The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 7 August 1921, Dornach

44. Eurythmy Performance

The first part of the performance took place in the domed room of the Goetheanum, the second part in the provisional hall of the carpentry workshop.

1. Part (Goetheanumbau) “Rosen aus dem Süden” by Friedrich Hebbel with music by Leopold van der Pals
   “Liebeserklärung“ by Friedrich Nietzsche
   Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (19) by Rudolf Steiner
   “Das Sträußchen” by J. W. v. Goethe
   Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (20) by Rudolf Steiner
   “L'Art et le Peuple“ by Victor Hugo
   “Prologue in Heaven” from “Faust I” by J. W. v. Goethe Part II (carpentry) Music by Leopold van der Pals. “Charon” by J. W. v. Goethe
   “The Minstrel“ by J. W. v. Goethe
   “The Violet” by]. W. v. Goethe
   “Papillons“ by Jean-Philippe Rameau
   “Elfe” by Joseph von Eichendorf with music by Leopold van der Pals
   Humoresken by Christian Morgenstern: “Die Fingur”; “Der Purzelbaum”; “Zwei Esel”; “Der E. P. V.”; “Unter Schwarzkünstlern”

Dear attendees,

Allow me to introduce today's presentation with a few words, as I usually do for these eurythmy attempts. This is not done to explain the presentation itself – art must speak for itself in the immediate experience, and the explanation of art would itself be inartistic. However, in the case of these eurythmy attempts, we are dealing with an artistic activity that draws on previously unfamiliar artistic sources and that also makes use of an equally unfamiliar artistic formal language. And perhaps something can be said about these two, about this artistic source and about this artistic language of forms - all the more so because what is presented here can easily be confused with all kinds of neighboring arts, with the art of dance, with pantomime and facial expressions and the like, with which it should not be confused.

What you will see here on the stage, so to speak, is people in motion, groups of people in motion. And what is expressed in these human movements is a real, visible speaking. It is not the result of gestures being invented at random to express these or those feelings, these or those nervous processes and the like. It is not like that; rather, it is a real visible language that is drawn out of the human being, out of the human organization, in the same way that language, spoken language itself, is drawn out of this human organization.

Visible song, visible speech: that is what eurythmy seeks to be. And the fact that it can be that is based on the fact that, to use this Goethean expression, it was first carefully observed through sensual-supersensory looking at what actually underlies the movement tendencies in phonetic language, song, in the larynx. In the other speech organs, if I may express myself in this way, movements come to life that are captured in the moment of their creation, in their status nascens, and then transform into those movements that convey sound or tone as air movements. So it is not that which becomes real movement, but that which, in the moment of its arising, holds itself in order to become tone or sound, that must be captured by sensory-suprasensory observation. For this is essentially born out of the actual organization, the human organization of tone and sound. Just as language can express what lives within the human being, so this eurythmy, this visible language, can express the laws of both the poetic and musical arts.

We must only be clear about the fact that in the poetic arts, the actual artistic element is seated much deeper than one is accustomed to seeking in our present unartistic age. On the other hand, we must fully understand how that which is present in the shaping of speech in terms of rhythm, meter, melody, but also in terms of pictorial imagery, is that which the poet actually experiences in his soul. For in our ordinary language – and singing is only one more artistic [linguistic?] activity that has been developed towards musicality – all that the poet expresses in speech, but that which lives in our language, is actually composed of two elements: a thought element, which, as it were, flows out from the organism of the head into the tone-like of speech, and from a will element that comes from the whole human being.

The whole human being has become soulful, and from this soulfulness of the whole human being comes the will element. The more language advances in civilization, the less artistic it actually becomes. You can see it in the languages, if you have an eye for it, how they can become inartistic. Those languages in which the vowels e and i are increasingly preceded by consonants tend towards the inartistic. We must realize that the mental element flowing into speech is inartistic. Thought as such is always inartistic. Thought has a different essential element, a different mission in life, than directly expressing the human inner self in artistic forms, which is why the thought element advances in civilized languages. The element of prose comes to the fore inwardly everywhere and the artistic element recedes.

The poet then fights against the prosaic, and he tries to lead language back again, I would say, to a deeper level of experience, where the emotional-volitional can live out more fully in it. But this, what comes from the whole, from the full human being, this will in the expression of soul and spirit, can be brought out particularly through the visible language of eurythmy. Therefore, in poetry in particular, what is basically only hidden in the treatment of language, in the eurythmization of language, but which, when you strip it away, the conceptual, and this element of will in human, lawful movement, is shaped as it is in eurythmy, then you will be able to reveal from the poetic content what is contained in the actual artistic content, just as it is with musical content.

