The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 5 April 1920, Dornach

56. Eurythmy Performance

Dear attendees,

Allow me to say a few words before this eurythmic presentation today. In this eurythmic art, of which we want to show you a sample here today, the aim is to create something from certain new art sources and from certain means of expression, which in a sense can be called a new art form. And anyone who takes into account the striving for new art forms among today's artists will perhaps see it as a possible and necessary attempt when special artistic sources are opened up. The point is that through this opening up of special artistic sources in the human being in eurythmy, as it is meant here, a kind of silent language is presented through movements of the human limbs or also through movements of the human being in space, through alternating movements of people who belong to groups.

I would just like to point out how such movements, which are by no means arbitrary gestures in eurhythmy, and are by no means gestures invented in an instant, can come about as equally lawful forms of expression of the human soul experience, just as speech or song, the musical itself, creates means of expression for what can be experienced by human beings.

It can be said that the more artistic elements there are in a person's language, the more these elements express this language as a basis, as revelations of the poetic, the more one goes back in the development of language. It is indeed a peculiar fact that the more advanced the languages within human civilization become, the more they develop into a conventional means of expression for external human intercourse, and that to the same extent as the artistic perception of language loses its power for truly artistic, poetic expression. And we must arrive at the cause of this peculiar phenomenon, which can only be penetrated through the artistic. When searching for this cause, one will find that the further back one goes in the development of language, the more the language, by filling it, takes up the whole person, and the sound language takes up the whole person in such a way that one can say: in different ways, the sound language takes up the whole person.

The less prosaic spoken language has become as a mere language of communication, as a mere language of everyday life, the more, the further one goes back to even more primitive language elements, the more it engages the whole person, and the more it unites in the phonetic language, in its vocalic, in its self-sound element, a musical, and in its consonantal, in its consonantal element, a plastic, an image-forming capacity of the human being. So that in languages – it was clearly noticeable in the Central European languages, in German, until the 17th and 18th centuries – so that in the original languages there is a confluence of the musical and the pictorial-sculptural.

The musical element, which lies primarily in the vocalization of speech, is now intimately connected with the spiritual element in the human soul. When the human being, as it were, grows together with his spirit and experiences within himself that which can make an impression on him outside in nature, then in the vocal-musical expression, an inner experiencing of the human being with the outer process or the outer thing comes about. One need only recall how certain external experiences evoke the a through wonder, the o through admiration, and so on, in the soul, and one will feel the musical, vocalizing tendency of human speech. On the other hand, we have the consonantal element, that element

where the human being is less introspective and more immersed in and devoted to external processes and external things. This is the plastic, the inwardly pictorial element. In fact, two unconsciously creative artistic elements in the human being flow together in speech.

Eurythmy is the shaping of what is experienced by the human being through the image itself. Again, one can say, my dear audience, how writing originally emerged from the image. We have pictographic writing where writing still has an inner relationship with the things that the human being perceives; then writing becomes more abstract and intellectualized. It becomes a mere sign. And today's writing has little more in what it presents to the immediate view of the experience that one can have when one considers pictographic writing in its relationship to the environment.

Now, in terms of writing, we civilized people are actually at an impasse. We started from the experiential relationship of the human being to the external senses in picture writing and arrived at prosaic, inartistic, abstract writing, and there is something tortured and unnatural about wanting to go back – anyone who has tried it themselves can judge for themselves – about wanting to go back to some kind of artistry in today's form of writing.

But with regard to language, we are not at an impasse. We can grasp the word, the phoneme, the sentence, in short, everything that is expressed through spoken language, in such a way that what is otherwise expressed through phonetic language is silently expressed in the movement of the whole person. I would say that something flows into speech that is like subconscious movement, like subconscious feeling. But the more language is transformed by the era of civilization, by communication, the less one feels the whole person resonating and resonating with the things in language. And if we use what Goethe calls sensuous-supersensible observation to listen to the movements tendencies of the larynx and all the organs involved in the production of speech, we begin to understand what movements are contained in the larynx and its neighboring organs in the production of speech. And if we then transfer this to the human being as a whole, to his limbs, and to his outer spatial movements, then we arrive at the mute language of eurythmy, which is just as necessarily lawful as spoken language.

