The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920
GA 277b — 21 February 1920, Dornach
50. Eurythmy Performance
“Wanderers Sturmlied” by J. W. v. Goethe
Music from the 4th Symphony by Anton Bruckner
From the 6th scene of “Guardians of the Threshold” by Rudolf Steiner
Music from the 4th symphony by Anton Bruckner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (46th) by Rudolf Steiner
Parabase by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (46th) by Rudolf Steiner
To the Cicada by J. W. v. Goethe
“St. Expeditus“ by Christian Morgenstern
“Cupid and Psyche” by J. W. v. Goethe
Satirical prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “Korfs Verzauberung”; “The Impossible Fact”; “The Shoes”; “The Aesthete”; “The Authority”; “The Mouse Trap”
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals “Seance” by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Joy“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Sorcerer's Apprentice” by J. W. v. Goethe
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.
In eurythmy, a sample of which we would like to present to you here today, a special art form is cultivated, an art form that, in the way it appears here, relies on a new artistic instrument, a new artistic tool, namely the moving human being himself, with his inner organic possibilities of movement, and that draws from very special sources.
If one were to describe this art form externally, one would say that it is a kind of silent language. But even though you will see people moving – moving both their limbs and performing movements as individuals or as part of a group – if you also see that, you cannot say that the aim here is to achieve a kind of general sign language or a kind of mimic language that is widespread among people. Everything that the mere momentary gesture would give, or that pantomime or mimicry would give, is avoided here. Rather, the attempt is made to give a thoroughly lawful mute language, a mute language that is brought out of the whole human organism according to the same laws as spoken language itself, [as] audible language is brought out of a particular organ system, out of the larynx and its neighboring organs.
The whole of eurythmy has actually emerged from Goethe's view of art and Goethe's artistic ethos, but in such a way that nothing arbitrary is established, but that the essence, the nature of the human organism is carefully studied through what one can call with Goethe's expression: sensual-supernatural vision.
When one comes up with something like eurythmy, one must surely be inspired by those endeavors that are clearly visible in the present and that are directed towards new means of artistic expression. Today, when we look at contemporary artistic endeavors, we see everywhere that artistic natures in particular are striving to go beyond the old means of artistic expression. We see this in painting, even in sculpture. We can also see it, although it is less noticed, in poetry.
What is actually being striven for? What is the background to this striving? Take the example of painting. Those who, because they are so old today, have experienced that painting as a contemporary one, which did not yet know about the so-called “open air” and the like, they saw that the old artistic means of expression means of expression of painting consisted of, something that was traditionally present, simply to be processed with certain means that one could learn in school, in order to express that which had now also become more or less traditional. Now one got the feeling: these means of expression alone have actually already passed through human thought too strongly. If one still felt painting from the first half of the 19th century - at least the common, [which] was common practice -, one could say: something strongly processed by human thought was already present in the treatment of the means of expression. It is only natural that when one works with certain means of expression for a long time, human thought comes into it, and now knows how to do one thing better or less well. And then one notices in the way it works, in which human thought plays a part, that here thought has played a part.
But even if such a method of treatment may still be artistic in its starting-point, it will be felt to be inartistic after a certain time, when human thought has taken over the treatment of the means of expression. For everything that is actually conceptual, everything that has the quality of an idea, kills every artistic element at bottom. In the artistic sphere one must not start from the idea in creating, nor must one be induced or seduced, when enjoying art, to understand a work of art with the help of the idea.
Therefore, in painting, one strove for means of expression that did not actually give any space to thought, either in artistic creation or in artistic enjoyment. And one strove to capture the immediate impression of how some part of nature presents itself under the influence of light, air and so on. One tried to capture the moment so that one tried to give, so to speak, in a pictorial way, that which flits by so quickly that one does not even have time to think. This was tried for a while. But in time one realized that one could not actually achieve a satisfying result in this way, in any field of art. If you only want to capture what nature reveals to the exclusion of thought, then you do not get the full nature, you get something that does not stand like a solved puzzle, but like a question. In short, you get something unsatisfactory. You found that nature cannot actually be mastered artistically if you do not mix in the thought.
