The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 22 August 1921, Dornach

46. Summer Course and Summer Art Course I

From August 21-27, 1921, the “Summer Course” and the “Summer Art Course”, held in English, took place in parallel in Dornach for an audience from many European countries and America. Rudolf Steiner's lectures, which were for both groups, were translated into English by Baron Alfons Walleen. There had already been a eurythmy performance the evening before, on August 20, but no speech has survived. There are handwritten speeches by Rudolf Steiner for the following three eurythmy performances. These are preceded by the stenographic transcripts of the speeches below.

The performance was announced in the course program as “Eurythmy (Pedagogical)” or "Eurythmy. Educational, examples by children". It took place in the provisional hall of the carpentry workshop.

Stick exercises
Balling and spreading
Chromatic scale and major triads
Anapaests
“Mary's worms”
Chromatic scale and minor triads
“In the high forest”
Scale exercise
Energy dance
“A little man stands in the forest”
“Berceuse”
“What are you doing, wind” by C. F. Meyer
“Dance” by] J. S. Bach
“Bunny” by Christian Morgenstern
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Rural song” by Robert Schumann
“Sleep child of the heart”
“Philanthropic” by Christian Morgenstern
“Vöglein im hohen Baum” by Wilhelm Hey
“Ring, ring little bell”
“The hunchbacked little man” (from: Des Knaben Wunderhorn)
“Frohsinn” by Ferdinand Hiller

“Eurythmy (pedagogical)” A Report on the Event

For the English-speaking audience of the eurythmy performance, Rudolf Steiner wrote the following written summary of his speech of August 22, 1921. Baron Carl Alphons von Walleen-Bornemann translated it into English and read it out after Rudolf Steiner's speech in German before the start of the eurythmy performance.

Introductory words for eurythmy (pedagogical), for Monday, 5 o'clock in the afternoon

Eurythmy, as we will perform it here today and over the next few days, is based on a visible language formed out of the essence of the human being. This language reveals itself in movements which the individual person performs through his body and limbs, or which are performed by groups of people. In this respect, what is presented here resembles a revelation through gestures, through facial expressions, through dance. And yet eurythmy is as far removed from these as lawfully formed human language itself. It is not a single experience of the soul, a sensation, a feeling that is brought together with a gesture or movement that results from momentary arbitrariness. Rather, the individual gesture, the individual movement are connected with the possibilities of the soul's experience in the same way as the individual speech sound or the individual singing tone. And gestures and movements follow each other like sounds and tones in a sentence, in speech.

How such a visible language rises to artistic expression is what I will have to say before the next eurythmy performances. Today we are dealing with another side of eurythmy. Children will perform in front of you. For them it is an inspired, spiritualized form of gymnastics. That is why it was introduced as a compulsory subject alongside gymnastics in the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and run by me.

The justification for this lies in the fact that it transfers the human organism into a mobility that is a completely natural, temporary living out of its own form, its inner resting or moving being. Just look at a human arm with your hand. Its form also contains the secret of its mobility, its activity. You cannot look at the resting hand and the resting arm without seeing the possibilities of movement in them in the spirit, just as you cannot see a calm, mute face without it revealing its form and shape, just as it only needs to open its mouth to make a soul audible. And one cannot see a moving hand and a moving arm without sensing in the movement the striving for the still form, just as in the speaking person the secret of his physiognomic expression is revealed.

But just as language itself emerges lawfully from the inner being of man, it is also possible to transform inner soul connections into movements that develop from gestures and facial expressions to the full articulation of a visible language. And the human being then experiences an expressiveness in his movements that is similar to the language of sound and song. Man reveals himself in his whole being, body, soul and spirit through such a visible language.

And the child feels this possibility of self-revelation. The human urge to move finds its satisfaction in such a revelation. The child finds its own essence in its actions. What is inherent in the human being is brought out of the inner being and out of the general physical sensation. All real education is based on this kind of extraction. Eurythmy as inspired, spiritualized gymnastics is an important means of education. Future times, which will have shed some of the prejudices of the present, will also realize how gymnastics must be supplemented by eurythmy. Gymnastics draws its laws from the knowledge of human physicality. What it can achieve through this should not be denied here. Only animated gymnastics will achieve what the purely physical cannot; it will, for example, extract the initiative of will from the human being. It will educate the full human being according to body, soul and spirit, but in no way neglect the body. For in the full human being, body, soul and spirit are one. And those who allow movements to be carried out that originate from the living spirit, not the abstract, nebulous spirit that is almost exclusively spoken of today, also best cultivate that which is in keeping with the body, which is natural.

This is why children perceive something in eurythmy that they want to perform from within as naturally as they want to speak from within. The justification of eurythmy as a means of education applies to those who seek the ways of education out of true, proper knowledge of human nature. It is therefore reasonable to believe that this inspired form of gymnastics will be included in every educational plan in the future. It will be done to increase the child's inner share in the educational path; to cultivate the whole full human being during education.

Eurythmy Address

My dear ladies and gentlemen present!

