The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922
GA 277c — 30 October 1921, Dornach
54. Eurythmy Performance
The eurythmy performance took place in its entirety in the domed room of the Goetheanum.
Poster for the Dornach performance, October 30, 1921
My dear audience!
Please allow me, as always before these eurythmic experiments, to introduce our mental image with a few words. I must always emphasize that this is not because I want to explain the mental image as such - and to explain the artistic would itself be an unartistic beginning. The only thing that underlies our eurythmy are special artistic sources that are still more or less unfamiliar today, as well as a formal language that is still unfamiliar today, and I would like to say a few words about these.
I am not talking here about some kind of mimic or pantomimic or even dance art, but about the use of a real language, a language that has come about and, in a certain sense, is being further developed by trying to recognize through - let me use this Goethean expression - sensory-supersensory observation, which movement tendencies - I am not saying movements, but movement tendencies - assert themselves out of the human being when he sings or speaks. When a person sings or speaks, there are always certain underlying tendencies of movement - be it [in] singing or speaking - which already pass over at the moment of emergence, metamorphose into something else, into that which then transforms itself into the air intonation that conveys the tone or the sound.
These tendencies of movement can be studied in two ways: Either by going directly to observing, sensually and supersensibly, what the larynx and the other organs of speech want to perform, so to speak, and what is held in the status nascens, I would say, in the moment of formation; or else one can direct one's attention to something else. One can, as it were, hold up to oneself the person listening, the person listening to singing or speaking. He appears to such an observation as if he actually wants to perform an inner, intimate movement when listening to every sound, every tone. He does not carry it out, but the movement remains restrained, does not become reality. But the understanding of the sound or the comprehension of the tone consists precisely in the inner experience of this arrested movement. If you then take this movement out of the human being and transfer it to the movements that the individual human being can perform through his own organism or the movements that groups of people can perform, you get a visible language.
This visible language must then, of course, first be elevated to an artistic level when it is used, as we are doing here. Just as an ordinary sequence of notes or an arbitrarily uttered sentence that is not formed is not yet artistic, eurythmy as such is only art when it is elevated to the artistic. This enables us to really expand the field of art and to use the whole person or groups of people as an artistic instrument.
Whoever uses today's language, especially the language of civilization, must take into account, ladies and gentlemen, that on the one hand civilized language has already completely adapted itself to the conventional or to the worldly, and on the other hand it adapts itself to the reproduction of thought. On the one side, on the side of the conventional, as well as on the side of the reproduction of thought, language naturally develops towards the inartistic. Thought in itself is an element that kills art. All thought is inartistic. You want to pronounce the sentence as radically as possible.
But also by adapting to the social needs of language, language moves away from the actual artistic. By withdrawing from the experience of the meaning of words to the experience of sound, language can also be returned to the artistic. In fact, the true poet does this all by himself. He already brings an intimate eurythmy into the creation of language. This restrained, intimate eurythmy is simply transformed into externally visible movements, and this gives rise to what appears here as eurythmy.
The fact that we are dealing with something that emerges from the full human being, while speaking and singing only emerge from a part of the human organization, makes it possible to bring the whole, full experience of a piece of music or poetry to revelation precisely through this eurythmic language. It turns out that - as you will see, eurythmy is accompanied by music on the one hand - that one can sing just as well in eurythmy through a visible sequence of tones as one can sing through audible tones.
And on the other hand, eurythmy is accompanied by poetry. We are then compelled to return from our inartistic age to more artistic ages with regard to the art of recitation and declamation. Our age actually sees the ideal of recitation and declamation more or less in pointing, that is, in treating the prose content of the poetry, not the actual artistic basis. The prose content of the poetry - this prosaic declamation and recitation would not be possible as an accompaniment to eurythmy. It is a question of either going back, let us say in Goethe's poetry, to the imaginative element that always lives in Goethe's poetry, also the imaginative element of language, the phonetic element; or, as is the case with other poets, going back to the musical, dramatic, rhythmic, rhythmic and so on, and allowing this to be clearly communicated through recitation and declamation. And so we can hope that in relation to the latter, a recovery can actually occur by accompanying eurythmy with recitation and declamation.
