The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 24 April 1920, Dornach

61. Eurythmy Performance

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

As usual before these eurythmy performances, allow me to say a few words today as well, not to explain the performances, because explanations as such are unartistic additions to art, and an art that would require an explanation would be something inartistic. But it is necessary to say a few words about the sources and the particular forms of expression of our eurythmic art. For it is not a matter of a modification of some other art of movement, but rather of an art of movement that, as it happens here, uses the human being as such as an artistic tool for the first time. You will see people in motion on the stage, human limbs in motion, groups of people in motion in such a way that the individual people belonging to them perform movements in relation to one another, that the whole group performs formal movements, and so on.

Now it is certainly true that in everyday life, too, people accompany their speech with some kind of gestures. We will not be dealing with such gestures here, although everything you will see on stage is a silent language, a language that reveals itself through moving sculpture.

That we are dealing with a language is clear from the fact that on the one hand we will hear what is happening on stage accompanied by the poetic text, which is also to be revealed through the silent language of eurythmy. Or that we will also bring musical elements to the stage at the same time, both musically ourselves and through the moving music that eurythmy also is. But these are not random gestures. It is much more than just looking for gestures that can be invented in the moment to accompany the poetic or musical expression. We are not dealing with a gestural art of this kind, but with a real language that simply uses different means of expression than spoken language. That artistic expression can be conveyed through such a silent language, which uses the human being and his movements as a tool, can be seen from the following.

When we speak – whether we speak to communicate as human beings or to express something poetic through language – we always stand before something that is fundamentally foreign to us as individuals. We share language with an entire human community, and if we have an artistic feeling about speaking, it may be expressed in the following way. One may say: the one who feels the full human individuality – and it is this that should actually be expressed in the artistic work – the one who feels the full human individuality, feels the surrender of human will and human feeling to language , to the air connection, to people, as a self-expression of the human, I would even say: as a surrender of our will, which is in a state of perpetual liveliness, to something that has become rigid, that has become a feast.

Therefore, what is poetically and artistically not the literal prose content of a poem. Great poets in particular have felt this. And it must be pointed out again and again how Schiller - especially in the most significant of his poems - felt a kind of indeterminate melody sequence, melody image in his soul and only then attached the literal content to this melody image. Only unartistically sensitive people see the literal content, that is, the prose content of a poem, as the most important thing, but [it lies] in what actually lies behind this literal content, which is given its legitimacy by the phonetic language. So that we can say: the actual artistry in poetry is the rhythm, the beat, the whole form, how thinking, feeling, sensing follow one another, how one thought connects to another. It is not the content of the one thought that matters, but the intertwining of the thoughts. What is actually at the basis of poetry in the prose content is something that is mysteriously worked out of the human will into what is otherwise more strongly influenced by the intellect, by ideas, as is the case with ordinary speech.

The element of artlessness in any art is always constituted by whatever ideas it contains. And precisely because eurythmy can bring out the conceptual, intellectual element and bring the whole human being into speech in his or her revelation, eurythmic speech becomes an artistic language in the most eminent sense, an artistic form of expression. One would like to say: anyone who can feel properly will find in a eurythmic movement, in a eurythmic form, something that is more closely bound to the individual human being than the word, than the sentence. So that one goes back to the human-individual by going from speech to eurythmy.

And there is nothing arbitrary about it. Rather, it is precisely that which is studied in phonology that is usually ignored when listening to phonology. The sequence of sounds, the content of the words, everything that is suppressed in eurythmy is observed. Because it is suppressed, we still have to accompany eurythmy with poetry or music today. But something else comes into it. The person who does eurythmy will find that when he makes a eurythmic movement, he lives into it with his whole being, whereas in phonetic speech he gives himself to a single human organ. That is precisely what this larynx and its neighboring organs develop in terms of movement tendencies when speaking. And this is transmitted to the movements of the whole person in accordance with the law.

So that on the stage you see something like moving larynxes in the whole person or in the group of people. If you could graphically capture the movements of the larynx, palate, tongue and lips through some instrument and could detach the tremulous movements from the lines that pass through them as movement tendencies, you would see everywhere the movements that you have made here on the stage by the person. So that when groups or two individuals in different places perform the same piece of music eurythmically, there is no more difference than when two pianists play the same sonata. Just as music consists in the lawful succession of melodies, so here this moving music consists in the lawful succession of movements that are eavesdropped from the movement tendencies of the human speech organs. One can do this through this supersensible seeing because through this seeing one brings to expression precisely that which can be expressed in human speech, which is otherwise not observed.

So, if you have a true sense of eurythmy, you can say: what is it? It is what would arise if one could suddenly enlarge the movements of the larynx, the palate, the lips, so that they would take up the size of the whole human being, and then let the whole human being carry out what has been enlarged. So it is based on a real observation of what the soul pours into the sound. Here in eurythmy, the soul pours this into the movements.