We will take the liberty of giving you a mental image of the art of eurythmy, namely one that is performed by children, in order to illustrate the pedagogical and didactic value of the art of eurythmy. Since today we are dealing primarily with the educational and didactic side of eurythmy, I will present what needs to be said about eurythmy as an art in particular at our next mental image on Wednesday and will limit myself today to saying only what relates to eurythmy as an educational tool and subject matter.

I would just like to say a few words in advance to the effect that eurythmy should be a real, inaudible, visible language, a language that is performed by the moving human being - that is, movements of the human limbs, of the whole human body - or is also expressed by groups of people in space. But that which appears as eurythmic art, which is thus achieved on the basis of a visible language, is not an ordinary play of gestures, nor anything mimic in the ordinary sense, and least of all an art of dance, but it is really carefully studied that which the human organism wants to perform, tends to perform, by revealing itself in spoken language or singing. The movements of the larynx and the other organs of speech and song are transferred to the whole human being according to Goethe's principle of metamorphosis. And because we are dealing with human movements that are extracted from the nature of the human organization itself in such a natural, elementary way, just as language is extracted from the laws of the human organism in a naturally elementary way, eurythmy is also an educational and teaching tool.

In the Waldorf School established by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which is directed by me, we have therefore introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject from the earliest elementary school lessons up to the age of 14 or 15. And it has already been shown during the existence of the Waldorf School that the children accept this subject with a special inner satisfaction. In this respect, if we disregard the artistic aspect for the time being, we could call eurythmy: inspired and spiritualized gymnastics. And as an object of instruction it is added to ordinary gymnastics as an inspired and spiritualized gymnastics.

This ordinary gymnastics is, after all, only arranged lawfully from the physiological study of the human organism, from the study of physicality. The movements that the child performs in eurythmy, however, do not merely emerge from this one member of human nature, from the human physical body, but emerge from body, soul and spirit, that is, from the complete human being. That is why the child also feels that what it performs as animated gymnastics is taken out of the full human being, and it lives itself into these movements with particular inner satisfaction.

If we want to understand how this is so, we need only think of how, for those who know how to put themselves into the lawfulness of the human organism with real intuitive insight, every possible movement to which the body is inclined already lies in the resting human form. He who can see in this way, sees in the resting human being how this wants to constantly pass over in the organism into movements that are already expressed in the formative or resting form. One only brings the human form itself into movement by passing from the contemplation of the sculpture of the human organism to this moving sculpture of eurythmy, which is at the same time a visible language. Anyone who is able to study the movement of the human being, which emerges from the elements of the will that have been determined deep in the subconscious of the will, who is able to study these possibilities of movement that lie within the human being, will find everywhere how these movements are nothing other than that which in turn wants to come to rest, just as the human organism, when it rests, stands still or sits still, shows its calm form. You only have to look at a hand and the arm attached to it - if you look at the shape of the fingers, the forearm or anything else, you cannot imagine that it is intended to be at rest. Its resting form is such that any movement and mobility is already expressed in the resting form.

And again: If the arms and hands of the human being are in motion, we see how only such movements are naturally elementary possible, which then again follow the resting form of the hands and arms themselves. The child senses that everything that is given in eurythmy is taken from the laws of the human organism. That is why it performs these eurythmic movements with such great pleasure, as we see in the Stuttgart Waldorf School, as inspired, spiritualized gymnastics.

And if we look even more closely at the soul, we must say that ordinary gymnastics can actually only extract from the human being that which lies in his physical organization. One day we will think about these things more objectively, without today's prejudices. Then we will see how ordinary gymnastics is one-sided. I certainly don't want to go as far as a famous physiologist - perhaps even the most famous in Central Europe - who once sat here and listened to such an introduction, and who said to me afterwards: "So, you accept gymnastics as a one-sidedness that has been taken out of physiology? As a physiologist,“ he said, ”I do not regard gymnastics, as it is practiced today, as a subject of instruction at all, but as barbarism."

Now, ladies and gentlemen, out of politeness towards our culture - one must always be polite - I do not want to say that gymnastics is a barbarism, but I would like to say that it is a one-sidedness, it is only taken out of the physiology of the human organism, whereas this animated gymnastics, which occurs in eurythmy, is taken out of the body, soul and spirit, out of the full human being. That is why it is used as a means of instruction, as an object of education, which draws out of the child that which the present and the following generation in particular will need very, very much, namely the initiative of will, the initiative of soul life.

This has already been shown in the Waldorf School through the teaching of eurythmy, how the development of the will, the initiative of the will, is detached from the subconscious depths of human experience during childhood. This has been achieved because eurythmy does not neglect the physical in a one-sided way, focusing only on soul and spirit, but takes into account all three elements of human life, training the spirit, training the soul, training the body - that the child perceives [this eurythmy] as something so natural that when it is brought to the child, the child learns to love this eurythmy out of the same inner urge as when speaking. Just as when language is brought to the child and speaking is the natural urge to reveal language, so in eurythmy, when it is brought in a natural way, there is such an urge in the child to be active [in eurythmy] as in language. And that is why we can hope, ladies and gentlemen, that eurythmy will become more and more recognized as an educational tool in the pedagogical and didactic field. What is missing in our time, what our time needs, is that the introduction of eurythmy into the curriculum is seen as a matter of course.