The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 30 October 1920, Dornach

11. Address on Eurythmy

Program of the performance in Dornach, October 30 and 31, 1920.

Mercury prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Devachan scene: 7th picture from the Portal of Initiation by Rudolf Steiner
“In the Sistine Chapel” by C. F. Meyer NZ 2420
Prelude ‘Fateful Question’ with music by Leopold van der Pals
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (29th) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (30th) by Rudolf Steiner
Opening of the elves
“Erlkönig“ by]. W. v. Goethe
Opening of the planetary dance with music by Max Schuurman
“World Soul” by J. W. v. Goethe
Children's poem (children's group)
“The Walk” by Martin Opitz with music by Max Schuurman (children's group)
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘The Problem’ by Christian Morgenstern; ‘Muhme Kunkel’ series: ‘Muhme Kunkel’; ‘The Parrot’; ‘Lore’; ‘Lorus’; ‘Word Art’
“The Pied Piper” by J. W. v. Goethe

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

Allow me to say a few words before these eurythmy performances, as I usually do, not to explain the presentation. Art must work through itself, through the immediate impression, through what you are able to see by participating. But this eurythmy, which we cultivate here, wants to draw from artistic sources that have been used less so far. It seeks to express itself in an artistic formal language that has also been used very little. And so I would like to say a few words about the nature of this eurythmic art.

What you will see on the stage is people or groups of people in motion. The movements that are performed are essentially not gestures, they are not a mimic representation, nor are they a completely dance-like , but is in fact a visible language, and a true language at that, a language that is not derived from the interpretation of words or the like, but that is based on a careful study of the essence of the sound language itself.

In the case of sound, we are also dealing with movements that the larynx and the other speech organs want to carry out, but which do not emerge as such, but are, as it were, stopped in their development, so that they then transform into the air movement through which the sound is conveyed. Through sensory-supersensory observation – that is a Goethean expression – one can actually form an idea of how the larynx and the other speech organs want to move, what this inner movement is like as it is developing, and how it is transformed into sound. And then, as it were, through the movement of a single organism or a group of organs of the human organism, one can bring about a visible language through the whole person, so that the whole person moves, namely his arms move in such a way as the speech organs want to move in the sound language, but stop in the will, so that sound comes out.

Now one can say that by making the whole human being the larynx, so to speak, or making groups of people the larynx, to a certain extent speech organs are transformed, that one able to tap into truly artistic sources and an artistic formal language, including for that which is otherwise expressed musically or, in particular, that which is otherwise expressed poetically. This happens in the following way.

The poet must express himself through language. In more advanced civilizations, language becomes more and more conventional on the one hand, but on the other hand, language also increasingly becomes the expression of abstract thought. Neither conventional nor abstract thinking can have any kind of artistic effect. Therefore, if I want to express myself in a somewhat trivial way, it can be said that poetry becomes increasingly difficult in civilized languages unless other elements of expression are used to help.

We can already imagine something under what I call a visible language here, when I refer you, I would like to say, to the other pole, to the abstract, inartistic pole of language development, the other pole in relation to eurythmy, which we will talk about in a moment. To a certain extent, writing, which we then fix on our paper, is also seen as a metamorphosis of speech. It is, in a sense, a kind of visible language. But writing develops in the other direction. We can trace writing back to where it was in its original stages. We see how the thought, the idea that a person formed of an external object, is still placed into the written character or characters, how the mental element becomes a kind of mute language in writing, a kind of visible language.

But then what was initially present as pictographic writing or hieroglyphic writing develops into completely conventional writing. That is one pole. I would like to say that the thought life of language enters into writing. Language becomes mute in writing. The thought element enters into writing. Writing is thus also a kind of visible language.

The further a civilization advances, the less one can tell from its writing how it wells up out of the living language. In the original writings, one would still notice this human-individual-personal element in the writing. You would still feel a kind of silent, visible language in the writing when you look at the original manuscripts. But then, little by little, as humanity develops, the element that lives in language passes completely into the conceptual and the conventional, that is, into the inartistic. And the more man wants to capture the conceptual in writing, the more inartistic writing becomes. Isn't it true that the highest potency of the inartistic is stenography, which is already terrible in itself because of its contrast to everything artistic.

Now one can come to the other pole, where one does not consider the mental element of language, but rather the will element. When a person speaks, the mental element, which is borrowed from the things of the external world, and the will element, the part that the person has in the external world and what wells up from within, flow together in his speech sound element. What flows into writing is completely rejected – it is completely rejected. When one studies the sound language in order to make eurythmy out of it, one introduces, as it were, that which is externalized in writing, thrown out, so that one then has the written word in front of one and nothing more of the human being is in it, it is completely separated from the human being: In a sense, this is incorporated into eurythmy. Through movement, the human being is made to express in his totality, in his wholeness, that which is the will element in speech.

