The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 23 October 1921, Dornach

53. Eurythmy Performance

The eurythmy performance took place in the domed room of the Goetheanum.

“Encounter” by C. F. Meyer
Doppelganger scene from the 4th picture from “Der Seelen Erwachen” by R. Steiner
“Rondeau” by Charles d'Orleans
“To sing on the water” by Franz Schubert
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (28) by Rudolf Steiner
“True Love” (sonnet 78) by William Shakespeare
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (29) by Rudolf Steiner
Evoe
“Artémis” by Jose-Maria de Heredia
“Beherzigung” by J. W. v. Goethe
Music by Anton Bruckner
Scene with Luciferian and Ahrimanic beings from the 6th picture of “The Guardian of the Threshold” by R. Steiner
“Vereinsamt” from Friedrich Nietzsche
Prelude “Schicksalsfrage” with music by Leopold van der Pals

My dear guests!

Please allow me - as always with these eurythmic experiments - to introduce the mental image with a few words. This is not to explain the mental image as such. Artistic things must work through themselves in the immediate impression, and an explanation of an artistic mental image would itself be something quite unartistic. But this eurythmic performance of ours is of such a nature that it draws on hitherto unfamiliar artistic sources and makes use of an equally unfamiliar artistic formal language. And I would like to say a few words about these artistic sources and the artistic language of form.

You will see, ladies and gentlemen, movements, movements of the individual, movements of groups of people in space and the like, sound pieces in particular, representing finished poetry. This can be achieved by eurythmy really striving for a true visible language or a real visible singing, if I may put it that way. It is not to be brought about by striving for arbitrary gestures or subjective mimicry or pantomimicry or the like, but rather, as I said, that a true, visible language should actually be revealed.

When a person speaks, his sounds, his revealing of himself is in spoken language, and when he sings, in music, his revealing of himself through sounds is something that calculates certain movements, movement intentions, not just of speech and the vocal organs, but of the whole person. And it is quite possible to study - to use Goethe's expression: through sensual-supersensory observation - what kind of movement intentions I mean. Please note that I am not saying: movements, but intentions of movement, which underlie what then appears as speech or song. These intentions of movement do not take the form of gestures or anything else. That which is expressed in the mimic arts, that which is expressed in the art of dance, is something quite different from what our eurythmy strives for and should not be confused with it.

What is meant here are the movements of the whole human being, which are actually suppressed - even as they arise - and which can be studied through the sensory-supersensory. So that what otherwise comes to a standstill in the human being in terms of movement intentions and what is transformed into the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs when speaking or singing, which is then transferred to the lungs, that is what is now being studied. And this can be transferred to the whole person, to groups of people, according to the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. So that what actually lives as something artistic in a piece of music or poetry can only be fully revealed through these movements, movements in the human being.

However, this will only be understood by those who do not look for the main thing in a poem, for example, in the literal content - which is actually the prose content of the poem - but who look for what is actually artistic in a poem in the shaping of the language, in rhythm and in the musical theme, in the pictorial, imaginative shaping of the phonetic or the tonal. All of this can actually be transformed into forms of movement. And then, I would like to say, the real secret of creating out of the poet or [out of] the sound artist appears to us in such a visible language, which in turn must first be treated artistically, when it appears as in eurythmic images, it appears before our eyes in a poetic visible?

Anyone who truly enjoys art will not reject the idea that the artistic field should be expanded through a new language of forms from such sources. For those who really enjoy art must also enjoy every expansion of the artistic field. But we will have to see, for example, how this can actually give us a feeling that, I would like to say, has actually been lost since time immemorial. Everything that man has in language as vocalization is actually based on the fact that man feels an impression that he receives from outside to be continued within himself and that he tries to dampen it in the vowel in order to live with the impression he receives. That which can be revealed in the experience and in the experience of vocalism can be expressed quite adequately in forms of movement. - Everything consonant is actually based on the fact that man tries to come to an understanding of processes or things in the outside world by imitating, through his own movements, what happens in these things. And the translation of the movements that he actually wants to produce into sound then appears in the consonant.

