The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 15 May 1920, Dornach

67. Eurythmy Performance

Saying from the soul calendar (5.) by Rudolf Steiner Saying from the soul calendar (6.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Limits of Humanity” by J. W. v. Goethe
Opening “Look within” with music by Leopold van der Pals
“To the Moon” by J. W.v. Goethe
Opening “Look within” with music by Leopold van der Pals A saying from the Calendar of the Soul (7th) by Rudolf Steiner
Opening “We seek ourselves” with music by Leopold van der Pals
“My goddess” by J. W. v. Goethe
Elven opening with music by Jan Stuten
“Erlkönigs Tochter“ J. G. v. Herder
Elegischer Auftakt
Stummer Auftakt ‘Flammen’
”Napoleon im Kreml“ von C. F. Meyer
Stummer Auftakt ‘Flammen’
”Das Göttliche” von J. W. v. Goethe
Children's performances with and without singing
“Five Things” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Life is a Bad Joke” by J. W. v. Goethe
“On Seeing a Goose” by Fercher von Steinwand Children's performances
“The Waistcoat and the West” by Christian Morgenstern
From the Davidsbündlertänze by Robert Schumann
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Unicorn”; “The Magpie”; “Question”; “Answer”; “Draft for a Tragedy”
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

With the art of eurythmy, of which we are once again able to present a sample to you today, we would like to make a contribution to the spiritual development of humanity that can be judged from three points of view: firstly, from a purely artistic point of view; secondly, from a pedagogical-didactic point of view; and thirdly, from a hygienic point of view.

As art, eurythmy is something that represents a kind of silent, visible language. However, although it appears in the form of gestures, in the form of movements of the human organism in groups or in individual people, it must not be confused with facial expressions or something pantomime-like, nor with a mere art of dance. Rather, as a language, eurythmy uses the whole human being as its means of expression, and in such a way that this visible silent language has been acquired through the study of the laws of spoken language.

Speech is, first of all, a means of expressing what lies within the human being. It is true that Schiller said: “When the soul speaks, alas! the soul no longer speaks.” In a sense, this is true. Language, in addition to the fact that it carries the soul of the human being to the outside world, is at the same time a means of communication from person to person and thus something conventional, and thus also the carrier of the thoughts through which people are to communicate. Language is in a sense a social phenomenon. And the more language has to serve as a means of communication and as a means of expressing thoughts, the less language is actually a means of artistic expression. For the artistic must come from the human being, from the whole human being, must arise from it.

Language has two sides. Firstly, the social side: the human being must give himself to the social world by speaking. And only through this does language retain something that has an intimate, an inner relationship with the whole human being, that language is not learned by the adult, [but is learned] I would say from childhood dreams, from the time when the human being, with all that he is, wants to adapt to his surroundings. And through this self-evident adaptation to the environment, language is preserved from being a mere means of communication.

But when the poet, the artist, wants to express himself in words, then he needs [another] - I would like to say all that which is always floating behind the language: he needs the image and, above all, the musical element. It is not at all the actual poetic or artistic content of the poem that is literal, but rather the way in which the content is shaped that is the essence of the poem. More than with anything else, one must take into account what Goethe expressed in the beautiful “Faust” word: “Consider the what, more than the how.” The way in which the poet shapes the material is what matters most, especially in poetry.

This can be much more clearly perceived if one does not use the means of expression that must absorb the thought too strongly in order to reveal itself purely in an artistic way, but if one uses the whole human being, the whole human being as a means of expression. To this end, studies were carried out using sensory and supersensory observation to determine the movement tendencies of the human larynx, tongue and other speech organs when a person expresses themselves in spoken language. These movement tendencies, which are then transformed into sounds, vibrations and oscillations in the air when actually speaking, are studied. They are then transferred to other organs of the human being, especially to those organs of the human being that can best be compared with the primitive organs of movement of the speech organism: they are transferred to arms and hands.

Sometimes, when first encountering the art of eurythmy, it is surprising to see that the individual human being makes more use of the arms than of the other parts of the hands. One would understand that this is a matter of course if one considered that even in ordinary speech, when a person wants to give more than the conventional in language, when he wants to express his individuality, his feelings, his emotions at the same time as his words, he then already feels compelled to enter into these freely moving organs, into these more spiritual organs, I might say, so that the arms and hands - compared to the other organs they are more spiritual, they are the arms and hands of expression-movement possibilities. Now, of course, in eurythmy the whole human being is taken into account - not just arms and hands. Above all, movements of expression in space are drawn upon, especially in groups, but also in individuals.

But the essential thing here is that these movements in groups are not arbitrary, but rather the same movements in lines, which otherwise underlie what is produced by spoken language, are transferred to the whole human being. I must therefore say again and again: on the stage we see, in principle, an entire larynx, presented by the whole human being. This shapes order, rhythm, tact, the musical, but also the pictorial as well as the actual poetic, where the poetic is art. This is really brought out of the whole group of people.

We then accompany what is presented in eurythmy in silent and visible language through music or recitation. In doing so, we are obliged – music and speech are, after all, only means of expression for the human soul life other than eurythmy – we are obliged, especially in the art of recitation, to fall back on the good old recitation that Goethe had in had in mind when he not only rehearsed the literal content in the drama with his actors, but, like a conductor with a baton in his hand, rehearsed the rhythm of the iambs with them.

