The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 9 October 1920, Dornach

4Eurythmy Address

Eurythmy performances during the first college course at the Goetheanum.

Program for the performance in Dornach, October 9 and 10, 1920

Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (27th) by Rudolf Steiner
“Summer Picture” by Friedrich Hebbel
Saying from the soul calendar (28th) by Rudolf Steiner
“The Convert“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Fisherman” by J. W. v. Goethe
Music by M. Ravel (played by L. van Blommestein)
“Little Canon” (children's group)
“Wind, du mein Freund“ by Christian Morgenstern
“The Metamorphosis of Plants” by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Gnome” by M. P. Mussorgsky (played by L. van Blommestein)
Sylphs and gnomes from the 2nd scene of ‘The Awakening of the Soul’ by Rudolf Steiner
“Das Käuzchen“ with music by Jan Stuten (children's group)
“Physiognomisch” by Christian Morgenstern
“Das Mäuschen” with music by Jan Stuten (children's group)
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘Palmström am Teich’; ‘Das böhmische Dorf’
Satirical prelude by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Mousetrap”; “The Authority”; “Modern Fairy Tale”

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

As always before these eurythmy performances, allow me to say a few words in advance. Not to explain the content of these eurythmy performances, that would be an inartistic undertaking. Art, in whatever form, must work through itself; it must speak for the immediate impression of what it has to reveal as art. However, in the case of this eurythmic art, we are dealing with something that seeks to create a certain formal language and certain artistic means of expression from special sources that have hardly been tapped into so far. And so it is probably necessary to say a few words about these sources of eurythmy and about the special formal language of eurythmy.

What you will see on the stage are movements that individuals perform with their limbs, with their whole physical form, or movements of groups of people in space and the like. None of this is any kind of dance art in the usual sense of the word, nor anything pantomime-like, mimic or so on. Here, there is absolutely no attempt to express any kind of soul content directly through a gesture. Such a connection between a gesture and the content of the soul, brought about, as it were, by the subjectivity of the human being, is not sought here; or rather, since we are still at the beginning of this art, where one should point out such mimic or pantomime expression here or there, there is still an imperfection in our eurythmic art, which it will outgrow. What is needed is a truly visual language, not an audible one, but a visual one, a language that has arisen through the use of sensory and supersensory means of observation - to use this Goethean expression - it is, as it were, read which movement tendencies then prevail in our speech organs, in the larynx and in the other speech organs, when we express ourselves through the sound language.

First of all, we know that spoken language – like sound in general – is also conveyed through movements, through the vibrating air. But that is not what is at issue here. Rather, the issue is that movement tendencies are present in all speech organs, which, as it were, by moving the speech organs,

stir the air, which then translates into the vibrations of the air, these underlying movement tendencies of the speech organs can be observed through sensory-supersensory vision. This can certainly happen, just as something else can be observed sensually and supernaturally, so too can that which simply eludes ordinary attention when listening, because it is based on hearing and seeing, it can be observed sensually and supernaturally. And then, according to the principle of Goethe's metamorphosis, what takes place in an organ, so to speak, invisibly to ordinary vision, can then be transferred to the whole human being.

Goethe sees the whole plant only as a complicated leaf, and in the individual leaf he sees a simplified whole plant. What Goethe brought to light through morphology can be transposed to the artistic-creative through the merely functional. What takes place when we speak – as a sum of movement tendencies in our speech organs, or in a single organ or in organ complexes – can be transferred as real movements to the whole person. So that you will, as it were, see a moving larynx as a whole human being.

In this way, one can evoke a silent language that is just as internally logical as one has a speaking language. Only by the fact that now every sound, every word, the combinations of words, the rising and falling intonations, the rhyme and so on, [that] everything corresponds to something in this language of movement, just as in ordinary language the inner corresponds to the outer, to something factual, only by the fact that our ordinary language is transposed into such a language, something very special is achieved.