It is precisely through this that man will be able to experience the sound, at least in the more original languages, the experience of the sound as such, which is particularly noticeable. This has actually been completely lost in the civilized languages. Who today still vividly feels vocalization, which is a co-experience with the world, which is an inner illumination and resounding of that which man experiences in the world? While consonanting is an imitation, a re-experiencing. This wonderful transition from vowel to consonant, from experiencing to reliving, is something that can now be expressed through the special design in this moving language of eurythmy.
Now you can see that eurythmy can also be used on stage [in drama]. We have already seen this by performing scenes from Goethe's “Faust”, namely those that rise up from the usual naturalistic drama to what is the inner experience of the human being, which is synonymous with the human being entering into a relationship with a higher spiritual world. And if one has artistic expression that is not exhausted in straw allegories or abstract symbols, but that comes to real concrete form, just as one otherwise forms external nature or external life by imitation, then one sees that one has the need for the dramatic to rise from the naturalistic to the supersensible - or let us say: the inner-experienced, if you prefer to hear it that way - that we need a stylization that is not accidentally bound to a particular individuality, but that emerges as a matter of course from the whole human being and also from the whole of art, like language or music itself.
Today we will take the liberty of presenting a scene from one of my “Mystery Dramas” as the second number in the first part. In these “Mystery Dramas” I have made the attempt - they are all four connected and it is of course a very short fragment that can be offered today - to form inner experiences, inner connections of man, which he undergoes through his inner development with the supersensible world, without allegory, without symbolism, in that spiritual, spiritual entities in supersensibly conceived figures that come on stage are actually directly spiritually seen in the same way as our external, sensual entities are seen. I may point this out in a few words, because otherwise you might not be able to understand what is actually meant.
Throughout these “mystery dramas” runs the figure of a human being who firstly develops through his own inner being and goes through various stages, but who also develops through the most varied relationships with the natural world, but also in particular with the world of other people. He grows through some of the thoughts and experiences of other people, and the experiences he goes through are attempted to be captured in forms. To those who are able to do so, they also appear in figures that are not merely ordinary symbolic or allegorical figures, but are seen in the same sensual and supersensible way that sensual life as such can be seen through the external senses.
And so Johannes Thomasius appears in this scene, having gone through much. He has arrived at the point where he is now forced into a real, deeper introspection by the surprising things that assail his soul. And so, to a certain extent, his own person confronts him in the form of a double. That which one can feel in oneself as an admonishing second person under certain conditions, but which is basically the basis for true self-knowledge and also for true introspection, confronts Johannes Thomasius. I cannot say that he retouched it (?), because a direct experience is reproduced, because those admonitions, those invitations that this doppelganger speaks can actually be experienced in a directly real way.
And here in this scene we see how Johannes Thomasius has arrived at a stage in his life in which he has, so to speak, lost his own youth. His own youth has become objectively alien to him. As a result, he does not actually have it in his consciousness. But when someone has lost something like a piece of their life, then the whole world is different for them. And so Johannes Thomasius is confronted with his double, his own self, which can be grasped at this moment and which confronts him in all kinds of situations, admonishing, teaching, but also with his own lost youth, which is, so to speak, bound to his own self, which he experiences as another. His own youth dwells with his organic self, which appears in his introspection, like a being that has taken shape.
There is therefore already an attempt to shape something of that which leads the human being into a spiritual world. That is why in this scene, apart from Johannes Thomasius himself - who of course has to be portrayed in a naturalistic way, who is not allowed to eurythmize - figures appear that can actually be characterized if one can make an organic stylization, as is possible through eurythmy - not an arbitrary stylization, but an organic stylization arising from the thing itself, from the essential nature of the thing itself - then the guardian of the threshold appears, that which is called the guardian of the threshold, that which those who venture to speak of the spiritual world perceive as standing before the ordinary consciousness, not letting it into the spiritual world.