So the whole of language, by really trying to understand its innermost secrets, can be translated into forms of human movement, into groups of people. And the fact that something inwardly poetic and musical does indeed come to light can be seen from the fact that recitation and declamation, of which you will know that it runs parallel to what wants to be revealed in visible language through eurythmy, must in turn be led back to its artistic forms, which were more present in earlier times than they are now.

Today, great value is placed on prosaic pointing in declamation and recitation. This testifies to the fact that we actually live in an inartistic age. Goethe himself rehearsed his jambendramas with his actors using a baton - like a bandmaster. And Schiller, before he had the literal content of his more significant poems, always had an indeterminate melodic motif living in his soul, to which he strung, as it were, the literal content of his poetry. It is precisely that which lies further back that must be brought out through eurythmy. But even in the declamation and recitation, if they are to be truly artistic, pure eurythmy must actually come to light. Rather than penetrating the literal content of the prose, the focus must be on shaping the rhythm, the beat, the musical and imaginative motif. And only when we return in this way to that which constitutes the artistic aspect of poetry will we be able to fully appreciate the correct interaction between declamation and recitation and eurythmy.

It should also be remembered that in the more primitive stages of human culture, in which language had not yet adapted to the conventional requirements of social interaction or to scientific, intellectual expression, in those times when language expressed the inner human experience in a more direct and elementary way, then - especially when something was to be presented artistically by priestly art - speech and song were always accompanied by movement. Prehistoric languages even always had a certain word for performing movements and for speaking or singing, a common word. A deep relationship between language and movement should in turn be revealed through eurythmy.

The experience is that eurythmy can also be used particularly well in drama when the drama has to stand out from the depiction of purely naturalistic scenes, when - as is the case in Goethe's “Faust”, for example - one is led up from the depiction of purely naturalistic processes into human inner experience, inner experience, i.e. when one is led over into the supersensible experience of man and this supersensible experience is not to be lived out on stage allegorically or symbolically, but through real, dramatic creative power.

In this respect, a scene from my “Mystery Dramas” is presented today as the second number, a scene that is certainly attempted in such a way that human inner experience is represented through figures - and not symbolically or allegorically, but through figures. It is precisely in the representation of such scenes that one experiences how completely different the stylization is when eurythmy is used than when one merely wants to stylize in a naturalistic way through gestures.

The scene that will be performed will initially show a main character from my Mysteries performance on stage: Johannes Thomasius. Johannes Thomasius, however, experiences a large number of inner soul processes and the elevation of man on the one hand to the spiritual worlds, and on the other hand to that which works forward inwardly through man himself by making this or that of his experiences in life. The scene that will be presented here expresses how John - it is a small scene from a larger mystery drama - how John at a certain moment actually no longer finds his way in relation to his experiences. He has established deep human relationships with personalities such as that of Capesius, a man striving out of science towards general spiritual knowledge, with a man like Strader, who strives towards a more practical life, but struggles with all the riddles of life. He then established and developed relationships with a personality like Mary, who had a deep impact on his life, and finally with a wise man who appears in the drama as Benedictus.

There is such a wealth of things he can experience that Johannes Thomasius has reached a stage in his life where he asks himself in the face of this wealth of experiences, one might say: What is it actually like with this inner world, what is it like with this spiritual world?

Then something like a kind of double appears before him as a manifestation of his self-knowledge, his self-perception. This double stands opposite Johannes Thomasius to bring him to his senses, so to speak. Johannes no longer knows how he should actually understand his relationship to Mary, to Benedictus, to Capesius, to Strader. Above all, the doppelganger draws his attention to this: "You must recognize yourself in all your depths, you must be clear about the fact that you no longer have your own youth before your soul. I will show you the spirit of your own youth. That which you went through as a very young person must once again be in front of your soul, because in reality it lives in the subconscious depths of your soul. Only if you bring it up there will it be yours again; otherwise it will remain in the unknown, which is in the unknown subconscious. And you will get on in life after you have experienced everything that has just come to you in your dealings with other people who have also been through depths."

