The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 8 May 1920, Dornach

65. Eurythmy Performance

Saying from the soul calendar (4.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Limits of Humanity“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Opening ‘Look around you’
“To the Moon” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the soul calendar (5.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the soul calendar (6.) by Rudolf Steiner
Prelude “We want to search”
“The resin journey in winter” by J. W. v. Goethe
Prelude ‘Fate question’ with music by Max Schuurman
Elegiac prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Silent prelude ‘Flames’
“Napoleon in the Kremlin“ by C. F. Meyer
“The Divine” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Mailied“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Häschen” by Christian Morgenstern
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Unicorn”; “The Skirt”; “The Guinea Fowl”; “Karl's Enchantment”; “Northward”; “West-East”
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals

Dear attendees!

Allow me, as always before these eurythmy attempts, to say a few words today as well. Not to explain what is to be presented – art must speak for itself, otherwise it would be an inartistic undertaking – but because our eurythmy is an attempt to at least try something new, allow me to say a few words about the sources and means of expression of this eurythmic art. There is an interesting verse by Ludwig Tieck, which goes:

Sweet love thinks in tones,
For thoughts are too far away.
Only in tones may it dwell
And beautify all it wills.

Ludwig Tieck thus wanted to assert that what a loving person experiences cannot be expressed in abstract thoughts, but rather in sounds. He did not mean that it should be given only musically, but that it should be given through the whole form of poetry, through the tone of the poetry. The great poet Ludwig Uhland, who, in addition to being a great poet, was also an extraordinarily great pedant, responded to these Tieckian verses with the following:

If you, proud beauties, did not love
to mock even logic,
I would dare to prove
that it is nonsense to say:
“Sweet love thinks in sounds."

And a logician, I might say, of course, a logician, has tried to prove in a treatise that I have here that there is much more nonsense in Tieck's saying than just the contradiction in Uhland's quote.

Now, I would like to say, eurythmy must also assert that it wants to express what is experienced inwardly by human beings, but not through spoken language, but through a kind of moving language, through a language that consists of movements, movements of the human limbs themselves, movements of groups of people, the interactions, positions, that are evoked in groups of people, and so on.

But all that will appear on the stage before you is by no means just a hodgepodge of random gestures invented to fit a content, I would like to say. Rather, there is a lawfulness underlying this silent, visible language, just as there is a lawfulness underlying spoken language itself. If you have to express something you have experienced inwardly through spoken language, you cannot just make up random sounds for anything, but you have to adhere to the laws of language. Thus, what is presented here as a single case is based on a complete conformity to law, a conformity to law in the movements of human limbs that is as internally necessary as the conformity to law of spoken language itself is necessary. Everything that is carried out in detail in these movements is gained through sensuous-supersensible observation in such a way that it was established which movement tendencies the human speech organs have when they produce a sound or a sound context. What is otherwise merely performed by the speech organs, but now in such a way that the speech organs convert their movement tendencies into small undulating movements, is taken directly as a movement tendency and is performed by the human limbs themselves, so that there is nothing arbitrary in what you see performed. Every single movement is carried out in the way that the speech organs want to carry out the movement, if I may say so. So that the individual person that you see here on the stage and the whole group of people is actually nothing more than a kind of larynx that has come to life, a larynx that has come to life and its neighboring organs.

This makes it possible, above all, to express directly what is artistically felt and willed. In our civilized languages, phonology has become conventional. On the one hand, it has become that which serves human intercourse, but then also that which serves the expression of thoughts. But in art, thoughts are actually what suppresses all art. Art is based precisely on the fact that one already has the impression from the sensual given, which one otherwise only receives in a roundabout way from thought, for example from nature: what is seen with the senses must have an immediate spiritual effect.

Never has this been stated more beautifully and meaningfully than in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, where it is pointed out that everything artistic is based on the fact that a sensual thing is viewed in such a way that it is otherwise only the case with a supernatural thing. Sensual things that appear to be supernatural. This is what various new artistic endeavors are trying to achieve today, in the fields of painting and sculpture. We have not yet reached the point where we really have a kind of formal language.

In this building, much has been attempted to arrive at such a formal language. In a sense, I would like to say that eurythmy can serve as a kind of model for acquiring such a formal language, because the artistic tool in eurythmy is the human being itself, and the human being is already, by nature, completely ensouled and spiritualized. If we allow what the human being accomplishes as a whole human being to be inspired in the way that only the sounds of spoken language are inspired, then we can most readily achieve a direct revelation of the soul and spirit through the sensory impression itself.