But this means that while in writing, which is also a mute language, the linguistic element detaches itself from the human being, it becomes more and more intimately connected when one moves on to eurythmy, which in turn lives entirely within the human being where the human being does not fixate in a separate sign what is expressed in language, but where the human being makes himself the tool, the artistic tool, of what lives in language, for example in poetry. So one can say: language is structured towards two poles. On the one hand, there is the non-artistic element of writing, which is completely rejected when one studies language inwardly through sensory-supersensory vision in such a way that one then metamorphoses it into eurythmy. In this way, the human being takes everything into his own being, everything that lives in his will, in his mind, lives through poetry and is revived in the movements of eurythmy.

Therefore, for example, on the one hand, what can appear in eurythmy as an artistic movement can be set to music. But basically eurythmy is the best expression of the inner artistic quality of poetry. The inner artistic quality of poetry is not the prose content of the poem, but rather that which lives in rhythm, in beat, in short: in the musical, which is therefore that on which the words move as if only on waves. Or it is the pictorial. Both the pictorial aspect of language and the musical aspect of language are particularly emphasized in eurythmy. Because the human will expresses itself through the human instrumentality, we can say: when we see the human being in motion — but who acts as if he were the soul-content expressing itself in speech — we have before us something that we can see directly, that we do not need to understand first.

Of course, people are not yet accustomed to eurythmy. That is why they say that much of it is incomprehensible to them. But the more accustomed we become, the more we will find that every eurythmic movement, every sequence of movements, is an immediate expression of what is simultaneously evoked in the recitation of the poem. And then one will see this whole human being as an instrument for the soul. One will see it, and at the same time one will have the soul. For naturally the human being puts his soul into eurythmic movement, that soul which the poet can only imperfectly express in language because the unartistic element of thought enters into it.

So what the human being experiences in civilization, I would like to say, in terms of “prosaicization”, if I may choose the expression, where he becomes more and more prosaic and prosaic the more he writes, [is balanced]. Sometimes people no longer have a real inner experience of what is being said; they come to no longer hear the language but actually to transfer it directly into writing, whereby from the outset the human being flows entirely into prose. Poetry will return to human feeling, to human emotion, when we come to eurythmy, by taking language into the inner being of the human being, into his movements.

Therefore, recitation as it is done today in our unartistic time, in our paper age, cannot be done as eurythmy is recited. For eurythmy, it must be recited in such a way that one hears rhythm, beat, and musicality, that one senses the image that lives in the poet, and that the words, so to speak, only provide an opportunity to bring to revelation the deeper, more artistic aspect of the poetry. In eurythmy, the words as such do not live, the heard words do not live. But in this way the inartistic element of the thought also disappears, and in eurythmy only that part of the poetry that is truly artistic comes to life.

In recent times we have often tried to shape through forms that which otherwise lives in the feeling of language. You will see, especially in the case of the things we are performing today, how, on the one hand, in the case of the serious poems, the form expresses the how of the creation, and how, in the case of the humorous and comic poems, we also express the style of the poem through the different style of the forms. That is one side of it.

Eurythmy has many other sides, including a hygienic and therapeutic side, which I will not discuss here. It also has a pedagogical and didactic side, which has already proved to be a blessing in the one year that we had eurythmy as a compulsory subject at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. There we could see how children benefit from this soul-filled exercise, which is quite different from mere gymnastics that only trains the body, where they do not merely perform movements that are first studied from a physiological point of view to see whether they are beneficial for the body, but where the child puts its soul into every movement it performs.

This is something that adults who engage in eurythmy can no longer feel, that no longer has any great significance for them, but that is evident in children, because in eurythmy the human being has a revelation of his soul nature, and this connects him with his humanity in a very significant way. If eurythmy is used as a teaching tool, it will also have a teaching effect on the sense of truth. The more abstract languages become, the less truthful they are. The element of set phrases is particularly developed in more advanced languages because the language becomes detached from the human being.

In eurythmy, everything that becomes detached in language is taken back into the human being. When we make ourselves an instrument and completely immerse ourselves in what we feel, we cannot be untrue. And when children are allowed to do eurythmy, they develop a sense of truthfulness and an instinctive feeling for all that is meaningful. These are the educational and didactic results that will be found when these things are thought about objectively.

I must always ask for forbearance when it comes to demonstrations, because eurythmy has only been cultivated for a few years. It is in its infancy, it is an experiment. But anyone who engages with the sources and with the artistic language of forms can know that there is an unlimited potential for development in it. We will discover more and more possibilities for presenting the art of eurythmy.

For some time now, I have been concerned with the question of how to express the dramatic. We can now only express the epic and the lyrical, and the actual drama, when it expresses the supersensible, you will find portrayed today, drama that expresses the supersensible, in a piece of one of my “mystery dramas”. The supersensible can also be adequately portrayed in eurythmy in a drama. But the ordinary dramatic, which, so to speak, takes place in the world of the senses, is something I have set myself as a problem, for which we will also find the eurythmic forms.

As you can see, everything is still in flux. Therefore, as I said, I still have to ask for forbearance. We are our own harshest critics and we know very well that eurythmy is still in its infancy. However, we also know that if it continues to develop, the eurythmic art will grow from its beginnings into a complete art that can stand alongside the other, older, fully-fledged arts, so that it will be recognized as equal to them.