The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 11 July 1920, Dornach

71. Eurythmy Performance

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, The art of eurythmy, of which we would like to give you a small sample here today, attempts to penetrate to the very sources of human artistic creation in a certain way, unlike certain other arts that can easily be confused with it - dance or other mimic arts. It seeks to achieve this through very special artistic means. And because it is necessary to say a few words about this so that the essence of this artistic direction can be grasped, I will send these words ahead – not to explain the performance itself, which would of course be an inartistic undertaking. For art must speak for itself in the immediate impression it makes.

What you will see on the stage resembles a kind of gesture performed by the whole human being. But it is not, and one would judge eurythmy quite wrongly if one thought that the movements that come about either through the individual human being or through human groups are mere gestures that are supposed to express what is to be presented either on the one hand musically or on the other hand poetically or recitatively. Eurythmy wants to be a real visible language, it wants to reveal in plastic movement exactly the same as the human larynx and its neighboring organs can reveal through sound.

If one wants to understand the essence of eurythmy, one must look at its sources. It is the observation, both sensory and supersensible, of the movement tendencies expressed by the human larynx and all that is connected with the speech organs when speech sounds are uttered. This does not refer to the movements that pass into the outer air as direct tremulous movements, as vibrations, but to the movements that underlie these tremulous movements as movement tendencies. Movements that, organically, want to do more than they actually do. But the sensory-supersensory gaze – to use this Goethean expression – can observe these movements and then transfer them to the whole person according to the principle of metamorphosis. Just as Goethe, when he named the whole plant in its complexity a leaf multiplied in its individual subdivisions, actually saw only a leaf that had become more complicated, so what you see on the stage as a whole human being, like a larynx on the stage is, in fact, a transformation of what is naturally ignored when we simply listen to human speech, but which can be observed through sensory-supersensory observation as movements, as an inner eurhythmy of the speech organs. This is transferred to the whole human being. The individual movements that a person performs or that groups of people perform are therefore to be judged in exactly the same way as human speech itself according to the inner laws.

Now, if you look at what is being presented superficially, you would think that you were dealing with pantomime or facial expressions. On the other hand, it can be said that when we speak, we sometimes feel compelled to support our speech with gestures. When do we do that? We only do that when we feel that we are subjectively pursuing something that is more or less fully expressed in speech. But what is present in actual eurythmy is just as objective as what is expressed in language; all gesturing is excluded from it, all mere pantomime and mime is excluded from it. This can now be considered in the same way as it is considered for ordinary language.

On the one hand, we can say that eurythmy is so much an inner, visible language with its own laws that when two people or two groups of people perform the same poem in completely different places, the individual differences are no greater than when two pianists play the same sonata. That is one way of looking at it. But you could also say: you can distinguish between two pianists playing the same piece based on their individual nuances – and the same will be true for individual eurythmists or groups of eurythmists. In this way, what is subjectively incorporated into the gesture will be connected in a nuanced way with what is an objective law.

So in this visible language of eurythmy, we have something before us, not in the individual gesture, not the expression of something that lives literally in the soul, but we have in the individual eurythmic movement in which the whole human being feels as he feels in a single sound or word or word context, as he feels in spoken language. And what is effective is not that it expresses something in the soul as an individual element, but that one movement is linked to the next, creating a sequence of movements, just as a sequence of sounds is created in speech. Exactly the same way as it is in music, where we also have an inner, lawful movement in the succession of tones, in eurythmy such an inner movement comes to light, so to speak, as inner plastic music.

This enables us to extract from a poem – and in addition to the musical aspect, there will also be poems that are recited to accompany the eurythmy – the eurythmy merely expresses in silent, moving language what is expressed in the recitation in spoken language. We have the opportunity to express what concerns the whole human being, what is not expressed in the conventional or in mere thought expression - the inartistic in poetry. We have the opportunity to express the whole feeling and will, the whole personality of the human being as if in a large, moving larynx.

To do this, however, it is necessary, and this must be mentioned again and again, that one must return to the actual artistic element of poetry. Our time is essentially unartistic, and it is therefore very common today to perceive what is literally the content as the essential thing about the poetic art. In contrast to this, it must be said again and again that Schiller, for example, had an indeterminate melody alive in his soul, and from this indeterminate melody anything could become, whether it was “The Diver” or “The Fight with the Dragon” or anything else - that only emerged later. The essential thing for Schiller was not the literal content, [gap in the text] not the prose that is in the poem, but the important thing was the rhythm, the beat, the musicality, the plasticity, the imagery.