Therefore, on the one hand, the musical element that has been incorporated to some extent into the vocalizations - into the eurythmy and into the spoken language - can be brought out more fully through the accompaniment of the recitation, and on the other hand, through the accompaniment with the recitation, one can, we say, bring out more fully what is expressed in the silent language of the eurythmy. So you see on the stage the silent language of eurythmy, which, as I said, is not arbitrary, but a lawful expression of vocalization and consonantization, of sentence formation, of grammar. But it is the case that it does not arise through intellectual understanding, but comes forth from the impulsive will element of the human being, so that one asserts the I in the means of expression itself, one has an expression of the whole human being in eurythmy.

This becomes understandable – or at least one is helped in understanding by the musical accompaniment, the recitation. Recitation, however, must be practised somewhat differently today than usual. Today, recitation is actually prosaic; eurythmy, which goes back to what underlies the actual artistic, to rhythm, to the beat, to the emphasis of the actual artistic, beat, rhythm, in contrast to the mere prosaic expression in recitation, would not tolerate this.

In this way, eurythmy attempts to create a kind of language that is not abstract, that is, that does not contain the unartistic, but that can be shaped into artistic effects precisely because it does not yet contain thought, and thus contains only the artistic.

At the same time, this eurythmy has another side, an essential pedagogical-hygienic side for children. Ordinary gymnastics for children can be imbued with soul. Whereas gymnastics is simply derived from the laws of the human body, and is based on physiology, children's eurythmy — a sample of which you will see after the break in the second part of our program — is intended to create soul-inspired movement. This will be recognized one day, when we think about these things more objectively: that through this soul-filled exercise, which is also artistic, the will of the child is strengthened at the moment of life when it needs to be strengthened, if it is not to experience a weakening throughout its whole life.

Therefore, on the one hand, eurythmy is to be understood as an art, but on the other hand, its important educational and pedagogical-didactic side must be taken into account at the same time. This evening we would like to present something from this side, where poetry itself is felt and viewed in a eurythmic way, as in the piece that will be performed for you today, where we try to capture the processes of the world in images that are otherwise only grasped through abstract concepts. Here eurythmy shows itself to be a particularly useful instrument for artistic expression. And only then will we understand how necessary it will gradually become for the human understanding of the world to grasp the whole of nature and also the supersensible in images, not in abstract concepts. One can philosophize at length, saying that yes, the human being must think discursively, the human being must analyze, the human being must explore the laws of nature in logical abstract judgment. Nature eludes this kind of investigation! We cannot get close to nature. We only believe that we can get close to nature with today's knowledge of nature; in truth, the more we satisfy this modern abstract drive for knowledge, which has triumphed in natural science, the more we distance ourselves from nature. Nature can only be understood if we grasp it pictorially, as is generally the case with cosmic processes. But then we see how man is a true expression of such a pictorial grasp of nature and the supersensible.

This really helps us to understand Goetheanism again, which sometimes expresses itself in very short sentences in Goethe, as when Goethe says: “To whom nature reveals her secret, feels the deepest longing for her worthy interpreter, art.” And for Goethe, art was in a sense a means of knowledge, not a physical-prosaic one, but an artistic means of knowledge. In this way, Goetheanism will also take such things into account as we train eurythmy. But the way we can present it to you today is just a first attempt, a beginning.

But one can also be convinced that it is based on the genuine sources of the most artistic instrument, the human being itself, that it will either be further developed by us or by others in the future, and that then, in fact, the older art forms, which, if I may say so, are already running in well-worn tracks, will be joined by a fully-fledged new art in this eurythmy, which may still be met with suspicion today. We ourselves are our own harshest critics; we know that what we are able to give today is only a beginning, but we also know that it can be perfected and that one day it will be truly recognized as a fully-fledged art form that can stand alongside other, older art forms.