We are obliged to disregard what an unartistic age, such as our own, is accustomed to regarding as important in recitation, namely the emphasis on the literal content. We are obliged to go back to what is shown to be artistic even in primitive recitation. Today, this is hardly visible anymore, especially city dwellers hardly see it today – but there are still some living memories from people my age from their childhood years, of traveling reciters who could be seen reciting such “Moritaten”; they had them written on tablets, and then they spoke the text to them. But they never spoke it in any other way than by tapping the beat with their foot, marching back and forth in a spirited place, thus indicating that it was not just a matter of explaining the content to you, but that it was important to them to particularly focus on the step of the verse, the inner form.

You will see that we therefore try everywhere to emphasize this deeper artistic aspect. When we try to express the poetic in the humorous, the grotesque, the droll, through eurythmy, we do not, for example, use sign language or pantomime , but in the forms that are developed as musical forms - only in space, not in time. We do not give the content of the poem, but what the poet, the artist, has made of the content.

These are some of the ideas I would like to give about the artistic element in eurythmy. The fact that the human being is the tool – not the violin, not the piano, not colors and shapes and so on – makes this eurythmy particularly suitable for, I would say, shaping that out of the driving forces of the world that is present in the human being itself through these driving forces of the world, as in a small world.

The second side of eurythmy is the didactic-pedagogical side. It is my conviction that mere gymnastics, which has developed in a materialistic time, takes too much account of the mere anatomical-biological in man in terms of its laws. Later, when we have a more objective approach to these things, we will recognize that, in a certain way, the human being is strengthened by it, but that this strengthening is not at the same time a strengthening of the soul and will initiative.

In a didactic and pedagogical sense, eurythmy became a kind of soul-filled gymnastics, a soul-filled movement game. And in the small beginnings that we can show you with children today, you will see how each movement is then also carried out by the children in such a way that it is soul-filled. In this way, in addition to the physical training, what I would like to call initiative of the soul life, initiative of the will, that which we need so much and which mere gymnastics does not develop in the growing human being. — It is extremely important that this is recognized. We have conducted experiments at the Stuttgart Waldorf School: one hour of gymnastics - one hour of eurythmy. It is then entirely interwoven with gymnastics.

We are obliged here when we show you children's exercises to say: the children are taught eurythmy in the few hours that remain to them during school hours – but that is not right at all. The education that underlies these efforts, which originate here in Dornach and have been realized to a certain extent in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, is precisely that they aim to introduce children to nothing outside of actual school hours. That is why it is so important that the significance of eurythmy is fully understood in terms of its pedagogical and didactic aspects, so that it can simply be woven into the school curriculum. Then it will be the case that children have everything that can serve normal spiritual, soul and physical development, especially from this eurythmic point of view.

And the third thing is a hygienic element. The human being is a small world, a microcosm. And basically, all unhealthiness is based on the fact that the human being tears himself away from the great laws of the universe. All unhealthiness — one would like to depict it pictorially by saying to oneself: If I take my finger away from my whole organism, it is no longer a finger. It withers; it has only its inner lawfulness in connection with the whole organism. In the same way, the human being has only attained his inner being in connection with the whole world. He is really connected with what happens in him with the whole world. If you just consider the very extreme, which shows how man is connected to the world, how he is not just this being enclosed within the boundaries of his skin, just consider: the same air that you now have directly within you was previously outside of you. But now, after you have inhaled it, it forms a part of your organism in its entirety. And what you have inside you will be exhaled again and will be outside again as soon as you have exhaled it. You cannot peel yourself out [...] as if we only lived within our skin, only had what was enclosed within our skin. We do not live in our environment with only the air, but we live with everything that fills the universe.

Now, all that is unhealthy in a person can be attributed to the fact that what is done by the person themselves, if it is not adapted, if it is not appropriate to the age or to the whole human being, cannot contribute to the harmony and complementarity that must prevail between the person and all other people and the whole rest of the world. But precisely because every movement in eurythmy is so naturally drawn from the whole human organism, like the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs for ordinary speaking, for phonetic speech, what is carried out in eurythmy is something that will and can bring the human being into harmony with the whole world, with the whole macrocosm.

It is therefore essentially a healing element, one can say that, which a person can have, which he can acquire as a child from the eurythmic movements, which may only be performed naturally and appropriately and not in a dilettantish way. This is something that can certainly be considered from such a point of view - from the point of view of mental, spiritual and physical health care.

These are the three aspects from which we can view eurythmy, and from which it will be honestly integrated into our spiritual movement. Nevertheless, it must always be said – even if there are spectators who have been there before and have seen how we have tried to make progress in recent times – that eurythmy must appeal to people's forbearance with regard to everything we can offer today.

Eurythmy is only just beginning, it is an attempt at a beginning, but it represents an attempt that, we are convinced, can be perfected more and more, even if others may have to come to further develop what we have taken up with our limited powers. Despite everything, however, we can already see today, from what is being shown in terms of intention, that this eurythmy, because it opens up artistic sources in their originality, because it uses the whole human being as a means of expression and because it works didactically and pedagogically for the development of the soul-spiritual-physical of the child, because it places the human being in a movement or in movement systems that are essentially healthy, that it will indeed be able to stand fully equal with the other, partly older sister arts, especially when contemporaries show an interest in eurythmy. Taking all this into account, it will be possible to see today how hard we are trying to move forward with this eurythmy, even if we still have to ask for the audience's forbearance for our performances.