The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922
GA 277c — 15 May 1921, Dornach
35. Eurythmy Performance
The performance on 15 May 1921 (Whitsunday) took place entirely in the domed auditorium of the Goetheanum. Only the first part of the performance on 16 May was shown there; for the second part after the break, the performance was moved to the carpentry hall.
Program for the performance in Dornach, May 15, 1921
Recitation by Dr. Steiner
Second scene from the mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner
“Evening Feelings” by Friedrich Hebbel
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (6.) by Rudolf Steiner “Spring” by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (7) by Rudolf Steiner ‘Daffodils’. Music by Henry Zagwijn
Dear ladies and gentlemen.
The presentation that is about to take place will consist of recitation, eurythmy and music. It has been organized in such a way that the second scene from my fourth mystery drama, from 'The Awakening of the Soul', can be presented today in the following way: Firstly, Dr. Steiner will recite the first part of this second scene. Perhaps I may therefore be permitted to say a few words about these “mystery dramas” for the reason that only one scene is to be presented here and perhaps a few words are necessary to place this scene in the context in which it is presented. For these “mystery dramas” are in fact a presentation of the soul processes within, not in a symbolic or allegorical way, but in such a way that the soul — insofar as it is as real for the human being and his development as the sense world around him — is presented in a thoroughly idealistic way, if I may use the paradoxical expression: idealistic-realistic.
The four “mystery plays” depict the inner psychological development of a series of people who are socially and psychologically connected to one another. In a sense, the fate, the psychological and spiritual fate of the personality named Johannes, is the central focus that runs through all four “mystery plays”. Johannes is a painter, but one who, in his artistic striving, aims for a spiritualization of the artistic, for such a spiritualization that can then bring a supersensible reality to manifestation in a thoroughly realistic way, even in the painterly.
Through the vicissitudes of his life, John comes into contact with various personalities who, while he is undergoing his own spiritual development, are also undergoing theirs. And then it can be shown in dramatic images how the various supersensible powers intervene in the development of those people who are truly undergoing an inner, spiritual development. We see how, in particular, Maria is placed alongside Johannes Thomasius as a personality who, while Johannes himself is still at the starting point, one might say at the beginning of his development, has already attained a certain maturity of development; so that a kind of spiritual confrontation takes place between the still undeveloped Johannes Thomasius and the more mature personality of Maria.
Then other personalities join the circle. Above all, the antagonism of fate that arises between the two personalities - Professor Capesius and Dr. Strader - is portrayed.
Strader is a personality who, by nature, is actually quite suited to direct practical life, who has only been brought up by parents and educational prejudices into a different life path, but at the same time a personality who cannot be within practical action without this practical action being illuminated by a spiritualized worldview. And at the same time, he is a personality who does not want, on the one hand, to have practical work, like the sober, realistic life to which one pays tribute, and, on the other hand, devotion to the spiritual world in an abstract, mystical form, but rather, in Strader, a personality should be portrayed who, from the point of view of humanity, from reality, wants to weave the spiritual and the practical into one another .
In Capesius, we see a personality who is more immersed in the scientific life and who also finds some satisfaction in this scientific life, but only in the general scientific life as such, not in the particular scientific field of the present in which he is immersed. Therefore, Capesius feels particularly drawn to the revelations that can come to him from fairy tales, from the presentation of myths, in fact from all that which, in an imaginative, folk-like way, finds its way into the secrets of existence. What such people can experience in terms of mutual spiritual interaction is now presented in the first three “mystery dramas” to the point where personalities can connect a specific idea with what it means to be part of the spiritual life.
Because, dear attendees, this must be a spiritual experience, a spiritual event. Something that can only be expressed approximately in abstract formulas, something that is called “standing within the spiritual world”, which can be characterized in such a way that for the one who stands within the spiritual world, this spiritual world is really like the outer sensory world, so real that he must speak not only of some abstract spiritual beings, but of concrete spiritual entities that are not symbols and allegories, but that interact with human nature — which itself is spiritual and soul-like on one side — just like the beings of the external sense world. And it is intentional, according to the scenic images that already characterize this standing within the spiritual world with the decisive personalities of the “mystery dramas”, it is intentional the transition into practical life afterwards, after the drama that I have named the “Threshold of the Spiritual World” [The Guardian of the Threshold], after that the drama is set, [whose events] present themselves as a further development, [ the drama] which the personalities on whom it depends are now to place in practical life.
