The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 10 October 1920, Dornach

5. Eurythmy Address

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Allow me to say a few words today, as I always do before the eurythmy performances. Of course, there is no need to explain artistic matters; it would be something inartistic to give an explanation of artistic matters. But here it is a matter of a certain art form expressing itself from artistic sources that have hardly been has been drawn upon, in a certain artistic language, and from sources that have not been drawn upon before, in a formal language that has not been used before. And so it will be necessary to say a few words about this source and about this formal language.

At first glance, when we see people or groups of people moving on the stage, as in a dramatic performance, for example, it might seem as if random gestures were being that are somehow connected with what is performed as an accompaniment, with the musical element or with the recitation that accompanies what is presented in eurythmy, somehow connected with random gestures. But this is not the case. What is important is that, through a kind of sensory-supersensory seeing – if I may use this expression of Goethe's – the human organism has actually overheard what movement tendencies the larynx and the other speech organs perform when the sound language is heard. This sound language is formed between people by the execution of air vibrations. These air vibrations actually arise from the fact that certain movement tendencies in the speech organs, as it were, collide with the air and transform into these oscillating movements. If we go back to what is going on inside the larynx and its neighboring organs during speech, we are dealing with tendencies of movement that do not come to full expression because they are transformed into vibrations, but which can be observed through sensory-supersensible observation.

Then, in a sense, by expanding Goethe's principle of metamorphosis, what has been heard in the speech organs can be transferred to the whole person or to groups of people, just as the whole plant is a transformation of what is already contained in the individual leaf in the Goethean sense. In this way, it is possible to reshape this principle artistically and extend it to the functional, to activity. What takes place in a certain way in the speech organs can be transferred to the whole human being or to groups of people in a different form, namely by shaping movements. This gives rise to a certain mute language, a language of movement. And just as we have in the lawful sequence of sounds, in the lawful sequence of words and so on, that which language reveals as the inner life of the soul, so too we can, in the lawful sequence of such movements, where one does not have the individual movements of facial expressions or pantomime or the gestural expression of the soul life, but where this soul life takes place in its own lawful order. But what is revealed through the eurythmic movements takes place in an equally lawful order.

It is important to have the impression that something is expressed in the sequence of movements, in the lawfulness of the movements, as in the lawful sequence or harmony of tones in music. In this way, we achieve what is meant here by eurythmy, and what a silent language, a speech movement, is, which is all the more perfect in eurythmy, the more every form of pantomime and mime is avoided. We have seen how difficult this is in the perfection of eurythmy. And certainly, in some details we will still not have achieved a complete overcoming of pantomime, but at the beginning of our striving there was still a great deal of pantomime, a great deal of random expression, a great deal of gesturing in our movements. What is achieved when, in accordance with movement and the laws of movement, the following or third or fifth personality in the movements emerges and then joins with the first, so that there is truly an inner harmonizing, an inner attunement of the movements takes place, which, I believe, we have already achieved to a certain extent through our work on eurythmy.

We can say that this moving language can be shaped more artistically than the spoken word in our modern age. The spoken word becomes more and more, the further civilization progresses, on the one hand a means of expression for thoughts that are becoming more and more abstract and, on the other hand, a means of convention. But this takes language out of the element in which it can actually be created artistically. For the more language lends itself to thought, the less it rings true to the whole essence of the human being, and the more it itself becomes abstract. And just as little is that which is merely a possibility of communication in language, that is also not something that can be artistically shaped.

In language, the thought element of the human being originally came together with the will element. The will element of the human being comes from much deeper levels of the human being than the thought element. This will element can be poured into the moving language of eurythmy much more than the thought element. The thought element is, as it were, thrown out of this moving language. And these successive movements, which intertwine within themselves, which work again and again through their repetitions, through their rhythm and so on, are basically an expression of that will impulse that goes through everything that is linguistic, especially through the artistic, poetic shaping of language. And so we have the opportunity, on the one hand, to invest the whole human being in what eurythmy gives, and on the other hand, we have the opportunity to achieve a different ideal of art.

Art must, in creating, produce something that makes a direct impression without us grasping it in thought or through abstract powers. We must, so to speak, look at the spiritual in art with our senses. And what better way to do this than to use the human being itself, the human being in motion, who is the very expression of soul and spirit, as the tool for artistic expression. In every movement there is something spiritual and soulful at the same time. So the sensually visible is in all its details at the same time supersensible, spiritual and soulful.

Therefore, one can say: both the musical element, which must permeate the poetry if the poetry is to be art, and the plastic, pictorial element, are absorbed into this eurythmic presentation. One sees this particularly when one accompanies these eurythmic presentations with recitation or declamation, as is the case today. What an inartistic age like our own makes of declamation – I also referred to this in the lectures – is not the art of recitation, for that is also essentially related to poetry itself. It must be recalled again and again how the true artist goes beyond the merely linguistic, beyond the literal content, beyond the prose-like nature of language. Schiller always had a kind of melody in his soul, regardless of whether he was creating this or that poem. He imbued this melody with the material content of the poem, so to speak, in order to make it rise or fall like a ladder, to transfer the poem into this melody. Goethe, for example, did not rehearse his “Iphigenia” with his actors in such a way that he sought the essential moment of the theatrical performance in the literal content, but rather with the baton in his hand like a conductor, so that the actors had to see their actual task in the inner form of the poem, in speaking the iambus in the poem correctly, in the rhythm and so on.

The recitation that accompanies the eurythmy must therefore also allow the eurythmic element in the actual poetry to emerge. It cannot do so in every prosaic element, which today's declamation particularly likes to choose, when this or that, which is more significant than the other in terms of the prose content, is also emphasized particularly emotionally or the like, whereby one only falls into an inartistic manner. The fact that the recitation itself has to be performed in a eurythmic way shows the justification for this emancipated eurythmic art, in that it expresses itself in its moving language.

This is one of the things that can be said about eurythmy as an art. This eurythmy has many other aspects, for example a hygienic-therapeutic aspect. This is not to be spoken of here, it does not belong here. Instead, I would just like to say a few words about how we use this eurythmy in the Waldorf school, as it should be, in a pedagogical-didactic way. It is an obligatory subject there. And even if I do not want to go as far as a very well-known representative of physiology said here in this hall after I had also spoken such words, who said: gymnastics as it is practiced today is not an educational tool at all, but a barbarism – I do not want to go that far, just to point out that gymnastics has emerged from a school of thought that looks only at the physical, the physiological, the corporeal, and is therefore only effective there.

But what happens in the child when, alongside this kind of gymnastics, I would say, a spiritual gymnastics in eurythmy is taught, is the creation of will initiative, which the person of the present and culture of the future will have to acquire more and more. The soul element in every movement strengthens the child when it is translated into movement in eurythmy. This in turn has the effect of strengthening and harmonizing the child's willpower. We will see how attempts have been made – this will be noticed especially by those who have already attended eurythmy performances months ago – to develop more and more the actual essence of the eurythmic, how we are increasingly coming not only to shape what relates to the what, but also to the how, which the poet himself brings out of the prose content.

However, we are still at the very beginning with our eurythmy, and therefore I have to ask for indulgence every time such a performance is presented to an audience. We know very well what this eurythmy is not yet. It is taking its first steps, but we are also convinced that if we continue in this way, we will see how this eurythmy, precisely by grasping artistic sources and reaching for an artistic formal language that has not yet been developed, but which is being grasped in certain depths of the human being, So that it can one day take its rightful place as an independent art alongside its older sister arts.