The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 31 October 1920, Dornach

12. Speech on Eurythmy

Dear attendees,

I am taking the liberty of saying a few words in advance, not to explain our eurythmy performance – for artistic things must speak through their own impression, through direct perception, and to want to explain them would be unartistic – but for the reason that I would like to say a few words in advance because what we are trying to do here at the Goetheanum with eurythmy is to research and create from artistic sources that have been little considered by art so far, and because this eurythmy wants to express itself through a particular artistic formal language that has also been little used so far.

It is very easy to mistake what we see here on the stage, with people and groups of people moving, for something borrowed from neighboring arts. But eurythmy is not meant to be what dance art is, what pantomime is, what mimic performance is, and so on. Rather, eurythmy wants to develop as an art, building on a special visible language. And this visible language, which is revealed through the moving human being, is not something arbitrarily conceived. The individual gestures, the individual movements that you see are also not at all arbitrarily conceived, but have come about in such a lawful way as human speech, the speech of sounds, comes about in a lawful way.

What is expressed as sound language is based on movements of the larynx and the other speech organs. These movements, however, take place in a special way, in such a way that basically these speech organs only attempt the movement; the movement is arrested and converted into air movement. And it is through the vibrations of the air that the sounds and tones of the speech sounds are conveyed.

But that which is actually only present in the speech organs during ordinary speech, which is held back in order to become external air movement, can, if I may use Goethe's expression, be truly recognized through sensory-supersensory observation. It is possible to recognize, if one is able to turn one's attention to these movement tendencies of the larynx and the other speech organs through sensuous-supersensuous observation, it is possible to recognize from which speech predispositions of these individual organ groups the speech sounds actually arise. And then, based on Goethe's artistic attitude and view of art, one can build a mute language, construct a visible language, by having the whole human being or groups of people perform the movements that are actually present in the speech organs and are transformed into sound language.

In this way the whole human being – or groups of people – become the bearers of a silent language. Admittedly, at first one has the impression that this silent language cannot be readily and obviously understood. But, dear assembled, we must be clear about the fact that we do not immediately understand ordinary spoken language either, in any form; we have to learn it.

Now, one does not need to learn the eurythmic language in this way, but there are many preconceptions - if I may use the word in analogy to prejudices - against it, when one sees the individual moving in his limbs, and at first one has to overcome the unfamiliar a little. But then, once you have overcome this unfamiliarity a little, you will feel that the inner life of the soul can be revealed just as much through the movements and sequences of movements that are performed here as it is through the language of sound. And that what is expressed through the language of sound can be translated, I would like to say, my dear audience, into the visible, for this we have a very ordinary fact in our writing.

The writing that emerged from pictographic writing or from sign writing can no longer be understood today in such a way that one sees great similarities between it and language. But this is only the case with writing that has already been developed in more advanced civilizations, writing that has already completely transitioned into abstract signs. The original writings bear the character of how they emerged from a reproduction of speech.

But this development of writing, I would say, is at the opposite pole to eurythmy. When language develops into writing, it is allowed to penetrate into the conventional. In relation to writing, we are very dependent on the people, on the community of people, within which we stand. And we have to adapt to this human community, to the community of the people - you let it flow out completely in writing. There is nothing personal or at least very little personal in it. Man does not reveal himself in his soul life through writing, or at least only to a small extent. The writing is separated, carried out into the prosaic, and actually visualized. What is writing for if not a mute language? Writing is a mute language for that which lies in our language as thought-life. Thus writing becomes something inartistic. And something horribly inartistic becomes the trained writing that wants to adapt completely to the thought: the stenography, of course, which is somewhat outrageously inartistic, which strives to drive what is spoken into the inartfulness of language.

Thinking, then, is what kills all art. Art lives in the elements of feeling, will, and mind.

Eurythmy, on the other hand, develops speech in the opposite direction. It allows speech to radiate back out from the human being, to be taken back by the human being. Instead of speech being transformed into written characters, it is taken back by the human being. This means that the human being's will element, their personal element, is activated through the movements that are expressed in eurythmy. And in that we see the human being, or groups of people, as it were, as a moving larynx, in that this silent language of eurythmy reveals itself, we have something before us through which the human being's soul life can directly reveal itself in silent language through the instrument of the human organism.

And so, on the one hand, we can regard what appears before us in a musical form – what is accompanied on one side, what is presented on stage – as another expression of eurythmy, but what is still to be presented through eurythmy is that which emerges from language into the artistic realm. It can therefore be accompanied, and will be accompanied, by recitation or declamation. These bring out precisely how the artistic element of poetry comes into play as the conceptual element is stripped away in the eurythmic movement.

But you cannot, as is believed today, recite or declaim, you cannot accompany eurythmy with this purely prosaic, inartistic recitation, which, precisely because we live in an inartistic time, is not seen as inartistic at all. You could not accompany eurythmy with it. This is just one sign of the lack of artistry in our time, that there is no longer any inclination for the formal element to immediately come into its own at the moment when a poem is to be recited or declaimed.

