The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1918–1920

GA 277b — 18 July 1920, Dornach

73. Eurythmy Performance

Dear Sirs and Madams:

Allow me to say a few words in advance today, as I usually do before these eurythmic experiments. This is not done to explain the idea itself, that would be an inartistic undertaking. Art must work through direct impression of what it is, and does not need an explanation. On the other hand, it seems necessary to me, since we are not dealing with something that is already fully developed in eurythmy, but with a beginning, perhaps one could even say: with the attempt at a beginning. It seems necessary to me, therefore, to say something about what you see in this eurythmic art and about the sources and tools of the eurythmic art.

This eurythmic art, by being completely derived from the Goethean worldview and Goethean artistic ethos, seeks to be a visible language. When I say that it is derived from Goethe's world view and Goethe's artistic outlook, I must point out, on the one hand, that when we speak of Goetheanism here, we are not concerned with somehow merely expanding what came into the world through Goethe up to 1832, but that for us Goethe is a living power, spiritually effective, and that we are not speaking today of the Goethe who died in 1832, but of the Goethe of 1920, that is, of what can further develop within the spiritual world view, the whole spiritual current that has been introduced into Western culture through him.

On the other hand, I would like to point out that Goethe developed what he called his metamorphosis doctrine for understanding living forms, especially plant forms. What Goethe published as such a unique work in 1790 is, despite many efforts in this field, still not sufficiently appreciated in wider circles today. Once it is appreciated, we will most certainly have access to a rich source for developing an understanding of living beings that can be gained from this idea of metamorphosis.

For us, it is not just any old theoretical insight that is to be gained from this idea of metamorphosis, but, above all, it is the artistic exploitation of this idea of metamorphosis that is at stake for us. Goethe begins by looking at the individual leaf in the context of the whole plant. Goethe begins by distinguishing between what is simply shaped in an outwardly sensual way, but in terms of the idea, in terms of the invisible, what weaves and works in the leaf: The leaf is a whole plant. The whole plant is actually also only a leaf artistically formed within itself, notched, ramified; in turn, the metamorphosis into flower, fruit and so on - for Goethe it is an artistically formed leaf.

The same thing, implemented in many other ways, gives us the opportunity — as I said, in addition to many other things — to create a visible language in such a way that we truly do not unintentionally express this art through people who initially serve as tools, as real tools, for the eurythmic art. However arbitrary such movements may appear at first glance, let me explain that they have little in common with dance movements or the like, which arise from instincts, from drives and so on. Rather, what you will see here on the stage, the movements of the individual human being, the movements of groups of people in space, is all thoroughly studied movement – to use Goethe's expression again – that has been penetrated by sensual and supersensual observation.

The movements correspond to the movement patterns present in the human larynx and other speech organs when speech is formed. Everyone knows that a movement element is at work here. After all, when I speak to you here, the movements of my speech organs are transmitted through the air, and when the air reaches your auditory organ with these movements, you hear what I am saying. When it comes to the design of eurythmy, it is not these tremulous movements, these undulations that are of primary interest, but rather the underlying movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs, which only then, through a complex process, translate into the combined movements of undulation, waves, vibrations in the air, and so on.

These movement tendencies are now carefully studied to see how they express the being, the character of the person through higher gestural abilities than those actually produced by speech sounds. And just as Goethe regards the individual leaf as an entire plant, so too can the larynx with its neighboring speech organs be understood as a whole human organism in miniature. And what the human being wants to express, but which is held in the “status nascendi”, in the process of being born, in order to be realized in speech, can be perceived through sensory-supersensory observation and can then be realized in movements of the human hands, the human limbs or in forms.

This is what we have been working on more and more, especially recently: the forms that the whole human body or groups of people execute in space. So what you will see is transferred to the whole human being, which otherwise underlies the speech organs as movement tendencies of the spoken language.

It is possible to treat this visible language artistically in such a way that what appears in poetry on the one hand also appears in music on the other, and can be transformed into what can be revealed in the visible language of eurythmy. On the one hand, you will hear music today, on the other hand recitation, and in the middle you will see the moving human being and moving groups of people - virtually the whole person or groups of people - as a large larynx that performs a moving language. What appears as moving language can now be treated artistically.

I would like to say that it is even possible to accommodate certain artistic longings that live in artistic circles today and therefore find little expression, sometimes even caricatured expression, because the various fields of artistic development have not yet reached the point of handling the means. Expressionism and Impressionism are there; but the treatment of the means, that is what has not yet reached a certain significant conclusion in the old arts. There, I believe, even the eurythmic art can, in a sense, provide a kind of stimulus – I will not say serve as a model.

