The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 24 August 1921, Dornach

47. Summer Course and Summer Art Course II

The performance was announced in the course program as “Eurythmy (free eurythmy)” or “Eurythmy as a free Art”. The first part took place in the Goetheanum's Kuppelraum, the second in the provisional hall of the carpentry workshop.

Part 1 (Goetheanum building)
“Das Märchen vom Quellenwunder” from “Die Prüfung der Seele” by R. Steiner with music by Leopold van der Pals
“The evening bells” by Thomas Moore
“The Nile Delta” by Vladimir Solovyov
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (21) by Rudolf Steiner “April” by William Watson
“The Violet” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Papillons” by Jean-Philippe Rameau “World Soul Spirits” by Rudolf Steiner
“The arrow and the Song” by Henry Longfellow Romantic prelude Part II (carpentry) From “Pierrot Lunaire” by Albert Giraud in the translation by Otto Erich Hartleben: “Evening”; “Prayer”; ‘Harlequin’; “Souper”
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “Das Gebet”; “Der Hahn”; “Die Weste”; “Der Purzelbaum”; “Die wirklich praktische Leute”; “Der Würfel”; “Die Feuerprobe”; “Die Hystrix”; “Antologie”

“Eurythmy as a free art” author's speech from August 24, 1921

For the English-speaking audience of the eurythmy performance, Rudolf Steiner prepared the following written summary of his speech of August 24, 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.

For Wednesday, August 24. 5 o'clock in the afternoon

Introductory words before the eurythmy performance.

Last Monday we took the liberty of offering you a eurythmy performance which was intended to illustrate this art in the form of spiritual and mental gymnastics as a means of education and teaching. Today we would like to come before you with eurythmy as a free art. To want to explain a mental image in such a way is an inartistic undertaking. For a real art must work through that which it can reveal in direct observation; and the spectator can only find artistic in it that which completely confronts him in this direct observation.

I cannot, therefore, say explanatory words about the mental image as to why I am making this introduction. It is for another reason. Eurythmy draws on hitherto unfamiliar artistic sources and makes use of an equally unfamiliar artistic formal language. And a few introductory words may well be said about these sources and this formal language. Eurythmy is based on a visible language. Its forms of expression are the movements of the limbs of the human body or movements of people in groups.

These movements do not come about like ordinary gestures, not as mimicry or pantomime, and least of all as ordinary dance. They were formed by studying the movement tendencies of the human vocal and speech organs through sensory-supersensory observation. This is the study of movements that are not fully developed and that underlie singing and speaking. In singing and speaking, these movements only begin and are then transformed into what can convey sound and tone. Singing and speaking must therefore be captured in their genesis (in the status nascens). What is thus grasped sensually and supersensibly as a possibility of movement is transferred to the whole human being. This becomes a singing and speaking organism.

It is the principle of metamorphosis used by Goethe as the goal of a morphological view that is elevated into artistic creation. Goethe sees in the whole plant only a more complicatedly shaped leaf; in the leaf of the idea, a whole plant that reveals itself to the senses only in a simpler way.

In human language, the thought is combined with the will. Thought is the non-artistic element. Therefore, the more civilized language becomes, the more it is deprived of its artistic character. It becomes the expression of thought, which on the one hand becomes a servant of knowledge, on the other of social convention. The true artist as poet fights against the inartistic thought element of language. He seeks to shape the sound and word contexts, which are based on rhythm, meter, harmony, rhyme, alliteration, the musical or imaginative thematic motif. He thus makes language an expression of the will, that is, of the full human being.

It is this element of will that governs the entire essence of eurythmy. Through eurythmy it is made visible what the musician strives for in the shaping of sound and the true poet strives for in the shaping of language. What underlies a poem as art beyond its prose content comes before the eye through eurythmy.

On the one hand, eurythmy is accompanied by music. There it is a visible song. On the other hand, it is accompanied by recitation and declamation. Through them, the truly artistic and poetic content of the poetry comes to light.