Now the opposite direction was taken. It was said: The artistic can also come from the immediate inner human experience, from that which man experiences in such a way that he does not yet think about it, that he does not let it come up into thought. So, in a sense, they worked with what remained more or less pictorial, not grasped by thought, but still an inner experience. They also tried to depict such things in painting, for example. Those who do not like to get involved in such artistic experiments perceive much of what is seriously striven for in the present as mere folly. Because when someone throws a few colors around or tries to capture something he has experienced inwardly, then the artist has perhaps tried to paint on a surface – let's say a liberating inner experience, an inner liberating sensation, a relief in the sensations. He considers that which arises as an image in his mind, without him engaging with the idea, to be this inner liberation, and he captures it with colors on some surface, throws it down, and the other person, who sees a decked-out ship or something like that in his painting, cannot find his way around in terms of what it actually means. One has not experienced any satisfactory results for the reason that one has felt, again, that the means of artistic expression – color and line – do not produce what one actually wants to experience inwardly.
Now one notices what this thing comes down to, especially in relation to poetry. Poetry, after all, has to struggle constantly with thought – especially in our civilized languages – in order to create artistically. If one goes back to the original state of languages, this is not the case: When someone said this or that, one still sensed in the language either the musical or the plastic element. I will give you an example. Suppose you take a very characteristic word of the Austrian dialect, that is, a word that is still close to the more original forms of speaking, which is found in the word “FHimmlitze[r],” the Himmlitzer. Anyone who pronounces this word as the Austrian farmer does will notice the three-pronged lightning flash. For Himmlitze[r] is also something that describes Werterleuchten and the [three] pronged lightning flash. You can still tell from the word that this is the case. But in our civilized languages, speaking, even the speaking of the phonetic, has taken on a thoroughly conventional character. We have organized our languages, especially the civilized languages, in such a way that they lead to understanding, to the most prosaic element of communication between people. But everything that is supposed to lead to this, to bring about understanding between people, naturally leads back to thoughts.
If the poet then has to use a formed language, as is of course the case, then the listener or the reader of the poems perceives the prose content. And that is why today the poetic sensibility - especially of those who enjoy it - is to a great extent highly unartistic. One goes into the content of the poems. But what is actually artistic about a poem is only what underlies it as rhythm, as meter, as inner form, what immediately arises in us as a musical or formative element when we listen to anything poetic. That is why one feels the lack of artistry of our age particularly in the face of contemporary poetry – of which, by the way, it can be said that today, of all that is written, ninety-nine percent is too much – one feels the lack of artistry of our age particularly in the face of contemporary poetry.
All these things lead to seeking something that does not need to give the immediate impression of nature, because that cannot be grasped without thought. Then one comes into the realm of symbolism or the like, which is even more clumsily inartistic. Or, however, it is not possible to capture with the usual artistic means of expression that which is grasped as an inner experience that has not yet become a thought. Expressionism tried to do this, but without as yet arriving at adequate artistic means of expression.
An attempt has been made to take account of this modern artistic striving in a very limited area, where it has, as it were, been derived, in our eurythmy. The movements you are going to see are not ordinary gestures. What a person performs as an ordinary gesture cannot really be done in our eurythmy. If we try to reproduce the gestures with which people usually accompany their speech, our conversation, we would get nowhere. We would only arrive at something very trivial that has no artistic meaning. But here in our eurythmy, we try to extract the will element from the flow of speech - which is derived from the thought element - and leave out the thought element entirely. By studying the movement patterns in the larynx and neighboring organs when speaking, we learn to recognize which movements are present in the larynx and neighboring organs in spoken language. Then we can transfer these movements, visible to the senses and the supersenses, to the whole person.
But then something very special comes to light. The larynx is in direct contact with the air. When we now tense the whole person, what flows out of him as a movement pattern first passes into the muscular organism. And if we do it in the transfer into external bodily movements of the groups, then it also goes into the external spatial movement. What is set in motion in the process is the human muscular system or the whole human being in groups of people. The person who causes these movements first encounters the muscular system. This muscular system initially forms a certain resistance. One must pay attention to this resistance. When the larynx begins to move in order to produce speech, it is directly related to the air through cartilage and the like. In this way, the movement patterns are communicated to the air in such a way that what is not actually pulsating in them, what the movement patterns are, is not expressed in the air, but is transformed by this special involvement of the larynx in the whole air circuit. what the centers of movement are is transformed into small, trembling vibrations that are not perceived, but one perceives the sound that is carried through the air on the waves of these vibrations and that strikes our ear.
On the other hand, if you do not take what happens directly in the larynx, but only what is present, and if you look at it through the whole person, then the rapid vibrations that are caused by the direct immediate movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs, [which] come about with the air, but rather slow movements, those movements that become slow precisely because the resistance of the entire muscular apparatus is there, so that we have intuitions, but in a completely different way. The muscular system is only the tool of the human will, and the whole human being is used for expression as the tool of that which is the will part in phonetic language.