Today, people love an art of recitation that actually no longer has much to do with artistry, but sometimes with human sentimentality, with human goodwill to express this or that inwardly – although it always remains a phrase or sentimentality. But what real recitation is, can still be found in older times. Goethe rehearsed his Iphigenia with his actors with a baton, not so much going into the content as into the way the iambic went. This literal recitation could not be juxtaposed with eurythmy as an accompanying art, but one must also go into the eurythmic aspect of speaking itself. And so here one must recite as the good old artists of yore recited.

All this shows that with this eurythmy something is being striven for that wants to establish itself as a new element in our whole spiritual movement, a piece of Goetheanism. Goethe characterized so beautifully what eurythmy can achieve, even if only in a very limited area. Goethe spoke of how man, when he sees himself at the summit of nature, in turn feels himself to be a whole nature and takes in harmony, measure and meaning, and finally rises to the production of a work of art.

This production of the work of art comes to life, I would say, most fully when the human being, in the realm in which he sees eurythmy, makes himself an artistic tool for what he has to represent. Then this microcosm, this small world, as the human being presents it, as he brings it before us, is really not conceived of as a collection of arbitrary elements for the expression of the subjective, which comes to expression in the gesture, in the facial expression. Rather, what is inherent in him from his entire integration into the world, that is to be said with regard to the artistic aspect of eurythmy. And first and foremost, eurythmy should be something artistic.

But alongside this – and you will see a small sample of this in the children's eurythmy that we will present to you in the second part, along with some humor – there is also the didactic-pedagogical significance of this eurythmic art. It is certainly something significant when one introduces children to this eurythmy, because one can understand this eurythmy in a pedagogical-didactic sense as a kind of soul gymnastics. There will come times when people will think more objectively about these things than we do.

In more recent times, gymnastics have been seen as a particular benefit for young people, and rightly so. However, this is not to be criticized. An important authority told me some time ago that he does not consider gymnastics to be an educational tool, but rather a barbarism. I do not wish to go that far. But it is clearly appropriate in our time and demanded by life that this soul-based gymnastics of eurythmy is of educational and didactic significance for children. The strength of the soul, willpower, is what can be developed through this soulful gymnastics, while ordinary gymnastics - only because it looks at the human being from the point of view of physiology, only for the body that performs certain movements - can provide some help for skill.

For example, this spiritualized gymnastics, eurythmy, is being introduced at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt. This provides an essential didactic and pedagogical element. And in many other respects, it will be seen that this eurythmy can perhaps give the people of the present age what cannot come from any other source. What people thought of before this war broke out! They thought of staging the Olympic Games. It is just as if, at a certain age, people were given not what is good for them, but something that is good for a completely different age. Today, everything is seen only in the abstract and intellectually, in terms of current affairs, and not in terms of effect. The Olympic Games were a natural thing for what people needed in that age. Today we need something quite different from the Olympic Games. Today we need something that also places the human being in the whole world context in a soul-spiritual way. And so the Olympic Games and all the ideas that aim at something similar are nothing more than a certain dilettantism in relation to human cultural development.

What is attempted in eurythmy is, however, only a modest beginning, and I must keep pointing this out. But it is what is truly called for by the immediate present, by the demands of our time. And so it may be said that, on the one hand, the esteemed audience must be asked to regard what we are now able to present as really only an attempt at a beginning – all of it requires a great deal of refinement. Although those viewers who have been there before will see how we are currently striving to make progress from month to month in the development of the forms, the three-dimensionally moving forms of groups – we are also our own harshest critics and know exactly what perfection we still need.

It should also be noted that in the art of recitation, which has the particular artistic task of emphasizing the poetic, we do not achieve this by particularly emphasizing the prose content and , but that every effort must be made to apply a suitably artistic form of recitation to eurythmy, which is certainly still in its early days today, and that this will not be universally understood today. What is available as a beginning in the artistic field can, especially if our contemporaries are interested, perhaps be perfected by ourselves, but probably by others. And then something will develop out of this eurythmic art that will be able to stand as a fully-fledged sister art alongside the older fully-fledged sister arts of eurythmy.