of language. The thought element comes in. But at the bottom of this thought element is the will element, coming from the whole human being. I would like to say: the thought, in speech, swims on the waves of the will.

Now in eurythmy, the thought element is completely suppressed. Only that which underlies poetic language as meter, as rhythm, as form, in short, as a plastic and musical element, is transferred into the movements. And this can be done by not speaking phonetically, but by having the whole person or groups of people perform those movements, which are otherwise only present in the larynx and its neighboring organs, as regularly as the larynx otherwise transmits them to the air, so that one then has the will element - opposing it, the muscular organization of the human being.

It is a different matter whether the movement patterns of the larynx and its neighboring organs are transmitted to the air when the mental element is received, and thus cause the movements of the air corresponding to the phonetic language, or whether the will of the person, coming from the whole person, directly impacts the muscle apparatus and sets the limbs in motion. This causes something quite different. The small vibrations that underlie speech, which are no longer perceived as movement, come about because the muscular element is not opposed by the larynx. But in the mute language of eurythmy, the will addresses the muscular element directly, the entire human element of movement, the muscular and skeletal system. And in the mute language of eurythmy, the whole human being, who becomes the larynx, brings forth what otherwise only spoken language brings forth.

In this way, eurythmy becomes an artistic element that always consists of rhythm and meter and arises particularly from the poetic and the musical, and presents a new artistic element to the present.

Therefore, the recitative element – which often alternates with the musical element, but mainly accompanies the silent speech – must be handled differently than recitation is often handled today. And if what is actually intended with the eurythmic element is already misunderstood, then it will be possible to misunderstand the accompaniment of the recitation in many cases today because it cannot go to the literal content – eury thmy would not be accompanied by recitation), but must go to the actual artistic element, which in our present, unartistic time is no longer felt in poetry: to the rhythmic, the metrical, which underlies the literal content. The art of recitation itself must return to the good old forms of recitation, which are still little understood today.

But you will see that when something has already been conceived as poetry in eurythmy, it can be expressed particularly well in the silent speech of eurythmy. Today, in addition to a few other things, we will present a scene from one of my mysteries in eurythmy, in which the laws of the world are expressed in such a way that thoughts alone are not enough to penetrate these laws of the world, but that other means of expression must be used to express what actually lives and weaves in nature. In this way, man is much closer to nature and the world in general than he is in the mere abstract comprehension of the so-called laws of nature, which actually only ever express an external aspect of nature.

But the artistic, too, if it wants to express the inner experience, cannot get by in the present, because when we use colors, when we use forms - no matter whether we use the stylus or the brush - these means of expression still resist the inner experience with the utmost brittleness. And that is why the expressionist pictures of today's younger painters look so strange, because the means to express what is experienced internally, but not yet driven to the inner element, where it becomes thought, because it [then] becomes inartistic.

But on the other hand, nature cannot be interpreted impressionistically; nature itself makes it necessary, so to speak, when we face it humanly, that we do not exclude thought; it cannot be interpreted impressionistically. The actual impression of nature cannot be artistically reproduced. But if you take the human being as a higher instrument, then you have the inner experience that does not come to spoken language, and thus does not come to the thought element, and you take the human being himself, by bringing his movements - that is, what can be observed - to the contemplation of the inner experience, excluding the element of thought. Expression in the immediate impression, that is something that can certainly become a possibility in eurythmy.

Now I am not saying that eurythmy is the only art that should replace other art forms, but I am saying that eurythmy can make it clear what the other means of expression should strive for those who, today, out of a good but still imperfect, I would say childlike, feeling, are looking for new sources of art. That on the one hand. On the other hand, we know full well – we are our own harshest critics – that our eurythmic art is still in its infancy. But we are absolutely convinced that this beginning is capable of perfection. I therefore ask you to accept what we can offer today in our eurythmic art with indulgence. For everything in its infancy is very easily misunderstood. On the other hand, however, we are well convinced that something is offered by this still very imperfect beginning, which, if it is further developed by us or by others, more likely the latter, and if it finds interest among our contemporaries, will be able to stand as a fully-fledged young art alongside the older fully-fledged arts and join them in the future.