The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 4 April 1920, Dornach

55. Eurythmy Performance

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

As always before these eurythmy performances, allow me to say a few words today as well. What we will present to you today in a rehearsal of eurythmy is an attempt at a new art form.

On the stage, you will see all kinds of movements that people perform on themselves through their limbs, or that are performed by people in space, by individual people in space, or also alternating movements, alternating positions of groups of people. These movements, which will be demonstrated, are intended to be the expression of poetry or even of music. Now, one could initially interpret these movements simply as gestures. But they are not. For everything in which you are to find the art of eurythmy is not arbitrary gestures associated with something poetic, but rather they are thoroughly lawful expressions of what is experienced by the soul — like language itself.

An attempt has been made to give a real mute language in this eurythmy, a language that consists of human movements. The way in which this is attempted is entirely in line with the spirit of Goethe's world view. However, one must not misunderstand the manifold aspects of this Goethean world view and also understand how to develop it further. Eurythmy is truly that which Goethe calls the expression of the sensual and the supersensible. For it is based on the study of the impulses and tendencies of movement that are set in motion in the human larynx and all those organs that connect to the larynx when speaking, for the language that is contained within.

Phonetic language is used as a means of poetic expression. However, it can be said that the more advanced a culture is, the more phonetic language approaches the prosaic as a means of expression. If we go back to the poetry of earlier times, we can see that in earlier times, poetry was still seen in what actually lies behind the actual prosaic nature of language, in the rhythms, in the rhythmic movement of language, and also in the plastic imagery that is expressed through language. This song-like and plastic character of language is increasingly being stripped away, the more language takes on the character given to it by the advance of spiritually inanimate movement. In particular, because speech is there for human understanding, for conversation, an unartistic element flows more and more into speech.

In this inartistic spoken language, however, one can seek out what lies at its artistic core. In it - in this phonetic language - two human revelations flow together, from two very different sides: on the one hand, the revelation of thoughts, everything that is thought and imagined, so to speak, everything that flows from the human head into the larynx, that is the one element of phonetic language. The other element is everything that comes from the whole human being: it is the will element in speech. One can say: the laws of the will, the inner soul life revealed in the will, flow together when one forms speech artistically, most especially.

But just as in every art there is less that is truly artistic the more that is ideational and mental that flows into it, so too in what is presented poetically there is less that is truly artistic as the thought - which is a prosaic element - flows into this artistic element. The actual poetry is given in the will element, which lives itself out in rhythm and beat, in the whole formation, and which also lives itself out in the images on which it is based.

Now, in eurythmy, it is precisely the task of stripping away that which is the thought element. This is then emphasized in the recitation that accompanies the eurythmy, but which must also be shaped in a special way for the eurythmy, as I will mention in a moment. In contrast, in the movements of the eurythmy itself, one will strip away everything that is conceptual. The whole human being is made the subject of expression: everything that is done in the way of movements as silent speech is now the expression not of thoughts but of the will element, which is expressed through the whole human being - namely through everything that is connected, that integrates into the rhythmic system, into the heart system and so on.

But in order to be able to do this, to really bring the element of will to manifestation through movements like a mute language, it is necessary to study the movement tendencies of the larynx and the other speech organs. When we speak, it is clear that our larynx and speech organs are in motion. One need only think of the fact that while I am speaking here, the air comes into certain lawful movements, which movement is simply a continuation of the movements initiated by the larynx and its neighboring organs. But it is not so much these movements that are of interest for eurythmy. Rather, it is the movements, seen supersensibly, that are the potential movements. And according to Goethe's law of metamorphosis, according to which the whole organism is only a more complicated form of a single organ, one can bring the whole person into such movement, as the larynx actually wants to develop in speech.

This is the study that must underlie this mute language, which comes to the fore in eurythmy. You see, as it were, the whole human being become the moving larynx. The movements are only different from those that function in phonetic language because in phonetic language the cartilages of the larynx collide directly with the outside air, while in euryth we let that which pours out of the will element strike together with the muscles, which offer a much stronger resistance to what is brought to the fore by the will. That is why these movements occur in a slowed-down form in eurythmy, which come to the fore in swinging oscillatory movements when speaking aloud, as it were, summing up the swinging movement into one main form. And that is expressed through the whole of the human personality, through the whole of the muscular organization. That is the mute language of eurythmy.

Therefore, in the succession of movements, it is something that represents a law as necessarily as the musical element itself represents a law in the succession of the melodious element or in the juxtaposition of what represents a law as does the harmonic element in music. And just as little as more than a certain degree of subjective interpretation comes into it when two pianists play the same sonata independently of each other, so it is also in eurythmy when the same thing, the same poem is presented by two personalities or by two groups. Thus, the individual element is no more distinct than the individual interpretation of two piano players of the same Beethoven sonata. There is nothing arbitrary in this artistic eurythmy, but everything is just as internally lawful as in music itself.