This eurythmy, which is only a beginning, is perhaps called upon to serve the path that many artists are seeking today: to express the supersensible in the directly sensual. This cannot be found in the impressionistic or expressionistic way that is being tried today, but only through the union of impressionism and expressionism that is achieved through eurythmy. In eurythmy we have the expression of what lives in the human being, the soul experience. But we also have it so that this soul experience is presented in a way that is otherwise only used to present something in natural forms, where we first have to feel our way into the soul. With human beings we do not need to feel our way into it, because it is quite natural when it is inside, that it can be seen in the movements of the human being.

So it is possible to really stimulate art anew from such sources, and that is what we have tried to do first. Those who were here as spectators months ago will realize, when they see us again today, that we have at least tried to move forward since then. They will see that we do not want to become naturalistic, even in the bizarre things we do, but that we want to present, in a thoroughly artistic way, what the poem gives us. Just as the poet himself seeks to go beyond the merely linguistic, the literal, we seek here in our eurythmic forms not what should be the expression of the prose content of the poem, but what should be the expression of what the poet has made of the poem, from which he has artistically shaped the prose content.

Therefore, anyone who asks, in our eurythmic presentation, “Yes, is that really expressed directly through this or that gesture?” will not get along. The aim is never to express something directly, but to artistically shape the content that is artistically shaped, also in movement.

This is because, on the one hand, there must be a parallel between the music and, on the other hand, the recitation – for eurythmy is just another form of expression for that which is given poetically, for example. Today, by performing the recitation in parallel with the eurythmy, we must try to take up the good old forms of recitation again. Today, of course, prose content is actually recited. We live in an entirely unartistic age. Today's world no longer has any real idea of the times in which Ludwig Tieck, for example, wrote, in which people, the Romantics for example, came together and particularly liked to listen to poems whose literal content they did not understand because it was in a language they did not understand. They were guided by the musical element, by what lay in the rhythm and beat and especially in the theme. This is what underlies the truly artistic element in poetry. The literal content is actually only, I might say, the ladder by which the truly artistic element moves in poetry. Either it is the musical element that underlies the poetry, or it is the plastic element, which contains the directly felt images. But this is also the only thing that can be brought out through eurythmy, because in eurythmy the conceptual content disappears and the whole being of the human being comes to the fore, namely the will in the human being.

So, if the recitation is taking place at the same time, I would say that the eurythmic element in the recitation should also be brought to the fore. And we must remember how Goethe, when he himself practised dramatic works, such as his “Iphigenia”, for example, with his actors, he did so with a baton like a conductor, paying attention to the iambic meter and so on, not to the literal content.

Today, it is necessary to reopen sources of art that have been almost completely buried in our prosaic age. That is the one thing I ask you to consider when looking at such a presentation. Because, of course, it is very easy to say today: Yes, at first I don't understand anything about the movements that are being made. Oh, we will gradually understand! Just as when we hear a language for the first time, we do not understand it right away, we will learn to understand it. But the point is that it is precisely through this visible language that something artistic can be brought out of people, which cannot really be brought out of the sources of human feeling through spoken language, which has become very prosaic today.

So, I would like to say, this eurythmy relies on saying: human soul life also thinks in movements. Because thoughts initially lead into an abstract area; and one must then leave it to the pedants and philistines to want to have them clarified again in a presentation, which is actually the most popular element today, but which must be overcome by that which, in turn, transforms our sense perception and our understanding into an understanding through all the powers of the human being, not just through the powers of the intellect or through the powers of sensory perception. The aim is to find the spirit in the sensual. And the art of eurythmy would like to contribute to this, even if only in a small way.

Nevertheless, I would ask you, dear assembled colleagues, to regard what we are able to offer today as a beginning. I am already very busy trying to reproduce the inner form of the dramatic through eurythmy. However, this is proving so very difficult that it cannot be said to be a problem that has not yet been solved, or even a problem that has only just been touched on. We must first overcome all the stages here with great effort. However, we have now reached the point where we can attempt to incorporate even these bizarre works, such as those by Christian Morgenstern, into a form without resorting to pantomime or facial expressions, which should gradually be excluded altogether from our eurythmic practice. Perhaps everything should be seen as just a beginning, but we remain convinced that this eurythmic art, if it is further developed, probably not by us but by others, will one day be able to stand as a fully valid art form alongside its older sister arts.