The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 16 October 1921, Dornach

52. Eurythmy Performance

The eurythmy performance, which took place in its entirety in the domed room of the Goetheanum, was part of the so-called “Swiss Speakers' Course” (GA 339) from October 11-16, 1921.

“The Fairy Tale of the Miracle of the Source” from “The Testing of the Soul” by R. Steiner with music by Walter Abendroth
“Rondeau” by Charles d'Orleans
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (26) by Rudolf Steiner
“Highest star” by Friedrich Nietzsche
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (27) by Rudolf Steiner
Evoe
“True Love” (sonnet 78) by William Shakespeare
“Butterfly” by Edward Grieg
Prelude “Schicksalsfrage” with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Vereinsamt” by Friedrich Nietzsche
“Throw your heavy things” by Friedrich Nietzsche
“To sing on the water” by Franz Schubert
Sylph and gnome scene from the 2nd picture of “Der Seelen Erwachen” by R. Steiner with musical introduction by Max Schuurman

My dear audience!

Please allow me - as always before these eurythmic experiments - to introduce the performance with a few words. I am not doing this to explain the mental image as such. To want to explain the artistic is itself inartistic, for the truly artistic must speak for itself in the immediate contemplation. Only here is an attempt being made, from artistic sources that are still unfamiliar today and with equally unfamiliar artistic means of an artistic formal language. And I may take the liberty of saying a few words about the latter two in advance.

You will see, ladies and gentlemen, people in motion on the stage, groups of people in motion, either in motion or in space. At first glance, this all seems to be a kind of gesture art. But anyone who takes it as the art of gesture would be making a possible misunderstanding. Nothing pantomimic, mimic or even dance-like in the usual sense is to be given in eurythmy, but something that is based on a real, visible language that is drawn out of the entire human organization just as lawfully as spoken language or singing itself.

If one wants to arrive at these eurythmic forms of expression, then one must carefully recognize through sensory-supersensory observation - to use Goethe's expression - which tendencies of movement are present when the human being produces the sound of speech or also the tone in music. I say explicitly: tendencies of movement. I am not referring to that which then passes into the air, produces air vibrations, approaches the higher human being in order to convey the tone or the sound, but rather to that which comes out of the whole human being as a tendency of movement, which comes to rest, so to speak, in the larynx and its neighboring organs, and only then translates itself into the small movements, into the air vibrations. Because speech actually comes out of the whole person. The whole person is involved in speech.

And one can perhaps form a mental image of eurythmy in the following way. Imagine a person listening. Basically, the speech, the word, the song affects the listener in such a way that it takes hold of him completely. The listener remains calm, but one could say that something is constantly taking place in him that he should actually keep calm. He wants to accompany what he hears with his gestures and movements - especially his arms and hands. And the inner movement that takes place when listening to the phonetic or vocal sounds is largely based on the fact that certain movements that are actually unconsciously desired are stopped.

These movements are also stopped, brought to rest, when a person speaks or sings - in other words, when vibrations are evoked. They can be studied through sensory-supersensory observation, these inner movements, and can be used to put people themselves or groups of people into such movements: Then you have eurythmy. You don't have the usual gestures, you don't have mimicry, but what you have is the movement of the most expressive organs of the human being - the arms, the hands - which is also a linguistic or vocal expression of what is going on in the soul of the human being, just like language and singing itself.

One sees a language or one hears that which is sung through movement in that which is presented eurythmically. Therefore, eurythmy can be performed as a parallel phenomenon to recitation or declamation, or it can also be eurythmized to music. One can sing through these movements just as one can sing through sound. But it is indeed the case that it is precisely through this eurythmically visible language that the deeper underpinnings of a poem are fully expressed. The fully human is expressed, whereas only a partial human can really reveal itself through the sound or through the sound.

The way in which recitation and declamation must accompany the eurythmic shows how one must pass from the literally prosaic, which poetry must use as a means, to the actual artistic aspect of poetry, to the rhythmic design, to the sound image, the sound imagination, the music-like theme, which lies in the rhythm, in the beat, in the verse design of a poem.

Today, the understanding of recitation or declamation is by no means correct. Greater value is placed on so-called reciters or declamators who succeed in overcoming the inner, linguistically structured structure of a poem and emphasizing the prose content, the literal content. It is perceived as very internal. That is something that must be characteristic of an inartistic age. But we must return to the artistic concept of recitation and declamation. It would be impossible to accompany the eurythmics, which bring out and reveal the subtexts of a poem, as prosaically as is popular today.

In declamation and recitation, too, the main emphasis must be placed on the shaping of the language, on the formation and shaping of the sound image, on the music-like theme in the poem. Recitation and declamation will therefore be able to experience a new fertilization in eurythmy. One will again learn to understand what the artistic quality of a poem is based on; one will again understand why Schiller, for example, always had a musical theme weaving in his soul in his most important poems - without words - and why he only later strung the literal words onto the musical theme, so to speak. One will understand again why Goethe himself rehearsed his jambendramas like a conductor with a baton. An inartistic age believes such things to be something antiquated. It is precisely what is truly artistic.