For when we are dealing, for example, with human language, which art makes use of, then, especially in our very advanced languages, an inartistic element always mixes into speaking, into poetry, as a result. And we may say that a large percentage of what is being written today is not really real art. For in poetry, real art is only that which is either based on music or on the plastic, on the pictorial. The literal content is actually prose content that is only used to reveal through language, in rhythm, beat, melodious element and so on, what is to happen in the artistic of the actual poetry. That it is so today has its reason in the fact that precisely the most highly developed languages have almost – because of their use for human communication, for ever more complicated human communication – acquired an extraordinarily strong prosaic element, which is not always, I might say, readily restrained and made useable for that elementarily original, which one needs if one wants to create artistically. On the other hand, the languages formed in the formed cultures and civilizations are the expression of highly developed thoughts. But the thought as such is an image that, when used in art in any way, whether as knowledge or as an underlying expression, kills art, paralyzes art.

Now, in spoken language, in phonetic language, we have a kind of interaction between the intellectual, the thinking, the imaginative and the volitional. When we set our larynx in motion, two currents of the human organization work together in the movements of the larynx. That which is permeated by the imaginative mixes with that which comes from the will. The will comes from the depths of the personality, which in turn is an expression, a microcosm of universal world law. The artistic can live in this. But in spoken language and therefore also in poetry, which makes use of it, this actually elementary-artistic is weakened, dulled by the abstract thought element, which is nevertheless connected with the thought element in word formation.

Now in eurythmy we have the opportunity to strip away this element of thought by not using phonetic language, but by taking that which arises from the depths of the human being, which contains the laws of the world in its depths, in the microcosm, that wells up from these depths, the will-element in the human being, that we stop this will-element before it becomes visionary, that we transform this will-element, quite lawfully, as only speech itself is lawful, into movements of the human limbs or of the whole human being. There is just as little something arbitrary in any single movement as there is something arbitrary in phonetic language or in the tones of a melody. Everything is based on the lawful, internally lawful progression of the movements. And what is involved is far from being merely mimic or pantomime. As long as there is still something of that in it, there is still a beginning to be overcome bit by bit. What is presented in eurythmy – you will see this particularly in the forms we are striving for today – is not a pantomime expression of the prose content of the poem, but a translation into this visible language of what the real artist has made out of language.

Therefore, the accompanying recitation must be different from what is called recitation today. Especially when one finds it good today, one emphasizes the prose content of the poem in the recitation and pays less attention to the rhythm, the beat and the melodious element. But one could not work with the present-day unformed recitation — which is only an artistic bad habit that has an unartistic element in it — one could not work with it in the eurythmic art, but the aim is to really try to find the underlying melodiousness and rhythmic in the recitation, in the declamation. On such occasions I am always reminded of how Schiller did not initially have the literal content of some of his significant poems in his mind, but rather something like an indeterminate melody. And then, out of this melodious element, which contained nothing literal at all, one or other of the poems could become literal. The prose content, which was then used without being, so to speak, the vehicle of the actual artistic content, which consists of the plastic and the musical, was only secondary for Schiller.

We seek to bring all these truly artistic elements to expression in eurythmy by making them the essence of the actual eurythmic art, and thus the essence of everything that we must bring into connection with it and will present to you.

Then there is another essential side to eurythmy: it also has a hygienic side, for example – but I do not want to talk about that today. Since it directly brings movements to people that arise from human nature in a lawful way, it is something truly healing. But that needs to be discussed in detail, and that cannot be done with these few introductory words.

Just one more point should be mentioned. Today you will also see performances for children, and I would like to emphasize that this eurythmic art has an essential pedagogical, didactic side, and thus has an element in it that we have already introduced in our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, the Free Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt, alongside purely physiological gymnastics. This eurythmy is, at the same time, not only of artistic value for the growing human being, but also of importance as a soul-filled form of exercise. When we are able to think about these things more objectively and impartially than we can today, then you will realize, dear ladies and gentlemen, that gymnastics, which is based on the materialistic understanding of the human being – which certainly deserves all the praise that is given to it today, but which at least cannot do one thing that the inspired gymnastics, the eurythmy, can: Where the child is required to permeate every movement it makes with its soul, the soul draws upon an element that cannot lie. This cannot be achieved through physiological gymnastics, which has grown out of materialism. Our soul-filled gymnastics, our eurythmy, awakens in the child the will to act at the right time, in the right age, and thus gives something immensely necessary to our time, which is so sorely lacking in the will to act in the broadest sense.

These are the underlying intentions of the eurythmic art, as I said at the beginning of my welcome. The point is that this art is still in its infancy. We are still very modest about it today and are our own harshest critics. However, we are also convinced that this beginning can be perfected and that, if – probably through others, no longer through ourselves – what can be given today as a stimulus can be given at the very beginning as a stimulus, if this is further developed, then this youngest of eurythmic arts will stand in dignity alongside its older sister arts, which have always been recognized.