# The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

## GA 277b — 11 April 1920, Dornach

### 58. Eurythmy Performance

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

As usual, I would like to say a few words before the eurythmy performances today about the way in which we are trying, within this eurythmic art, to seek first of all a kind of new artistic form, to seek new means of expression, and then, in a certain way, to go back to the source of artistic activity in human nature itself.

On this stage you will see movements of the limbs and of the whole human being in space, changing movements and changing positions of people in groups. All of this is meant to be a kind of silent language. But not a mute language that consists of random gestures, so that one would have to search for gestures to accompany the poetry that is recited at the same time, or for the song-like, musical elements. Nor are random gestures sought here for what is to be expressed, just as the sound of speech itself or the word is something that is added “by chance” to the meaning, as it is something that connects itself through the human organization with the meaning that the sound is to express.

To create such art, it was truly necessary to make use of what, according to Goethe, can be called sensuous-suprasensuous intuition.

When we follow human speech, we first turn our attention to the spoken sound or the sequence of sounds. We do not become aware – this is inherent in the whole organization of language – of the fact that our organs, which have something to do with the production of speech, carry out movements. These movements are, of course, small rhythmic movements, but they are based on movement tendencies. Those who are able to follow speech in a certain sense can really see these movement tendencies. They can get a picture of the movement tendencies present in the larynx and its neighboring organs, while speech sounds phonetically to us.

What we observe in speech, whether it is a single organ or a system of organs at work during speech, can be applied to the human organism as a whole. However, as I will explain in a moment, this is not as simple as it may seem, but requires a certain metamorphic transformation. Just as Goethe arrived at his view of metamorphosis as that which must underlie a true organicity, so too must we strive for such a view of human functions that allows us to recognize how a single group of functions — that is, underlying speech movement — can be connected to a possible movement of the whole person, just as Goethe saw the whole plant only as a more complicated, metamorphosed leaf or petal [or] also as stamens. This view, which Goethe applied only to the morphological, can be extended to the functional; it can be permeated artistically. But just as one can follow the larynx's main tendency, in that it comes into direct contact with the external air when speaking and is transformed into small rhythmic movements, , another element comes more to the fore in this transmission of the movement of the sounds to the whole person than it comes to the fore in the movement of the sounds, namely the element of will, also the element of willing feeling.

In our language, thought, imagination, and will, feeling, willing feeling, and feeling will all flow into each other. We do not need to distinguish these things, because in fact only the imagination and the will are actually juxtaposed. And in the artistic contemplation, we always have to fight, I would even say, against too much of what is the perception, what is the idea, flowing into the artwork in the direct perception of the image – but not in the image as we otherwise perceive it in nature, but rather in the spiritualized image. That is what should actually work in the perception and creation of art.

Now, when we look at nature in ordinary life or even in science, we transform the image through thought into what it then is as a spiritualized image. In this way, we lift it out of the sphere of the merely artistic. In the artistic, the image should have an immediate spiritual effect. In a sense, as an image it should already affect us in the same way that thought otherwise affects us. But as soon as thought affects us as thought, the artistic aspect ceases, the artistic is paralyzed, and in our language there is actually less and less possibility for artistic expression – even in poetry – as civilization advances. It becomes more and more conventional as a spoken language, it becomes a form of expression for that which we want to present in an abstract, intellectual way. As a result, our poetry actually becomes impoverished in terms of its means of expression. But basically, there is only so much that is truly artistic in poetry, as there is music on the one hand or imagery on the other.

Pictorial, plastic is meant here in such a way that, by listening to language, to poetically shaped language, one immediately perceives a kind of image in sound as well. We then rid the poem of everything that flows from the thought into the poem when we begin, as we usually begin, to transfer the tendencies of movement that the larynx and its neighboring organs carry out to the whole person. By undertaking this metamorphosis of the function of speech and now looking at the whole human being – of course it cannot come to phonation because we are considering the macrocosmic movements, the movement tendencies instead of the microcosm – that which we extract from the spoken word is the will element, that will element that is bound to the whole human being. Therefore, if the human being as a whole appears, so to speak, like a larynx in lively motion, we have expressed that, the form of expression given by the human being himself.

But at the same time, we also have the opportunity to perceive what confronts us in the human being as an image, without philosophizing about it, by first spiritualizing it. The spiritualized image arises from the fact that the human being, who is spiritualized in his movement, becomes this image, so that we can have the spiritualized image directly in our perception. Through this inspired image, which can become a means of expression in poetry in an equally natural way through a silent language, we have actually achieved much of what art must strive for: to create the inspired image without having to take the detour through the intellect, through thinking, which has a deadening effect on art.