In this way, you see, one gains the possibility of realizing the aspirations that I have characterized, which are not arbitrarily set up by me here, but which are actually taken from modern artistic striving, I would say, to a certain goal, to lead to a certain goal in the first place. By not allowing the movements to reach the larynx, but only as far as the muscular system, it does not reach the thought, but the things remain human soul experiences, but expressed in a form that the person performs themselves.
So you don't have the mental element in artistic revelation, which is the death of all real art. But at the same time you do have the experiences that are in the human being. Nature does not give us anything satisfying if we do not bring it to thought. That is why mere impressionism could not lead to any satisfying results. But when you set the human being in motion, you have an inner experience in what is presented; but at the same time you have the possibility to express this inner experience externally, bypassing the language of thought. So, by pointing to the artistic aspect of eurythmy, by enjoying the artistic aspect of eurythmy, one has an inner human experience, which can be grasped directly in what the moving human being is. One has an impression that is also directly an expression. And in this way, something is initially striven for in a specific, narrowly defined artistic field, which you can see in the most diverse ways in our building forms, and also in painting. For there, the aim is everywhere to gain precisely those artistic means that are actually being tried by the most modern artistic endeavors, but which have otherwise led to very little results.
Now I do not want to claim that what we can give here as eurythmy – where the immediate impression is only not raised to the level of thought, because what is given here as expression has not yet reached the level of thought – I do not want to claim that this eurythmy is in itself something that should take the place of the other arts. But I would like to point out that in this eurythmy something is given that can be studied, just as one can seek in other arts — painting and other arts today, including architecture , to present the means of artistic expression in such a way that, by avoiding the thought element that kills art, they truly represent what is being sought from the unconscious today. Therefore, we must also organize the recitation in such a way that we do not recite as is customary today – the prose content – but that we emphasize rhythm, beat, the melodious element itself in this recitation. One could not, as one tries to do today, find it beautiful in recitation when it accompanies eurythmy.
All that I have indicated to you is, therefore, created in a narrowly defined area and is initially an attempt to arrive at new artistic means of expression by first allowing the human being to reveal himself through his inner experiences as a direct expression of the human inner being. Nature cannot be grasped as completely as one can immediately grasp nature and the human soul at the same time in the external form, because the human soul can be naturally expressed in the artistic movement of eurythmy.
But all this is still in its infancy, and you will see that some of the things that try to make an impression on you here may leave you with a somewhat unsatisfactory feeling. But those of you who have been here half a year ago or who have seen our eurythmic art occasionally and have come back now, you will see, you will notice how we have striven in these last months to move forward, because today we already have the emphasis in the musically felt movements, in the whole forms.
But no one feels what eurythmy actually is if they start from the premise that these forms are supposed to explain something, that these forms are one way or the other because they are supposed to be a mimic or pantomime expression. The large forms that you see are all formed from direct perception, excluding the conceptual element. You cannot say that they are so or so. And anyone who sees something contrived behind them, who cannot base it on purely artistic perception, but [gap in the text], is on the wrong track from the outset.
But I would still ask you to be indulgent in your judgment of our performances. We are our own harshest critics, and we know very well what we are capable of at this early stage. This is a beginning, and we must strive to improve. But you will see on the other hand that when something is already conceived in eurythmy, something that is already formed with the exclusion of the thought element, as it is the one scene that I have tried to do in my mystery drama with the two opposing forces: where on the one hand the forces are presented that are active in the human being and that influence him in such a way that he actually wants more and more and more to rise above his head in mysticism, fantasy, enthusiasm, theosophy; and on the other hand, how it leads him into deceit, the other things that oppose him, that continually push him down below, where the spirit of heaviness would like to move, where the sober, prosaically sober is expressed, and so on. Where this becomes everyday [...] man is always in the realm of balance when something like this, which is in harmony with the life of the soul, is overheard, performed and realized in eurythmy. Of course, in the future our attempts to present dramatic works will also gradually be developed more and more in eurythmy. There is little of this today; but attempts will also be made to develop eurythmy for the actual drama.
For today's performance, I ask that you take it with indulgence. Our attempt is a beginning. But all those who can respond to what is intended can still believe that this eurythmy will one day be recognized as a fully fledged art form alongside the other, older art forms, perhaps through completely different people than we are, who are now starting with it.