The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 17 July 1920, Dornach

>72. Eurythmy Performance

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Today, we will again take the liberty of presenting you with a few samples of the eurythmic art we have inaugurated. As usual before these performances, allow me to introduce them with a few words. I do this not because I intend to explain what you are about to see on stage, but because what you are about to see aspires to be real art. Real art, of course, needs no explanation, but must speak for itself, must immediately make the impression that is intended with it, must appear directly. But I must say a few words in advance about the sources and the whole way in which this art was found. For it is an art that is only just beginning, that will only come to the stage where the laws work as something self-evident - for example in music - through further development. We are under no illusion that what we can already try today is just the beginning.

If I am to express the essence of this art in a few words, I would say: it is a kind of language, but a language that does not come about in the usual way that a person speaks with his speech organs in the phonetic language , but rather it is a language that works through visible movement, which either one person performs on himself or groups of people perform together in space and the like, thus a kind of mute, visible language, performed by the whole person.

All this is fundamentally based on the development of a Goethean concept of art, like everything that is attempted here, or is attempted within the movement for which this Dornach building is intended to be the representative, the external representative. Like everything, this too is based on a further development of Goetheanism - whereby Goethe is not what he was when he died in 1832, but what he is in the living, spiritual movement to this day, in the artistic principles, in the cognitive and spiritual principles in general, which are in his sense.

It may look abstract, but I am being very specific and factual when I recall what Goethe actually meant by his theory of metamorphosis. This theory is still not sufficiently understood today. It will only be fully appreciated in its full scope and depth when our views on true science have changed from those of today, which are still rooted in materialism. It may sound simple when Goethe says: If I take a single plant leaf, then everything that makes up the whole plant is present in this single leaf, only various aspects — the ramification of the plant, the formation of the flowering part, the fruit part, and so on — are not visibly expressed in the leaf, but are, so to speak, within the leaf in thought. What is visible in the leaf is much less than what is present in the thought in each individual leaf, so that each individual plant leaf – simply formed – is the whole plant. And again, that the whole plant is nothing more than a complex leaf. As I said, once the full scope of what Goethe suggests for plant life, and what he has also developed in a certain sense for the animal kingdom, has been thought through and researched, it will make a significant impression on all spiritual life.

We are trying to implement here what Goethe merely applied to the form of organic growth, the growth of living beings; we are trying to apply it – albeit transformed into the artistic – in our eurythmic art by studying. All that is contained in the art of eurythmy is based on a deep spiritual study of the underlying movement tendencies of the larynx and all neighboring organs that come into play when speaking. Not the individual vibrations that then pass into the air and convey the sound that I am speaking to you now, for example, and that reaches your ear, but the large, comprehensive movements, which are clearly evident in the configuration of the vocal cords and the configuration of the other organs that come into play when speaking. All this had to be carefully studied. These movements, which one gets to know, if I may again make use of Goethe's expression, through sensual-supersensory observation, are then transferred to the whole person, so that the person expresses through his arm movements, through the movement of his whole body, what the larynx and its neighboring organs want to carry out.

Just as Goethe takes the whole plant, like a complicated designed leaf, so too is what a single person or groups of people present on the stage in front of you, it is a transformation of the larynx and other speech-organ movements. In the people and groups of people who appear before you, you see, I would say a moving larynx. The whole human being becomes a moving larynx. It is only natural that not everything is immediately comprehensible, since this art is in its infancy. But just think of when you hear a language you do not understand, it is also not immediately comprehensible to you. And if you are also to receive artistic and poetic elements in the language, it is not immediately comprehensible either. Eurythmy will only gradually develop into a self-evident impression. But those who have artistic feeling will already be able to see the movements that are performed as a kind of moving language or moving music. All it takes is a little artistic intuition.

However, as eurythmy is emerging, it must strive, I would say, in our truly art-poor time, in the time when there is so little real artistic sense, it must strive to deepen this artistic sense. If you listen to things today, it is really the case, ladies and gentlemen, that you have to say that ninety-nine percent of everything that is written today is written completely unnecessarily, and only one percent of it really arises from artistic inwardness. Because it is not the prosaic content, the literal content, that makes a poem artistic, but only the form, either the musical background or the plastic-pictorial background.