In our everyday language, on the one hand, what is organized by thought, so to speak, from the head to the speech organs, and on the other hand, the will element, flow together. Now poetry seeks, so to speak, to push back the inartistic element of thought by organizing the will element into the thought element. But precisely because language is increasingly becoming the language of civilization, it loses the possibility of being a means of artistic expression of poetry. In a more artistic time than today, one would feel how language - by being a means of expression for abstract science on the one hand, and on the other hand becoming more and more the more social life develops - becomes more and more a means of convention, whereby it depends on the content of what is to be communicated, so that language loses the artistic element all the more. The will element is lost, which wants to reveal itself from the whole person, because what lies in thought is one-sided, and the mere thought kills what is actually artistic. And so, in this abstract age, we go back to the place where the will element, the whole person, can reveal itself again. We go back to that in man which is precisely this moving language, and thus we gain the possibility of casting off the conventional as well as the abstract of language, and of expressing, if I may say so, of bringing to light in the representation precisely the more artistic, the will element.

In language, only that which has linguistic, literal content in its development can actually be artistically shaped. Again and again, I have to remind myself how true artists like Schiller did not first have the literal content in their souls when writing a poem, but rather a kind of indeterminate melody, a musical element. Goethe had a pictorial, a plastic element in the scene. Only to the extent that language can be shaped musically or plastically in tone coloration, in tone nuances, can be made colorful and pictorial, only to that extent can language actually be brought to poetry. By having what is represented eurythmically in this moving language accompanied on the one hand by the musical, which moves in the tonal in just the same way as the movements in their succession in eurythmy, or by having the eurythmy accompanied by recitation, the relationship between the individual arts that are presented becomes apparent.

But in recitation, as is necessary, one can already see how to go beyond what today's inartistic taste considers appropriate for reciting great and significant works. I have already pointed out in other parts of this lecture cycle what the essence of declamation and of recitation actually consists of; I will talk about this further. In the sense in which we recite today, where we actually emphasize the prose content of the poetry, in that sense, one cannot recite in parallel to eurythmy. It is self-evident that the eurythmic and plastic element in language should be emphasized in recitation and declamation, that is, that the formative, the creative, that - as the poet does - the content of the prose, that this must be particularly emphasized in recitation, [that] to a certain extent the inner eurythmy of the poetry should already emerge in recitation and declamation. Well, that can still be discussed in the lesson that will be devoted to further presentation of this in the next class. I would like to mention now that this is the artistic element in eurythmy.

But this eurythmy has other moments as well - it has an important hygienic-therapeutic [moment]. I will not speak of that. But I would like to say a word about the pedagogical-didactic element of this eurythmy. We have introduced it as a compulsory subject in Waldorf schools because it will gradually become clear that although ordinary gymnastics, which only follows the physiological laws of the human body, can be very good, what can be given to the child - you have also seen samples of children's eurythmy for children, that which can be given to the child by introducing this soul-filled gymnastics of eurythmy to the child, by showing the child how it can put soul into every movement, how the whole body becomes a means of expression for it, as the speech organs are otherwise a means of expression. In this way something grows in the child that will give something in particular to our time - [which] will extend far into the near future - that is entirely absent from our present time: namely, initiative of the will, initiative of the soul, which ordinary gymnastics cannot give.

And so one would like to say: by animating gymnastics and spiritualizing it, and doing so in an artistic way, one will be able to insert a significant element into it, especially in terms of pedagogy and didactics.

Of course, this should only point to what is at the root of it, what is the means of expression of eurythmy. The artistic must have an immediate effect in eurythmy, that is, what one does first with the help of this means of expression. Above all, it is so important precisely because our language, at least in its present form, does not already have something artistic about it. That is why it is so important that eurythmy can have an effect. As the honored audience has often been told and as those who have been here before will have seen, in recent months we have increasingly been expressing in the forms, in the larger forms, what the poet, what the artist has already done with his poetic art from some material, how we strive to get the mood and temperament of the poetry out of the design, and thus preferably the how, how we strive to distinguish the serious from the humorous. You will see samples of all this presented.

What I would still like to say on this occasion is the following. In all our undertakings here – I ask you to take note of this in particular and to be patient, since everything here with us is in its beginnings, including this eurythmy: We know very well where this and that is still, what is missing here and there. But we are also convinced that if we continue along this path, if we develop eurythmy in the same direction – although it will probably be others who do it rather than us – then, because the path can only be a slow one, in time, as this eurythmy becomes more and more developed, we will see that this eurythmy will certainly be able to stand alongside the older, fully recognized arts as a younger art in its own right.