The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 12 June 1921, Cannstatt

39. Eurythmy Performance

Address on Eurythmy

The following words are from Karl Schubert, who only took down fragments of Rudolf Steiner's address in shorthand.

A visible language is expressed through the movements of the human body in space. These are not random gestures or facial expressions, but rather this visible language is truly brought out according to the same laws by which the soul and spirit of the human being reveal themselves in musical song or in spoken language. The aim is to explore, through sensory and supersensory observation, which movement tendencies are stimulated – not actual movements, as movement tendencies are transformed into sound vibrations. These are transferred to the movements of the whole person or whole groups of people.

This is based on Goethe's view. This Goethean view leads to seeing the whole plant in the individual organ, both super-sensibly and sensually. There is a whole plant in each individual leaf. What is seen in the forms can be applied to human activity. In the larynx and its neighboring organs, movement tendencies are generated during singing, in a closed human organ system. If one gets to know these movement tendencies and transfers these movements to the limbs of the whole human being, then one gets the whole human being on stage as a speech organ, and one can express the same thing that one can bring to light through singing or through poetry through the whole human being. In this way, one achieves an essential foundation for something artistic.

In our language, the content of thought appears as a particularly intrusive element. The thought pushes the artistic back. In language, will and thought meet. The thought comes from the head. It is an incomplete means of expression. Human will comes from the whole person, and so what comes from the will is what is effective and powerful in language when language is to be artistically shaped through poetry.

Those who have an organ for rejoicing when the field of art is expanded will welcome such an attempt as an attempt to expand the artistic. But the fact that these movements come about as I have described them does not make them tendentious. They arise from the whole inner lawfulness of the human organism. This inner lawfulness is something wonderful when one gets to know it. Consider the wonderful formation of the human hand. There we have the form as the sculptor reproduces it in a static way. One cannot understand a human hand without understanding one's own finger formation in such a way that it can move, without understanding the connection between the movement in the human being and the human form. The one who sees the eurythmic should have before him in direct contemplation that which can arise in the human organism in a completely lawful way in terms of movement. You can present a poem in such a way that you see how the whole human being comes into activity, into movement. Nietzsche knew what he said: He meant that what the human being wishes to reveal from the fully human can only be expressed in visible speech, whereas what is expressed in phonetic speech and song does not come from the fully human. Those who demand that the human being add pantomime to his movements would demand something grimacing.

We will hear something poetic. This declamation must become something different if it is to accompany what is being presented through eurythmy. We have indeed strayed far from what Schiller had in his soul when, before writing down the literal words of a poem, he wrote down an indeterminate melody. Goethe had more of a poetic-pictorial quality in his soul. It is not the prosaic that is at the root of it; we have to go back to the shaping of the sound, to where the linguistic expression becomes an image in the sounding. If you bring the eurythmic into the language in this way, then the declamation is able to accompany the eurythmic. Goethe therefore rehearsed the iambs with a baton. The poetic lies in the rhythmic, not in the literal.

Therapeutic-medical: Movements can be derived that have a healing and hygienic effect. The educational-didactic, which has proven itself in Waldorf schools. It can be clearly seen how the child, by immersing themselves in soulful gymnastics, feels that every single movement comes from the laws of the human being. The human being itself is taken as a means of expression.