You will therefore hear the musical and the poetic at the same time as what is presented here as the eurythmization of the musical or the poetic. In this, it is important to bear in mind that recitation and declamation, which are supposed to accompany what is being performed in eurythmy, must in turn return to the times when the art of recitation and declamation was understood. Our age has become inartistic in this respect, also with regard to poetry. Today, few people are aware that Goethe himself, for example, did not rehearse his iambic tragedies with his actors based on their prosaic content. He did not just rehearse them, but rather, like a musical conductor, he rehearsed his Iphigenia with the actors, wanting to present and reproduce the speech formation. In the future, people will be just as insensitive to this as they are today. Schiller, just before he had the literal meaning of most of his poems in his soul, first had a kind of indeterminate melodiousness within him, a musicality, to which he then, so to speak, strung the words of his most important poems to create this linguistic form, this rhythmicization, this rhythmic treatment of language, to this treatment according to a kind of melodious thematic, to this treatment according to the pictorial, according to the imaginative, which is evident in the particular treatment of the sounds. Some sounds are broadened, others sharpened: in these expressions alone, by taking them literally, it is already expressed that the pictorial element can also come to life in language. This must be expressed in declamation and recitation. That is what is particularly opposed today, but only out of unartistic sentiment, out of pure dilettantism. Even if this kind of declamation and recitation has been fought against in recent times for quite different and dishonest reasons – I do not want to talk about these today – it is precisely out of quite [different declamation and recitation] that it must be shown how language also has within itself that which is then expressed through movements []. And these movements are not arbitrary, but are taken from the whole of the human organism through sensory and supersensory observation, and can be expressed in movement. In our eurythmy performances there is relatively little facial expression. Facial expression can of course only be expressed in a eurythmy performance to the extent that it can be expressed by an individual when speaking. In artistically shaped speech one would treat it in the same way as a forced facial expression when speaking, which would be a grimace, a caricature. And precisely because it has often been emphasized that the facial expression is missing, it shows how little sense one has of this particular linguistic element that lies in eurythmy. One also wants to look for the gestural element in it that can be interpreted from the moment. But just as the speech sound does not come to the soul content arbitrarily, but in a lawful way, so too what is formed in the eurythmic as movement does not come arbitrarily to the soul content. And a thought, a configuration, a sentence configuration, all this has a clear revelation in eurythmic expression, not something arbitrary. And the essential thing is that one does not seek what is actually to be expressed in the individual gestures either, but precisely in the sequence of movements, in the artistic shaping of the person, we have eurythmy. What is still inartistic, what still has to be artistically shaped, just as language itself in poetry: that is what we have to bear in mind.

I would also like to mention that today, in addition to the poems presented, we will also see something dramatic, the “Prologue in Heaven”, which precedes the first part of Goethe's “Faust”. There you can see how much the dramatic justifies eurythmy. I have not yet found it for myself, I am still working on it. If one wants to look for a new means of expression for the dramatic at all, as we already have it to a certain extent for the lyrical, for the epic, one only realizes how a truly artistic style comes to expression precisely in the search for a legitimate style. It is at most sought for naturalistic scenes. They must, after all, remain naturalistic scenes. I don't even want to say today how simple and superficial they will appear.

But what, like Goethe's “Prologue in Heaven” or other “Faust” scenes, carries the situation from earthly events up into the supermundane, where soul experiences that have a connection with supersensible worlds are to be portrayed, there one notices, especially with Goethe, with the true poet, how that which he cannot reveal, precisely because it descends into the purely naturalistic, ascends into the supersensible, how on the one hand it can only be truly stylistically presented [through eurythmy]. And one can hope that wherever the action in the drama rises to the level of spiritual experience, which goes beyond the purely naturalistic, eurythmic forms will be found everywhere, which in turn do justice to what is basically neglected if one wants to present it with today's merely technical means. I would also like to say that the presentation of Goethe's Faust scenes, such as the “Prologue in Heaven”, which is to be presented to you today, is something that is capable of significant perfection.

That is more or less what I would like to say in a few words, just about the artistic side. Another aspect of eurythmy is its pedagogical and didactic side. Here at the Goetheanum, of course, it is mainly the artistic side that is presented to you. As always, I would like to inform the esteemed audience that we are only just beginning with our eurythmy performances; we are our own strictest critics and know that it needs to be further developed. Those of our honored viewers who have seen our performances often will have noticed that we begin and end our eurythmic forms with silent forms before and after our performances. Wherever eurythmy is the only accompaniment, you will actually see how the mood of the poem can be introduced through such silent forms and how the mood can be sealed at the end through silent forms, after the poem has faded away. And how one can express the essential artistic element of the poem through this visible language, even when it is not accompanied by audible sounds, but is introduced or allowed to fade away merely through the visible language of eurythmy.

On the whole, it may well be said that when Goethe says: “He to whom nature reveals her manifest secret feels a deep longing for her most worthy interpreter, art, that one strives for this quite objectively with eurythmy. So that this saying of Goethe's can also be interpreted, with some modification, to mean: he to whom human nature and the soul reveal the revealed secret finds in himself a deep longing for that expression of the human form, for that remembering of the human form of the movements that arise from an inner, not an outer, lawfulness and art.

Elsewhere, Goethe says very beautifully: “By being placed at the summit of nature, man brings forth a summit within himself and ultimately rises to the production of the work of art.” If we know how the human being is again a true microcosm, in which what lives as the macrocosm, as the great world, is secreted, then what is scattered, I would say, throughout the world of space and the world of time, can be found again in the human being; if we truly feel and experience this world, then we can also say, with regard to what lives in microcosm of the human being, draws order, harmony, measure and meaning from his own essential qualities and forces, and draws measure, harmony and meaning from these qualities and forces and creates a work of art out of them, as in the art of eurythmy, then a real work of art must arise. And so we can have confidence that, if we look at what eurythmy wants, it will continue to develop, probably not through ourselves but through others, but by developing further and further, we can be sure that it will finally arrive at the point where it will be able to add itself as a fully-fledged younger art to the fully-fledged older ones.