The times are actually over, but they must come again, when the romantics found it particularly satisfying to listen to poems in foreign languages, when they did not understand the content at all, but only the rhythm, only the musicality, in order to delve only into the musicality, into the formal of the artistic creation that underlies poetry. We must come back to this, to understanding correctly, in turn, what it actually means when one becomes aware that Schiller did not initially have the literal content of his most important poems at all – that was of no great importance to him at first. There was something vaguely melodious in his soul, and one poem or another could arise from it later. It was only later that the prose content was added – that is the unartistic aspect of the content. The actual artistic aspect, that is, the rhythmic, the metrical, the melodious, or even the plastic, is what is actually artistic about the poetry. So you will notice that when we perform poetic eurythmy, we do not strive for pantomime, for anything mimetic. If it still occurs today, it is only because we are just at the beginning of the eurythmic art and must strip away all physiognomic, mimetic and other aspects in eurythmy. That is another imperfection. Insofar as it occurs today, it will be discarded later.

What is important is that what the poet himself does artistically in the formation of the verses, in the rhythm and so on, is also grasped in the flowing out of the eurythmic. So that it is not a matter of asking: how does a eurythmic movement express this or that? but rather: how does the eurythmic movement properly follow the preceding movement, how does the third follow the other two and so on, so that one really has a musical art unfolding in space. Therefore, on the one hand, you will see that what is to be eurythmized is recited, and on the other hand, you will hear something musical. And on stage you will see only human movements, in which either the musical or the poetic is realized.

I would like to point out that in this way, the art of recitation must in turn be pushed out of the non-art in which it is actually included today. This art of recitation is, of course, regarded as particularly perfect today when the reciter pays particular attention to the literal content, to the prose, to that which is expressed through poetry. And one is particularly satisfied when the reciter, the declaimer, as one says, expresses the prose content quite inwardly. It cannot be expressed in the same way as it is striven for in today's inartistic culture. If you want to practise eurythmy after reciting, the reciter must also respond to the rhythmic, the musical or the plastic-picturesque aspects of the poetry. So that precisely what is neglected today must also come to the fore in recitation.

During the course of this evening, you will also see children perform. I would like to draw particular attention to the fact that these children's performances already play a major role in the curriculum of our Stuttgart Waldorf School – as a supplement to purely mechanical gymnastics through the art of eurythmy for children. I would like to say that what otherwise appears as art is inspired gymnastics. A later time, which thinks more impartially than today about spiritual progress, spiritual human needs and so on, will think quite differently about these things than we do today. Today, of course, children do gymnastics as the physiological, the purely mechanical laws require. But no consideration is given to the human being as a whole; only the human being as a physical being is taken into account. When our children perform movements that are also movements of the eurythmic art, the whole human being is set in motion in body, soul and spirit. And the effect of this is that - if it is introduced to children at the right age in a fully curriculum-based way, as we do in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart - then not only what gymnastics brings about is brought about, but much more. Today, this is not believed because the whole spirit of thinking is materialistic. Gymnastics certainly has many good things. But what eurythmy can bring out in children and what gymnastics cannot do is develop initiative of the will, independence of the soul life. This comes from the soulfulness of the movements, which is not present in mere gymnastics.

So what we do as eurythmy has, firstly, an essentially artistic significance, but secondly, it also has a pedagogical-didactic significance. And I could talk about a third significance, a hygienic one, but I do not want to today. Because what is done in eurythmy has something essentially healing about it, this hygienic aspect can provide essential practical support in cases of illness. Unfortunately, the time available to me here is not enough to go into more detail.

In any case, what might be called the following should come to light in eurythmy: The human being attempts to express through outward movement what lies within him in the way of movement possibilities. In this way we have something truly spiritualized and ensouled, something that can be directly perceived by the senses in its spiritualized and ensouled form. We have nature, for the whole human being stands before us as nature. But we have ensouled nature, for it is the human being who performs these natural movements. We have, in the most eminent sense, the human mystery expressed in the movements of the will, so that when the human being is the instrument in the art of eurythmy, Goethe's beautiful saying is truly fulfilled: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he brings forth a whole nature within himself, takes order, harmony, measure and meaning together and rises to the production of the work of art. And in eurythmy, he takes his own movement possibilities, his form, everything available to him, and brings order, harmony, measure and meaning together to express what is in his soul.

I believe that what Goethe longed for so much in art, namely that it is at the same time an unraveling of the great secrets of nature, comes to expression in a eurythmic performance, because Goethe says: “When nature begins to reveal its manifest secret to someone, that person feels a deep longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. Art is something that Goethe, like every true human being, thinks of in intimate connection with the secrets of the world.

But I ask you to bear with me on this, as far as we can demonstrate it in rehearsals today, for we ourselves know very well that everything is still in its infancy, and perhaps only the attempt at a beginning. But anyone who looks at the essence of this eurythmic art and is active in it must be convinced that what it is at the beginning is capable of being perfected, which will one day – perhaps through our own efforts, but more likely through those of others – enable this youngest of the arts to stand fully equal with the older, more established ones.