But one cannot declaim and recite to eurythmy in the same way as one does in our inartistic age, in which one sees an essential element in emphasizing the prose content of a poem. Beyond the content of the prose, one must see this essence in the recitative and declamatory language, in the elaboration of meter, rhythm, harmony, rhyme, musical and pictorial theme. The invisible eurythmy must be extracted from the poetry, which then appears before the audience as visible eurythmy.

Eurythmy is still at the beginning of its development. We know this and are ourselves the most severe critics of what is already being achieved today. But anyone who knows what is being striven for must see in it unlimited possibilities for development. Goethe said: “To whom nature begins to reveal its open secret, he feels the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter in art.” Well, eurythmy can say: “To whom man begins to reveal the secrets of human organization, he feels the deepest longing for the artistic creation that is attempted in eurythmy.” For this does not make use of an external tool, but of the human being himself as the most worthy tool. And another time Goethe says: “When man is placed on the summit of nature, he feels himself again as a whole nature, takes order, harmony, measure and meaning together and rises to the production of the work of art.”

This elevation must succeed best when man takes the order, harmony, measure and meaning of his own being and creates a work of art through himself; for in him as the microcosm all the secrets of the macrocosm lie hidden in some way.

From this objective it may be hoped that, even if today eurythmy is only a beginning, it will one day be able to stand alongside the older, fully authorized sister arts as a fully authorized art.

Eurythmy Address

My dear ladies and gentlemen!

Last Monday we were able to present eurythmy to you as a means of education and teaching, and I took the liberty of speaking about the significance of eurythmy as an inspired and spiritualized form of gymnastics. Today, my dear audience, eurythmy is to appear before you as a free art. And wanting to explain that which wants to reveal itself as art is actually an inartistic undertaking. For everything that is truly artistic must work through that which is directly perceived. And on the other hand, man demands of the truly artistic that it grasps its entire essence without having to first seek a detour through a conceptual or other explanation.

However, if I allow myself to say a few words in advance, it is for the reason that the eurythmy representations we have attempted here at the Goetheanum and elsewhere are artistic works that draw on hitherto unfamiliar artistic sources and also make use of an unfamiliar artistic formal language. And please allow me to say a few words about these artistic sources and this artistic formal language beforehand.

That through which eurythmy wants to reveal itself as a free art are movements of the human being in his individual limbs, or also movements of groups of people in space. These movements do not represent a mere mimic or pantomime, something merely gestural or even something dance-like, but [eurythmy] should be a truly visible language, a visible language that is derived from the sensory-supersensory observations of the human organization itself. So that in eurythmy one can allow something to emerge from the human being that comes out of him just as organically - without being a momentary gesture or a momentary mimicry - as human language itself. And just as the sound or, in the case of singing, the tone emerges lawfully from the human inner being, so too should that which emerges as eurythmic art come from the human inner being and its organization.

The point is that, as I said, it must be carefully studied in sensory-supersensory observation which movement systems or movement tendencies arise in the human speech or singing organs when the human being prepares to sing or speak. I say explicitly: tendencies of movement, because what I mean by this does not become a real movement, but one can actually only observe that which lies at the basis of it in its development, so to speak in the status nascens, because that which wants to form as movement in the organs of singing or speech is already stopped in its development by the singing or speaking person who is active and converted into those movements which can then represent the tone or the sound. So you have to transfer the possibilities of movement that arise in individual organ systems - in the singing or speaking system - to the whole human being.

This is very much in line with the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Goethe sees the individual leaf as a simplified plant and, in turn, the whole plant as a complicated leaf. What Goethe uses here only for morphological observations can be elevated to an artistic level. We can transfer the possibilities of movement that are inherent in an individual organ system to the whole human being, just as nature transfers the form of the individual leaf in a more complicated form to the whole plant. Then the whole human being becomes a speech or singing organ. And even groups of people become an organ of speech or singing. And one must no more seek a connection between the individual movement and the individual soul process than one may seek a connection between the individual sound [or tone and that] which takes place in the soul. But just as the overall formation of language is lawful, so too is the overall formation of eurythmic movements entirely lawful. And by allowing the human being to reveal himself through this eurythmy, one comes to represent precisely the artistic, [that] which underlies singing or speech, in its original element.