We should be able to use the course of these dramatic events to draw attention to how a spiritual world should not be approached as a Sunday pleasure, as something that runs alongside life, but how it should be approached as a spiritual reality that is directly connected to the outer, very real everyday life. The spiritual world should not be sought as a cloud-cuckoo-land, but as something that can be approached through each of the individual powers of the material life, to have a spiritual effect.
The first scene of this mystery drama, “The Awakening of the Soul”, therefore shows how one of the personalities of the four dramas, Hilarius Gottgetreu, comes to organize his very practical, namely industrial, enterprises in such a way that he includes Johannes Thomasius and Dr. Strader in this practical enterprise, so that they can actually bring about the realization of what that is, what connects abstract technology, in which it has been brought to a certain perfection in recent times, with that which, at the same time as the actions of technology, promotes everything that places man in this community in such a way that everyone can find their human existence in this community.
If this is to be realized, then the machine must begin to think differently than it has been thought in the past, especially in modern life; then the spirit must indeed be invoked and called upon to explain in a fully human way that which has so far only been explained in abstract mechanics, so that it can be carried directly into practical life - for the good and further development of humanity - that which is looked down from the spiritual world. Thus, spiritual personalities with a certain development are to be placed in practical life, and practical life is to be placed in the service of spiritual activity.
This gives rise to prejudices in those who have hitherto been involved in such an undertaking merely out of, I might say, abstract practice – like the office manager in the first picture of Hilarius Gottgetreu's practical enterprise. And we see the whole opposition with which so-called practice is confronted with that which alone can bring salvation to humanity: in a spiritual conception of life that is convincing to humanity.
What we are now attempting to a certain extent in practice, albeit in the very first, elementary stages, is fully contained in these “mystery dramas”. And when in 1913 the fourth drama, 'The Awakening of the Soul', was performed, initially it could only be brought to the world - which actually only means the world, namely the world of the stage - but which is thoroughly conceived in a thoroughly real sense, albeit in the sense of a spiritual-physical reality. However, when you see something like this, you soon realize how not only the so-called practical, physical world presents its prejudices against that which wants to exert its influence from the spiritual, which it wants to penetrate spiritually, but also how sometimes those who now strive for the spiritual heights, who want to undergo a certain spiritual development and also undergo it, how these can also absolutely can also completely fail at the right moment. And this failure from the other side is artistically attempted to be demonstrated in the second picture, which we now want to present.
In the first picture, which is not to be presented here, the resistance of external practice against the spiritual is shown, so to speak. In this second picture, the resistance of spiritual people is to be shown, so to speak. First of all, there is John himself, who, in the course of many events in his life, has gone through a lot, and who has risen to a certain view of the spiritual world, so that he could already be guided through the event of crossing over into the spiritual world. But then he suddenly feels uncanny] about this whole spiritual world into which he has come: He is confronted with the spiritual world, he feels like he has no footing in this spiritual world. But he wants to resort to direct nature and, above all, to what emerges in him as his own childhood memories. This inner tragedy, which actually grows ever greater the more a person advances in the spiritual world, this inner tragedy of a person developing in this way, is to be depicted in this picture. One would like to say: Through such a spiritual development, a person, when he has reached a certain age, becomes more alien to his earlier epochs of life than otherwise. He looks at his earlier epochs of life as if, one might say, childhood, the first childhood, were standing there as an independent person, as another person, and then youth, one might say, as another person. One becomes stranger through such a spiritual development. And one must again find one's way back in a more intense way than otherwise occurs.
We see Johannes Thomasius depicted as his childhood appears before him, as he wants to go back to that childhood because he cannot yet grasp what he is looking at, because he has not yet learned [to shine a light into] the spiritual world. Just at the moment when he had been called to be useful in the world, one might say, he becomes a burden to himself. You see him standing there in all his tragedy, first facing Maria, as he is to be led back to what he once was. But we also see how another personality connected with him, Capesius, has taken a certain step forward in his development, has gone through it, and cannot find his way back into reality, how he wants to remain in abstract spiritual worlds, in those that cannot penetrate reality. He, who has only been educated by science, I would say - not by practice like Strader - can more easily be tempted to stay inside the abstract spiritual world. We therefore see him, so to speak, temporarily falling away in the course of this picture.