Therefore, when reciting and declaiming eurythmy, one must fall back on the good old forms of reciting and declaiming, so that what today's unartistic times as the main thing, where one says that he recites well who inwardly emphasizes the feeling that lies in the word, but who actually only looks at the prose content of the poetry and only reproduces the prose content of a poem in this way. Rather, one must be mindful of what real artists meant, for example, Goethe, when he himself rehearsed his dramas with the individual actors with a baton like a conductor, in order to orient his actors' speech towards the iambic foot. We must go back to the rhythm, the beat, the formal, formal side of what is truly artistic and forms the basis of poetry. Otherwise we would not be able to cope with recitation, which should go hand in hand with eurythmy. — Musical accompaniment should also accompany our eurythmy.

In the first part of the performance, before the break, you will see in particular the very significant scene from the beginning of the second part of Goethe's “Faust”. And it shows how eurythmy can be used to depict on stage what otherwise cannot be done with ordinary naturalism. Anyone who has seen many Faust performances in a wide variety of adaptations knows how difficult it is to present on stage, especially in Goethe's Faust, that which leads away from the ordinary prose content of life and presents the relationship of the human soul to the supersensible world. We gave that in particular in this first scene of the second part. People have even reproached Goethe for the fact that, after Faust has taken upon himself the great, heavy guilt of murder and is tormented by terrible pangs of conscience, he is brought into a situation like the one at the beginning of the second part. There appear those powers that operate in the supersensible realm and influence the human soul. When they are dramatically presented, they must, of course, be personified. However, they are meant as an illustration of the real supersensible world.

For example, a certain Mr. Max Rieger, who wrote a little book about Goethe's “Faust”, claimed that Goethe was of the opinion that if a person has incurred a serious debt, all he needs to do is take a morning walk in the fresh sunlight and he will be cured of these pangs of conscience. This is certainly not what Goethe meant here. Rather, it means that the metamorphosis of the soul, after the soul has taken on such burdens as Faust, can only take place through an influence from the supersensible world.

Now it has been shown that such supersensible scenes can be properly presented on stage with the help of eurythmy. I am very busy trying to develop dramatic works further. Today we prefer to present lyric, epic and similar works because these are the only ones we can do. But I am also trying to find forms that can be used to express and present drama as such, in eurythmy. But even without this having been achieved, to present the drama in the course of dramatic action, the tensions and solutions in eurythmy: If we retain the usual theatrical art and technique for what takes place in physical life, eurythmy can be called upon to help where dramatic poetry rises from physical experience to supra-physical experience, to spiritual experience in something like the case of this scene.

I have indicated how I hope that the Eurythmic Art can also be extended to the dramatic, to the generally dramatic – I hope this. Those who have been here often as honored listeners will see that we have endeavored, especially in the last few months, to arrive at ever more perfections in this eurythmic art. Nevertheless, there is still a great deal to be done. And so I must ask the esteemed audience for their forbearance today, because we are just beginning with our eurythmic art. But we believe that, since it makes use of the means of human movement itself as a tool and draws from the very original sources of artistic creation from the depths of the human soul and is seeking new forms for it, [then] this eurythmic art will one day be able to present itself as a fully-fledged art in the world alongside the older arts that have already earned their place in the world.

As I said, it should be noted that we are still dealing with a beginning, perhaps even with the attempt at a beginning in the emerging eurythmic art, which – perhaps no longer through us, but probably through others – will be able to develop into a fully-fledged, younger art.

We will also present Goethean humor today. You will see just from the presentation of Goethean humor through eurythmy how unique this Goethean humor is: a humor that can rise to the heights of world-view contemplation and yet remains an elementary, healthy humor.

I would like to point out, if you will allow me, dear assembled colleagues, that we are now making a special effort to show, in the eurythmy we perform for such humorous poems, how the main value in this eurythmizing does not lie, as I said, in the expression of the prose content in the forms or gestures, but in what the poet has done artistically. So that one can indeed feel the artistic shaping of language again, also in the moving, the mute language of eurythmy.

So it should be clear that I am not trying to recreate the humoristic content of the Humoresken through mimicry or pantomime, but rather to show how the artistic sound form is transformed into eurythmic, silent forms of movement.

But that is only a beginning – with the lyrical part or the dramatic part of the scenes that lead into the supersensible. On the other hand, it will be my task for the future to enrich the drama itself, the dramatic presentation through eurythmy in a certain way. This must, of course, be quite different from what you can already offer today. What we can offer now may be received with leniency – we are our own harshest critics. But we also know that there are possibilities for developing this eurythmy into a complete work of art, either through us, if our contemporaries show enough interest, or through others.