So we see how the doppelganger demonstrates the spirit of John's youth, how John comes more and more to himself, but how at the point where John is able to live into the inner world, how he must be confronted by that which can be shaped in such a way that it looks like a kind of guardian before the spiritual world. The world of the human soul is just as rich as the outer world can be, but the human being can give himself over to deceptions. Self-love, illusions, fantasy - all sorts of things confront man when he is to get to know his own inner life.

Therefore, those who are not yet fully mature enough for such introspection are held back by certain inner forces. These are represented by two figures: Under the figure of the Guardian of the Threshold, then Ahriman appears, the figure that is absolutely predisposed in every human being, if man had no heart at all, if he had only powers of understanding, hallucinations that prevent him from taking in the world inwardly with his heart - then man would tend more and more to that which shows itself here in a one-sided way [and] appears in the Ahriman figure. This Ahriman therefore makes fun of the reverent way in which the Guardian of the Threshold draws John's attention to all the dangers that lurk in illusions, in fantasy, in false mysticism and so on, if one really wants to look into one's inner self independently. Only by being prepared in this way can those personalities reappear to him at the end of the scene who have intervened deep inside him: Mary and Benedict, who now appear before him like a thought, but who are definitely real figures in the other, in the overall dramas, [which] now, however, only after Johannes Thomasius has prepared himself to look at himself by looking at the conversation with the doppelganger, which now rise fleetingly before his soul as thoughts at the end, so that he can really now grasp himself, that he can now grasp the whole weaving of his soul again in full prudence.

So, apart from Johannes Thomasius, we have all these figures on stage in this scene who relate to the supernatural. And there you can see, I would like to say, how everything is aimed at stylizing in the same way that this true language of movement, the visible language of eurythmy, allows you to stylize.

With this, ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to hint a little at the artistic side of eurythmy. There are two other sides to eurythmy, which I will only briefly mention. It has a hygienic-therapeutic side, which is already being developed. It has emerged from eurythmy, based on the inner laws of human organization, just as language itself can be. These movements, of course, do not appear as they do here, artistically, but in a completely different way. They can also be shaped in such a way that they can be applied to people as healthy movements, so that there can certainly be a healing connection.

The third aspect, the pedagogical-didactic side of eurythmy, has already been introduced at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart as a compulsory subject alongside gymnastics. And it is fair to say that when this eurythmy is introduced to the children, they perceive eurythmy as something natural, as something that emerges from the whole person, from the first to the last grade. When children are introduced to eurythmy, they take to it as a matter of course, just as they take to language as a matter of course when they are younger. You can see from the way the children perform eurythmy with inner enthusiasm and deep love and how it educates the body and the mind - not just the body, but also the mind - how this eurythmy is actually drawn from the whole, full human being.

Here we will have to deal with the artistic side of eurythmy. As always at the beginning of a mental image, I must ask the audience for their indulgence. We are still very much at the beginning, but we ourselves are our most severe critics and know very well that what we can offer today is only at the beginning of its development. But it is something that will certainly, as it is developed further, be given a form - precisely because this eurythmy makes use of its tool; not an external tool, but the human being himself with all his inner organic lawfulness.

If one considers that man has within himself the laws of the whole world, that he really is a microcosm, then what Goethe says about man's relationship to art can be applied to eurythmy in a special sense in our time, in the fullest sense of the word. Goethe said: "When man is placed on the summit of nature, he in turn brings forth a summit in himself, takes harmony, measure and meaning together and raises himself to the production of the work of art. When man from himself, from his microcosm, which actually represents the whole world, brings together order, measure, harmony and meaning, makes himself the instrument, the means of expression, the means of revelation of that which is contained in poetry and music, then something quite great must come about through this most living and animated of means of expression, which today must still be expressed imperfectly in the beginning, but which in its perfection will one day be able to place itself as a fully authorized art alongside the other fully authorized sister arts.