For in language, through the human organization, flows together the mental and that which does not merely emerge from the head like the mental, but that which comes from the whole human being, the volitional. But the more the merely intellectual lives in any content, the less artistic is this content. Thought kills the artistic. And only so much of the element of will that emerges from the whole, from the fully human being, can pass through language, so much of the truly artistic-poetic can be found in language.

Therefore the poet, who is truly an artist, must wage a constant battle against the prose element of language. This is especially the case with civilized languages, where language is more and more the expression of the cognitive thought on the one hand or the thought suitable for social convention on the other. As languages grow into civilization, they become an increasingly useless and useless element for the expression of that spiritual which the artistic poet must really seek. Therefore the poet must - going beyond the prose content - lead language back, so to speak, through rhythm, rhyme, through harmonies, through meter, through the musical or imaginative thematic, to that element in which man makes himself tonally or phonetically the revealer of a spiritual and can thereby really raise this tonal or phonetic into the spiritual-artistic.

Because eurythmy, through its special nature of expressing itself through movement, works elementally and naturally out of the element of will in the human being, it is precisely through eurythmy that the actual artistic nature of both music and poetry can be brought out of the human being. And that which the poet already strives for - I would like to say in an invisible eurythmy - can be made visible through the human movements that occur in eurythmy. One can create an accompaniment to any musical element in eurythmy, in which case a kind of visible singing is performed; one can sing in eurythmy just as one can sing audibly. The poetic can also be represented in eurythmy; then what appears on stage as eurythmy before the audience must be accompanied by recitation or declamation or poetry. In an inartistic age there will be little understanding for what is necessary to accompany recitation and declamation in eurythmy art. And today is such an inartistic age.

It is hard to understand today what Goethe meant when he himself rehearsed his iambic dramas with baton in hand like a conductor with his actors. He was not looking at the prose content. He looked at the artistic shaping of the iamb. Or it is difficult to understand how Schiller, especially in his most important poems, did not initially have the literal prose content in his mind, but a melodious theme, and that he only [later] took up the literal prose content, so to speak. In an inartistic age, such as the present one, where the significance of declamation and recitation is seen in the fact that it is precisely the prose content that is emphasized, that what lies behind the prose content as rhythm, rhyme, harmony, musical and imaginative themes is made to disappear as far as possible, in such an age there will be little understanding of the forms that recitation and declamation must take so that they can appear simultaneously with the eurythmic.

But the artistic person must take precisely the forms that recitation and declamation must take so that they can appear simultaneously with the eurythmic.

But the artistic person must understand precisely how a secret eurythmy is already sought in real poetry and how this secret, invisible eurythmy can reveal itself in the visible language in which it appears here. Again and again I must say before such mental images that we ask the audience for indulgence for the reason that we know exactly how this eurythmy is still at the beginning of its development.

But those who immerse themselves in its actual essence can also know that it has unlimited potential for development. For why? When Goethe says: “To whom nature begins to reveal its open secret, he feels the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter, art”, it may perhaps be added, justifying eurythmy: "To whom the human being itself begins to reveal its secret in its design and movement, he feels the deepest longing to reveal visibly to the eye that which lies within this human form in terms of movement possibilities, in terms of eurythmic possibilities.

When Goethe says in another passage: "When man is placed on the summit of nature, he again sees himself as a whole nature, takes order, harmony, measure and meaning together in order to raise himself to the production of the work of art, one may again say, with regard to eurythmy: This eurythmy does not make use of an external tool, but of man himself, and all the secrets of the world really lie hidden in man. If you draw them out of him, the revelation of these secrets of humanity, these microcosmic secrets, is a revelation of the macrocosmic secrets.

Eurythmy uses the human being himself as its tool, takes order, harmony, measure and meaning from the essence of the human being and presents the human being himself as a work of art. In undertaking this, it must have unlimited possibilities for development. For if man himself is taken as a tool for artistic representation, then this is in any case the most worthy artistic tool.

And so we may hope that from the will of eurythmy, which is still in its infancy today, artistic revelations will emerge - perhaps still to some extent through us, but probably only through others - which will be able to place eurythmy as a fully justified younger art alongside its fully justified older sister arts.