The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 28 March 1921, Dornach

27. Eurythmy Address

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Allow me to say a few words before our eurythmy performance, not to explain it, but to talk about what this eurythmy actually wants from certain art sources and how it would like to make use of a certain artistic formal language. What you will see, dear audience, on the stage, is the human being in motion or groups of people in motion, also mutual positions of groups of people in relation to each other, and so on.

At first glance, all of this could be mistaken for pantomime. However, eurythmy is not meant in this sense. Eurythmy is meant as a truly visible language. And it did not come about by arbitrarily adding some gesture that one thought right at the moment to this or that element that now comes to light in poetry and music that go hand in hand. Rather, eurythmy as we understand it here has come about through careful, sensual and supersensory observation, to use this Goethean expression, observation of what actually underlies the conditions of underlying human speech and singing.

What underlies speech and singing is not openly apparent to the ordinary observer. The inner tendencies of movement transform themselves into what can then be heard. But it is entirely possible to study the basis of the audible sound in terms of the movement tendency and in terms of the way in which this movement tendency emerges from the human organism.

If we look at poetry, on the other hand, we will have to say to ourselves: what the poet brings to revelation through tone and phonetic language contains and encompasses human thought. But human thought is an abstract element, especially in more advanced civilizations. And every such abstract element is actually inartistic. So that poetry as an art must constantly struggle to bring thought back from its abstractness to that which can bring it into a living element that is connected to the full human being.

When we study the thought as it is to fertilize poetry, we find that, if we do not grasp it in the abstract but approach it as artists, it has a certain tendency to take shape. We find this particularly in poetry. We find it quite outstanding in dramatic poetry. We can only truly stand before a drama artistically when we are able to transform what is given to us through language into form. Even if we do not see a drama on stage but only read it, we only have it as a dramatic work of art if we are able to transform in our imagination what is presented to us into form.

In epic poetry, in narrative poetry, we see that precisely where it appears in a certain popular form – we take the example of Homer – it also tends to develop into a form of its own, a visualization of what is sought through the literal. In Homeric poetry, we find [as constant designations: Hector, the hero with the billowing crested helmet, or: the swift-footed Achilles]; if we start from these more distinct, immediately illustrative examples, we nevertheless find the transformation of the abstract, literal element into the figurative everywhere.

And even in lyric poetry: if we have to stop at accepting the bare word content, or even thoughts or feelings of a lyric poem, then we do not have it as a complete work of art. We must be able to present to ourselves the figure of the soul from which the song's underlying idea has emerged, even if it is in this case in a spiritualized form. The one who approaches speech so artistically, in that this speech becomes what the poet can use of it, will see how what underlies the literal as thought tends towards form.

Now, if we look first at form, the human form is what appears to us as the most perfect in the realm of the sensual, physical world. And we can say that if we want to gain an insight into the human form, starting from thought, the powerlessness of thought immediately becomes apparent. In thinking, we are not really artistic. But we cannot help but say to ourselves: the capacity for thought is what puts man at the top of the creatures in whose midst he is initially placed.

And what we then encounter in the human form, we cannot grasp with thought. All scientific comprehension of the human form falls short. We must, so to speak, experience how thought becomes powerless, how it is transformed, in order to grasp the human form. But still, the path from thought to the human form is viable. And we will say to ourselves: the one element that confronts us in human language and also in human song, the mental element, is an element that tends towards form, an element that we can only really grasp if we seek to recognize the form but not to penetrate it with thought.

But what confronts us in the human form as the other, is that we actually only grasp this form as the result of movement. Anyone who is able to truly grasp the form of, say, a human hand or an arm will say to themselves: everything that I see in such a form only makes sense if I see in this form the movement that has come to rest. The movement, in turn, that is expressed in the entire human form is the will. The will is something that, by revealing itself in the human being, is directly connected to movement. One does not need to be a Schopenhauerian when it comes to music, and yet one can still say: by moving from the element of thought to the element of will, we begin to understand the musical element in the human being. And musical art is actually that which shows us movement, hidden in the calm of the seemingly lively movement of the sound mass.

In this way, humanly created things appear to us as the right expression of thought. What the human being brings forth in his movement, what is fundamentally one with his will, appears to us, revealing itself in a certain way, in the musical element. The musical element is pictorially formed, but it is that which basically underlies everything that is expressed in the individual organ groups, the larynx and its neighboring organs, in speech and song. If we study, in the sense of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, that which is concentrated in the larynx and its neighboring organs as the entire human organization, we ultimately arrive at the human form. And we arrive at the moving human form.

And if one does not just look with the senses, but with the senses and the supersenses, one finds that what lives in the human form can flow directly into movement, and that which lives in movement and is an expression of human will finds its ultimate result in the form of the human being. Therefore, if you look at this wonderful connection between the human form and its overflow into human movement, and on the other hand, movement and its striving towards the human form, artistically, you can extract what you are meant to see here in eurythmy.

It is not arbitrary. It is what can arise naturally from human movement when one uses not only the speech organ but the whole human being as a means of expression, when one tries to add a visible language to the spoken language, which must first be artistically processed so that what eurythmy is as an art can arise.

This eurythmy is preceded by what eurythmy is as language. Then one must realize that such a human language of form, which has come about out of the moving figure or formative movement, can on the one hand accompany poetry, which is then given in recitation and declamation, and on the other hand the musical. One can sing in a visible language just as one can develop it through sound in tone, in song, and one can express that which really underlies the poetry in this visible language just as it is expressed in the poetry itself. Only then one must not look at the literal content, which is actually the prosaic in the poem, but one must look at the tone, rhythm, form of the meter and so on of the poem, which underlies the poem.