Of course, the recitation that accompanies the eurythmy must then take care to extract precisely what is actually artistic, not the prose content of the poem. Today, because we live in an unartistic time, reciters actually attach the greatest importance to the prose content, to the convention of the literal. The artistic person does not feel the essence in this emphasis on the literal of the poetry, but in the emphasis on the rhythms, the cadences, the musical or even the pictorial-sculptural, formative. Therefore, recitation, in so far as it is to accompany eurythmy, must return to the good old forms of recitation, to which Goethe naturally felt himself bound. He, who felt artistically, rehearsed his 'Iphigenia' with his artistic personnel, like a conductor with the baton in his hand, with an eye to form rather than content. And Schiller always had, before he had the literal content in his soul – at least with many of his poems – an indeterminate melodious connection that hummed within him, and then he sought out the literal text, the content.

If you look at the one hand at what is brought forth from the human being as a mute language, just as arbitrarily as the spoken language, you will find it accompanied on the other hand by the music. It is only a different side of what appears in these two arts. Furthermore, I believe that one can only create something that actually presents itself as a kind of new art form alongside our older art forms in eurythmy.

When we turn to the visual arts, we need, as it were, to first calm the things that are moving within us. The musical and the poetic, which are indeed moving, must work at the same time with such a strong power of internalization that the external sensory impression often recedes. Even in purely musical, absolutely musical works, the external sensory impression is juxtaposed with an internalization. But it is precisely because music, when it appears as pure music, can still speak to the pure senses that it retains the purely artistic. By contrast, we do not find what I would call plastic movement in those areas of art that are considered traditional. Sculpture that is artistically formed and does not depend on standing simply in repose, in form, in calm shape-shaping, but sculpture that can take human movement as its starting point: this simultaneously becomes eurythmy, which is based on listening to the movement tendencies of the human speech organs and applying them to the whole human being.

You will see from the experiment that I have just carried out, with the presentation of what underlies the world spiritually, which is then connected with the essence of the human being - which is already conceived poetically in such a way that one counts on there being more in reality than is provided by the mere, abstract laws of nature formulated in intellectual form — that this can most easily be represented in eurythmy.

As with all eurythmy in the present day, one will probably have to encounter misunderstandings and hostility in our time because it is simply believed today that what essentially underlies things must be able to be grasped in an intellectual form. But nature creates in images, and therefore we can only approach nature in its actual creation and weaving of the world if we engage with images. And so what Goethe meant will come true when he said: “To whom nature reveals its secret, longs for its most worthy interpreter, art.

For Goethe, art was something that combined – I would say in continuous metamorphosis – with mere scientific knowledge. So that one might truly find the truest truth in the moment when the whole human being is set in motion, in lawful motion, which is at the same time the expression as is speech itself, that one might find the truest truth in the Goethean saying: in the artistic one has a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never be revealed without this artistic manifestation.

That is one side, the artistic side, which is initially more important for the outside world. However, it should be noted that, beyond the artistic aspect, there is also an important hygienic-therapeutic aspect to this eurythmy, the soul-inspired movement. And that this soul-inspired movement has also been added for children, in their education, so that this soul-inspired movement is added to gymnastics, which is actually based solely on the physiological view of the human being. When we are able to judge more impartially, we will recognize that gymnastics, while it makes the muscles strong, does not at the same time help to bring the initiative out of the soul and to shape the will. Therefore, I believe that once this eurythmy can be introduced into the teaching plans, as we have already done at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which is based on these important educational principles, it will turn out that the children will take with them into life a very essential, a certain culture of the will, the cultivation of which is so important in the present day: a soul-inspired culture of the will, a culture of the will that is not merely a child of the physiological view of the human being, but a child of the psychological view of the human being.

That is why we will also show you something done only by children after the break, so to speak also a sample of children's eurythmy. But please be aware that our performances must still be viewed with leniency. We are our own harshest critics in these early days, because it is only a beginning. It is an experiment. But just as those of our esteemed audience who have been here before will probably be able to see that we have tried hard and really improved from month to month, we will continue to try to turn this beginning into something more complete. And we can be convinced that although we are still at the very beginning of this eurythmic art, it is capable of such perfection that it will be able to present itself as a young art alongside the older arts - as a fully-fledged art alongside other fully-fledged art forms.