And if one penetrates into that which underlies a poem from the law, then one will find that one should not reject something like the visible language of eurythmy, but on the contrary should accept it as the possibility of an expansion of the fields of art. This must be said if, for example, it is objected that it is something artificial or the like. In eurythmy, those who really have an open heart and healthy senses for the artistic should enjoy it, not reject any expansion of our artistic fields.

And what comes into consideration above all is that, as soon as one moves into the dramatic, those scenes which deal with, let us say, some scenes in Goethe's second part of Faust, which in turn overcome scenic relationships, which are thus conceived in a naturalistic way, that one simply has to arrive at a certain style, that one cannot simply represent through naturalistic gestures that which is given by the poet. It is precisely where the supernatural is inserted into the course of the scene that you can see how eurythmy offers something that allows you to get away from that from which the poet also wants to get away in such cases: from that which can be exhausted merely in naturalistic renditions.

In my experiments, a few of which will also be presented eurythmically today, you will see how, when the aim is to portray connections between the human soul and the supernatural, how, as is the case with my “Mystery Dramas”, the poetry itself can already be conceived eurythmically, eurythmically to a certain extent, and how, if this is the case, eurythmy then arises as a natural means of stage expression. This will be demonstrated today in particular in some rehearsals.

Well, that is above all the artistic side of eurythmy. Eurythmy also has two other sides. There is one that I would like to mention briefly: it is the medical, hygienic-therapeutic side. Because the eurythmic movements are taken from the organization of the human being, it is possible to shape the movements in a different way than they are shaped here today in a purely artistic way. They can be extracted from the human being in such a way that they have a healthy effect, that they transform something unhealthy in the human organization into something healthy. I just want to mention that. An attempt is already underway. An attempt has been made to develop a kind of eurythmy therapy.

A third element is the pedagogical-didactic. In the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which is run by me, we have a kind of inspired, spiritualized gymnastics, which is included in the lessons as a compulsory subject. You can see how, if it is done correctly, the children grow into this eurythmy, this visible language, from the first year of primary school through all classes with the same naturalness as the child grows into the natural spoken language. The child grows into it with devotion and joy and feels what it is supposed to perform in these movements as something that belongs to the natural longing for movement of the human organism, feels a natural harmony between the sound and the tone and that which is brought out of the human organization as a whole, especially through the most expressive element in the human being - through arms and hands. One can also see how that which our time will very much need in the next generation - the development of the initiative of the will, the initiative of the soul - can be quite advantageously brought out through eurythmy in quite a different way from mere [gymnastics, which] is regulated according to [physiological] laws. This, too, has already been shown essentially in the use of eurythmy as a compulsory subject in the Stuttgart Waldorf School.

Now, apart from these other aspects of eurythmy, eurythmy is an art that draws on such formal languages and artistic sources, and it has the peculiarity that it makes the whole human being with his organization, the whole human being with his inner lawfulness its tool. It is not an external tool that is used, but the human being himself. And if it has been felt from a deep right throughout the ages that man is actually a small world, a microcosm, in which everything is contained in a certain way that occurs in the great world, in the macrocosm, then one can also assume that, if this eurythmy is further developed, it must represent something particularly artistic precisely because one uses oneself in this small world of the macrocosm [microcosm?] as a tool, not external tools. One may therefore perhaps say: if Goethe calls art a revelation of secret natural laws that would never be revealed without it, then secret world laws must reveal themselves artistically in a special way when the inner, organic secrets of man are artistically presented before the eye, before the sentient human being.

Now, of course, I must always say that we are only at the beginning with this eurythmy. But those who immerse themselves in what eurythmy actually wants can already feel today how, in the course of development, something will really be given that is a kind of special art in that the human being appears as an instrument. One can say - entirely in the Goethean sense - that a kind of summary of the artistic, albeit initially for the eye, but accompanied by other arts, also for the ear, can certainly enter into our civilization and spiritual development. It is in the true Goethean sense, this eurythmizing, when Goethe says: "When man is placed on the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which again has to bring forth a summit in itself; to this end he raises himself by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, calling upon choice, order, harmony and meaning and finally raising himself to the production of the work of art, to the creation of the work of art. And man rises especially to the creation of the work of art when he takes measure, harmony, order and meaning not from external nature, but from the law of his own being and [when he] tries to conjure up the artistic aspect of the world before the soul through that which his own being can produce from within himself.

We can therefore believe, because this art of eurythmy wants to flow out of the fully human, that - even if today, because it is in its infancy, we must still ask the spectators and listeners to apologize for the eurythmic images - that this art of eurythmy, if it is further developed, will one day be able to place itself as a fully entitled younger art alongside the older fully entitled arts.