Therefore, recitation and declamation for eurythmy cannot be done in the way that is often popular in our unartistic times, namely, by particularly emphasizing the literal, prosaic aspects and regarding the actual art of declamation and recitation as lying in the emphasis of the literal, prosaic aspects. We must go back to older times, to the Goethean and Schillerian concept of recitation and declamation, to the rhythm, meter and thematic content of poetry, if we want to bring out what is actually artistic in eurythmy, if we want to do justice to the poetry when reciting it. For eurythmy brings out of the poem precisely that which the poet has woven into it out of his own secretive nature. So, in essence, poetry is handed over to the whole human being in eurythmy, in that the poet is aware that he will find understanding of his poetry if the opportunity is created to do so from the whole human being, which he would only have to entrust to a part of the human being, namely the speaking human being.

Eurythmy is a means of expression for precisely those things that cannot come out through speech and mere singing, that cannot be brought out through them. And so we can say: it seems from the outset like an unartistic feeling if one wanted to reject such an extension of our art and artistic endeavors just because one is not accustomed to finding this formal language used so far. Those who really have an artistic sense will have to strive for an extension of our art forms and artistic means.

That, dear attendees, is what eurythmy is about for now. You will see – and especially those of you who have been here as spectators before will notice – that we are always trying to move forward.

For example, today we are trying to reproduce the mood of the poem in introductory forms that are not accompanied by recitation or music, in order to lead into the actual poem. Or we try to hold on to the mood for a while in a closing form, so that in such introductory and closing forms we allow the content of the poem to be revealed only through visible language. And one must feel – not speculate about it, not believe that one could grasp it intellectually, which would be inartistic – one must feel what lies in these forms. – You will see, my dear audience, that one can indeed already find the stylistic form of poetry if one is able to enter into the stylistic form of poetry.

What we do here as eurythmy is really still in the early stages of development. But we are striving onwards. We are trying more and more to eliminate all mere mimicry, to overcome all prosaic content, and to create an art in eurythmy in which everything is truly based on the lawful sequence of movements, just as the lawful sequence of tones in music is based on the lawful sequence of movements, so that nothing is arbitrarily gestural. When creating forms, the keynote, the basic mood, must be taken as the basis, that which is the keynote, the basic mood of a poem.

And you will see how we try to distinguish the serious mood of a poem in eurythmy from the mood of a poem that will confront you, for example, in the eurythmic rendition of Morgenstern's Humoresques, some of which you will see today.

It is not so easy to find the basic tone of these Morgenstern humoresques.

Morgenstern created these humoresques by placing himself as a very original feeling human being in the vicle, which today surrounds us as - how dare I say? - as the actually philistine part of the world.

Anyone who finds themselves in today's world with completely unbiased senses will find an enormous amount of philistinism in the world. And the philistine element, which admittedly also has its good sides from time to time, is making itself felt in a harmful way in many ways today. After all, for someone like Christian Morgenstern, it is not only what is commonly called philistine in life that is philistine, but much of what is considered very ingenious today is in fact just genius transformed into philistinism. And such metamorphosed genius, which is actually philistinism, then formed all sorts of skewers in a life like the one Christian Morgenstern led.

From all sides, these philistinisms form skewers. And then you realize that you can't really get close to this stuffiness. But life brings you close again. And that is when these thoughts begin, which you have because you keep bumping into these narrow-minded attitudes, to perform all kinds of dances. These are wonderfully graceful dances, which Morgenstern performs, so that real seriousness can laugh and real seriousness becomes profound and meaningful again in laughter. It is wonderful to see here in Christian Morgenstern how logic cannot be used to deal with the illogical philistinism, but how thoughts must be made to dance so that they enter into a kind of negative logic on the other side, which, however, has something extraordinarily convincing about it.

This dance-like quality of Morgenstern's humorous poems, which depict wonderful irony, which really, I would say, offers something convincing to these moods of the times, must be experienced in their style. And then, once you have grasped them, I believe you can also present these dancing thoughts, which arose from the narrow-mindedness of the philistines, in eurythmy. You can show the difference by following the style forms.

This eurythmy has not only an artistic side but also a pedagogical-didactic one. At the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and is now under my direction, we have included eurythmy as a compulsory subject in the curriculum. And you can see how children from a very young age feel completely at home in these movements in an elementary and natural way and are happy to be able to make these movements, happy not just to need to move according to the physiological peculiarities of external gymnastics, but to bring the whole organism into movements that are inspired and spiritualized. So that this child, in this inspired gymnastics, can feel itself so truly as a human being in full naive unconsciousness.

Then there is a hygienic-therapeutic side to this eurythmy, which I only want to point out. The fact that these movements are taken from the healthy form of the human organism means that they can also be used when this organism falls into an unhealthy state, to help it recover.

All in all, I must ask for indulgence today, as I always do before our performances. We are our own harshest critics and know exactly how far we have to go, because we are just beginning with this eurythmy and because what it aims to achieve actually still needs to be perfected. On the other hand, however, one can also point to the almost unlimited possibilities for development: Because the human being, this universe of all the secrets of the world, is used as a tool, not taken as a tool, one can indeed make the confession from inner contemplation that the time will come when eurythmy will be able to stand as a younger sister art beside the older sister arts, which have been fully recognized for some time.