This makes eurythmy, this silent language, particularly suitable for serving Goethe's demand to bring a sensual and supersensory element into artistic representation, because it dissociates the prosaic, the thought element, from the poetry and translates into visible movement what is actually artistic in it. One could also say: sculpture in motion, gestures that take hold of the whole human being, understood as language, as real language, as unambiguous language. This is what should come to the fore in eurythmy.

Therefore, you will see that this silent language can be accompanied on the one hand by the musical element and on the other by the poetic element in the recitation, which, however, as such, as the art of recitation, must in turn return to the earlier good forms of reciting, where one recited according to measure and rhythm, not according to the prose content of the poem, after which one has just now especially formed the art of recitation and sees something perfect in this prosaic form of the art of recitation.

How great poets did not consider this prosaic element, to which so much importance is attached in today's unartistic age, to be the main thing, can be seen from the fact that Schiller, for example, never had the literal content of a poem in mind, at least not in his great poems. He always had something vague and melodious in his soul, and only then did he add the literal content. Goethe even rehearsed his Iphigenia with his actors like a conductor rehearsing a piece of music with a baton, not emphasizing the content of the prose during the recitation, but rather the artistic, rhythmic, and metrical form, the plastic, musical element in the poetic, which is, after all, what is truly artistic in the poetic.

Then we shall see how that which is already eurythmically shaped in the imagination, such as my [mystery drama] scenes, which are also being presented today, express the expressions of the laws of the human soul, and the paths that this soul life can take, as well as that which is already inwardly formed in the feeling, and how that can be expressed quite naturally in eurythmy. In scenes like these, we can see how we must develop towards an understanding of the life of nature and the world, so that we no longer base our understanding of the life of nature and the world merely on intellectual abstractions, but on imaginations — imaginations such as I have attempted in my mystery scenes, of which a rehearsal will also be given today. For the fact that human development must go in this direction is in line with a deep conviction that one gains when one has any insight at all into the workings of human and non-human nature. What use is it, dear attendees, to philosophize about the fact that real knowledge, real understanding, only exists in the rational, clearly analyzable, when nature does not give up its essence to the analyzable, the discursive, the rational alone. If nature works in images that only reveal the inner essence of nature as images, then it is necessary that we also penetrate into the inner essence of the existence of the world through images, through imagination.

The fact that people wanted to understand nature only with their minds actually led them to say, cowardly:

No created spirit penetrates into the depths of nature
Happy he to whom she shows only the outer shell.

Goethe, in his old age, when he was truly able to think more clearly about such things than many who philosophize rationally, said of these words of Haller's – “No created spirit penetrates into the innermost being of nature; blessed is he to whom it shows only the outer shell” – Goethe said:

“Into the innermost part of nature”
Oh, you philistines!
“No created spirit can penetrate."

May you not remind me and my brothers and sisters
of such a word:
We think: place by place
we are within.“
“Happy the man to whom she shows
Only the outer shell!”
That's what I've heard repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly;
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
She is everything at once;
She only tests you, most of all,
Whether you are core or shell.

So it is: the one who does not want to be shell with his soul, that is, a bundle of intellectual ideas, must move up to images. But then knowledge connects with art. And then one can say, say with understanding, what Goethe also demanded of true art: that it is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that could never come to revelation without it. And one understands Goethe's other feeling about nature and art: “When nature begins to reveal her manifest secret to someone, they long for her most worthy interpreter, art.”

This kind of world view, this Goetheanism, underlies what we want to present in eurythmy here. In the second part, after the break, you will see that our children's eurythmy demonstration – a presentation of eurythmic poems by children – shows the very strong hygienic and educational side of this eurythmy. Ordinary gymnastics, the one-sidedness of which is still not recognized by the public today, will have to be supplemented because it only takes into account the physiological aspects of the human being, the soul of the movements that the human being performs as a child. And only the art of movement imbued with soul, eurythmy, will truly make the human being strong-willed, while mere gymnastics may make the body strong, but not at the same time the soul, and in particular does not draw the initiative of the will from within. Eurythmy can bring the initiative of the will from within the human being.

But all in all, we must ask you to be patient, because what is being attempted as a new art form is still in its infancy. It is an attempt at the beginning of what I have presented to you more or less as the ideal of this art. But those who saw this eurythmy here months ago and will see it again now will see that we have worked on it, that we have achieved a great deal in the formation of the groups and also in the formation of the movements of the individual compared to before. We are the harshest critics of our performances and we know that the eurythmic art is in its infancy. But we also believe that, if it is further perfected either by us or probably by others, it will one day be able to take its place as a younger, fully-fledged art alongside other, older, fully-fledged art forms.