The human being cannot, if he [does not] have the maturity through the necessary preparation, look directly into the spiritual world; that would be harmful for him. That is why it is said that there is something like a guardian before the spiritual world, again such a figure that is neither allegorical nor symbolic, that is a real experience, but which cannot be represented in the external, naturalistic sense. Then there is a figure that I always call the Ahrimanic figure in anthroposophical spiritual science, Ahriman. It is the figure that lives in every human being. If man had no heart, but only intellect, if he had no devotion, no love for the world, but only criticism - there is something of this in every human being - then he would wander through the world as such an Ahrimanic being. And that is why we see these two alien figures - the guardian who is supposed to lead people to something that seems positive or rather natural, [how that] can be experienced quite soulfully, what this guardian leads people to, [and] how that is mocked by the ahrimanic figure who distorts and caricatures everything.
And through the experiences that this Johannes Thomasius undergoes in this way, he then only becomes mature enough to get to know personalities with whom he has been in a relationship for a long time; [he becomes mature enough] to see Mary and his teacher, the Benedictus, in a new form. They appear very briefly at the end of the scene. And one should have the feeling that everything that passes through the soul of Johannes Thomasius like a light from the spiritual world makes him ready to see personalities such as Benedictus and Mary, whom he has accompanied through a large part of his life, only then in their true essence, in a new form.
It is only in these things that one notices how one needs this stylization, which is drawn from the whole of human organization, which has nothing accidental about it, but which grows out of the human being like language and song.
And that is one side of eurythmy, the artistic side. There are two other sides that I would like to mention briefly: the first is what I call the hygienic element, the hygienic-therapeutic element. All the movements that are performed in eurythmy are taken from the healthy human organization. Not the movements that you will see here - they are indeed oriented towards the artistic - but other movements that can be extracted, transformations, metamorphoses of these movements, which, when performed, also have healing effects in this area. We are in the process of developing this further - we are already developing eurythmy therapy.
A third element is the pedagogical and didactic element. Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which I directed, where eurythmy was introduced as a compulsory subject alongside gymnastics. Eurythmy is a spiritual gymnastics, whereas ordinary gymnastics is basically based only on physiology, on what one can study if one only looks at the human body. Without in any way treating the physical in a detrimental way, it must be said that what occurs in eurythmy as an animated gymnastics, if the matter is developed pedagogically and didactically, brings the child into movement, naturally brings the whole human being into movement in body, soul and spirit. Without neglecting the physical, the child is led through all school classes in such a way that it can express itself in physical movements of body, soul and spirit. Even though the Waldorf School has only been in existence for a little over two years, we can see how the children, if it is done in the right way, experience eurythmy as something natural [and] just as they learn to speak at an earlier age, so they will experience these eurythmic movements as something natural. But in particular, the initiative of the will, which is usually ignored in ordinary gymnastics, will increase, which will be very much needed by both the present and especially the next generation. The initiative of the will will be better developed through eurythmy if people are prepared for it now, at a young age, through eurythmy, this spiritualized and spiritualized gymnastics.
At the end - as always, this time too - I would like to apologize for the fact that we are still at the beginning of our eurythmy art. We are aware of this, we are our own harshest critics; nevertheless, we strive to advance eurythmy from month to month and are also convinced that eurythmy offers such opportunities for development that a perspective can open up for us for a significant artistic development - precisely through this eurythmy.
Goethe says so beautifully: "When man has reached the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which has to produce another summit in itself. To this end he raises himself by imbuing himself with all perfections and virtues, calling upon choice, harmony, order and meaning and finally rising to the production of the work of art. - If external instruments are not used, but man himself, who basically still carries the laws of the universe within him in a mysterious way, if man makes himself an instrument, if order, measure, harmony and meaning are brought out of his own organization, then something must arise through this microcosm as an artistic instrument which, if it is further developed, will undoubtedly be able to stand alongside the older, fully entitled arts as a fully entitled younger art.