In artistic declamation, the prose content of the poem does not have to be effective, which, after all, is only intended to serve as a point of reference, so to speak, through which rhythm, meter, the musicality and the imagery of the poem develop. That is why poetry today basically has a hard time rising from language to become real art. In civilized languages, in particular, on the one hand, the abstract expression of thought becomes predominant. This is inartistic. Or, on the other hand, they become the expression of conventional communication between people – again inartistic. Language is only artistic when it is the direct expression of the soul, the inwardly moved expression of the soul's feelings. Real poets, like Schiller, for example, have first of all had an indefinite melody in their soul for each of their poems. And in Schiller's case, the prose content of the poems only followed on from this melody.

And on the other hand, on the prose side, today the emphasis is somehow created and so on. And so, from the outset, something that is popular with many people today in the art of recitation is something that has nothing to do with real recitation. Real recitation art must look at the rhythm, the beat, the musicality, or the poetic content of the poetry, not at the prosaic.

Real eurythmy shows that when in a poem that which is to be felt in terms of content or what is to be felt musically [gap in the text]. If, on the other hand, it is to be eurythmized that which, in a just civilized language, is basically unartistic in poetry, that is, mere prose content - however beautiful or witty the prose content may be - if that is to be eurythmized, it becomes extremely difficult. That is why such poems, as you will see in what you are about to see in my presentation of the spiritual realm to which the human being can rise with his feelings and thoughts, in what is written from the outset in a simple language or in a more complicated language only when one forms new word connections for what is thought eurythmically from the outset, is viewed eurythmically - it more or less eurythmizes itself. Whereas the eurythmic form is extremely difficult to find for what is carried out of a civilized language, as is usually the case with our art poets, where it depends on the witty content.

That is precisely the peculiar thing, that through the eurythmic art, poetry as the expression of the human soul can be taken back into the human being. Therefore, the artistic pole is developed in eurythmy in contrast to the spiritual, which, on the one hand, develops language into a mute language, and is brought to the human being in such a way that everything personal, everything conceptual, everything volitional is carried into movement. Therefore, in our time, which is so unartistic in many respects, one will be able to experience a genuine artistic feeling, a genuine feeling for the artistic, through eurythmy. On the one hand, this could be said about the artistic that is attempted with our eurythmy.

But eurythmy also has other sides. Just as it brings forth the mute language of eurythmy from the artistic, it has also brought forth a natural side of the human being, the therapeutic and hygienic side. I will not go into this today, as it would take us too far afield. But I would like to mention very briefly that this eurythmy also has a significant pedagogical-didactic side. We have therefore introduced it as a compulsory subject in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, and already in the first year it has become clear how this moving, soulful gymnastics - this is how it initially affects the child - has an extraordinarily beneficial influence alongside ordinary gymnastics. By performing the movements, the child finds that the body moves as if by itself. It perceives this as something quite different from the gymnastics that is taught to the child. I certainly do not want to go as far as a famous physiologist of the present day, who told me some time ago that gymnastics is not an educational tool at all, but a barbarism. Once we think more impartially and objectively than we do today, we will realize what a difference it makes to the child whether the movements used in gymnastics are devised purely on the basis of physiological observation or whether a soul-filled, spiritualized form of gymnastics is used, as eurythmy is for the child, where it feels soulfully and spiritually in the movements it performs, where it knows itself to be completely within, not, I would say, forcibly, through bodily movements that have been thought up, as it were, and which it must follow.

That is what I would have to say about eurythmy if it is introduced as a subject in schools. And it must be introduced because it will develop the will initiative in children in particular, because it will bring initiative into the human soul and because it will bring out another element, which can no longer emerge so strongly when adults learn eurythmy, but which will emerge to the greatest extent in children: that our language, especially when it is a civilized language, tends more and more to fantasy. We speak because we want to speak. And language becomes - as can be seen by anyone who can really study the soul in this respect - language gradually becomes more and more untrue, the more civilized it becomes.

By taking language back into the movements of his own body, the human being must be present for everything that the soul wants to express. When introduced at the right time, this has an effect on the child such that the sense of truth, the sense of the opposite of all phraseology, will emerge in the child at the same time. In the future, people will think much more freely about these things. These things are only just beginning.

For this reason, I always have to ask the esteemed audience for their forbearance when we present a eurythmy experiment here. We are our own harshest critics and know very well what we are only just able to do with our eurythmy art today. But we also know that what is just beginning to emerge today can be developed further and further by ourselves or, more likely, by others. Then the time will surely come when developed eurythmy, which uses the noblest tool, the microcosm itself, and which uses the human being as a tool and thus comes so close to Goethe's word so close: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn sees himself as a summit of nature, takes harmony, measure and meaning together and rises to the production of the work of art.

Man rises to the production of the work of art, not when he [gap in the text], but when he makes himself the tool of artistic revelation. For this reason, although we are only at the beginning of the eurythmic art today, I would like to emphasize that all of this is already possible in the development of the eurythmic art. Therefore, if you look at things impartially, you have to be convinced that eurythmy can continue to develop and will be able to stand alongside its older sister arts as a fully-fledged, youngest art in the future.