And all this is meant to represent nothing other than the way in which the power appears – I need only remind you of Johannes Thomasius – not in a mystical and mysterious way, when I use the term 'Ahrimanic' for this power, when one sees how the Ahrimanic reaches into this life, wanting only to chain him to the outer, spiritless practice, to all that that only ties people to the physical and mechanical. This Ahriman does not appear in this [picture]. But on the other hand, one sees that which now wants to lead the human being beyond himself, so to speak, which works in the human being so that he wants to mystically or, in the bad sense, theosophically rise above himself by half a human length. You are well aware, ladies and gentlemen, of this kind of theosophy, which consists in those concerned always saying: I have the higher human being in me, I have the higher self in me. And then they feel as if they had grown beyond themselves by half a person and could grow beyond all other people. This is bad mysticism, this is bad theosophy, this is what wants to dissuade man from standing firmly on a secure ground of practical-physical reality, but which must be permeated by the spirit.
These forces, which want to alienate man from himself into an abstract spiritual world – I refer again to Thomasius – should be called Luciferic forces. They appear here; but the whole thing is not meant symbolically, but quite dynamically as forces present in the world, such as electricity and magnetism, which cannot be seen, but which are nevertheless present forces. We see how, through everything that is at work, Johannes Thomasius is led not to see his youth in delusion and dream and to long for it, but to see it in front of him, real. The struggle of his Scelenkräfte - Philia, Astrid, Luna and the other Philia - is presented to you. The spirit of Johannes' youth is presented to you. It is Johannes himself, but something that has become alien to him, which is juxtaposed with the older Johannes Thomasius as a perceivable personality – so to speak, the young Johannes Thomasius with the older Johannes Thomasius. The soul forces work together so that Johannes Thomasius, at the age at which he can recognize himself, no longer dreams himself back to his youth in delusion, but can prepare himself in this way to really intervene in practical life, as it should be in the real, right relationship between the spiritual world and the physical world.
The first part will be recited. The second part – where the gnomes and sylphs appear and the soul forces and where the drama itself demands a kind of eurythmy, as noted in the drama – the recitation will then transition into a stage presentation through eurythmy, through that eurythmic art that is based on a visible language that is brought forth from the human organization just as lawfully as human phonetic language or singing.
But precisely that which is to be presented supernaturally, which plays into the supernatural, cannot actually be presented with ordinary stage realism. We have made the attempt with the scenes in which Goethe, for example, transfers his “Faust” drama into the supernatural: we have used our eurythmy, this visible language, to help us. And you can see how everything that Goethe weaves into a higher world of reality can, precisely because of that, find its way into the language of the stage.
What appears here as visible speech is intended to enable the inner movement tendencies of the human larynx and speech organs to be studied as they are employed in speech or song. Then what is observed there as the inner lawfulness of speech is transferred to the whole human being or to groups of people, so that, as it were, the human being or groups of people appear on the stage like a visible larynx, like a speech organ. Eurythmy is not mere gesturing or mimicry, nor is it ordinary dance, but eurythmy seeks to represent something quite different at its root.
When we accompany our speech with gestures today, these are arbitrary gestures. It is interesting that in the early days of human development there was a single word for the gesture that was still connected to the sound. Our gestures today are gestures of meaning that arise from what we actually want to express and have already gone through in our thoughts. What occurs in our eurythmy is what is experienced in the tone and sound. What is experienced when a person experiences the individual sound in their soul is already abstract in outer speech. But in eurythmy we must lead back more and more from the gesture of meaning to the gesture of the sound. And that is the point: how speech in sound and song itself can evoke something that is again a real language, not just an accompaniment. In this way we can go back to the elementary form, to the artistic feeling of expression.
This, however, also leads to a different relationship to the other arts, namely declamation and recitation. This is an experiment. And one could, by accompanying the eurythmy - not in the sense of wanting to particularly emphasize the content of the prose and let everything that is rhythm, meter, rhyme and so on, verse foot and so on, recede in the declamation, thus suppressing the actual artistic element, [one could] not accompany the eurythmy with this art of recitation at all. Therefore, we fall back on what, for example, Goethe, the true artist, still felt very much when he himself rehearsed the drama with his actors, what he had to rehearse with the baton, thus seeing the main thing in the treatment of language, in the formation of the linguistic-phonetic-tonal basis of the actual literal content. For that is the truly artistic, whereas it is an unartistic approach to focus particularly on the content and to want to emphasize only what is often considered the greatest in the art of recitation and declamation today. We then apply this art of recitation and declamation, if recitation and declamation is used at all, by always going back to the artistically shaped, which actually only makes use of the literal content in order to express something much deeper than can be expressed by the abstract literal content, thought-filled content.
In this sense, the first part of the picture should be recited; then the transition will be made immediately to the eurythmic presentation of the second part of the second picture of my mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul”. There will be no break. The entire performance will take place in this space without a break. The presentation of this mystery play will then be followed by other types of eurythmy performances, and there will also be a musical interlude.