The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 7 December 1921, Dornach

Address on Eurythmy

The Goetheanum Eurythmy Group traveled from Berlin to performances in Bremen (December 11) and Stuttgart (December 13 and 14, 1921), while Rudolf Steiner returned to Dornach.

“Olaf Åsteson” with music by Jan Stuten
“Elfe” by Joseph von Eichendorff with music by Max Schuurman
“Sommerbild” by Friedrich Hebbel “Abendgefühl” by Friedrich Hebbel
“Aus Ruhm und Ewigkeit” by Friedrich Nietzsche ‘Tonbild’ by Edward Grieg
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “Bim Bam Bum”; “Die Behörde”; “Das Geierlamm”
Satirical prelude
“Unter Zeiten” by Christian Morgenstern
“Der Rattenfänger” by J. W. v. Goethe

Ladies and gentlemen!

Allow me, as always, to say a few words about our eurythmic experiment. This is never done in order to explain the artistic performance as such. Art must speak for itself through its immediate perception. But what appears here as eurythmy comes from artistic sources that are still unfamiliar today and makes use of an artistic formal language that is also unfamiliar today. And a few words should be said about these artistic sources and this artistic formal language.

Ladies and gentlemen, you will see moving individuals or groups of people on stage. The movements performed are not mimetic or pantomimic; they are certainly not to be confused with any form of dance, but are intended to be a truly visible language. In order to truly achieve such a visible language, it was necessary to explore, through careful, I use Goethe's expression: sensual-supersensual observation, what the sources of human linguistic and vocal expressions are within the human organism itself.

It can be said that both language and movement originate from the whole human being, and that only that which actually takes place in the whole human being in terms of the will to move and the intention to move is then concentrated on a single group of organs, the organs of speech or singing. This elevates language to the realm of thought, and in the case of civilized languages in particular, we must be clear that language is either the expression of what lives in social interaction as convention, or of what is thought. And both of these, both that which lives only in external, social communication and thought, make language inartistic. And truly artistic poetry seeks to move away from mere content—that is, from the prosaic nature of linguistic expression—toward the musical or the pictorial. By using language, the poet shapes it pictorially, imaginatively, or musically. Goethe, for example, shaped it more pictorially and imaginatively, while Schiller shaped it more musically. Schiller always had a kind of indefinite melody for his most important poems in his soul first, and then he basically arranged the prosaic content around it.

What the poet creates is basically already a mysterious, invisible eurythmy hidden in the treatment of language. And it stems from the part that the whole human will and the whole human mind take in what is then expressed in the embodiment of thoughts through language. Eurythmy goes back to what underlies poetry, what also underlies music in terms of volitional intentions, volitional intentions, and emotional content. What is otherwise transformed into the movements of the speech and singing organs, what is then transformed into the movements of the air that convey the sound or tone, is transferred to the whole human being. Since it is a content of the soul, it is transferred as if by itself to the most animated external organs—the human arms and hands.

Anyone who believes that eurythmy should first be arranged through some kind of intellectual consideration is mistaken. It is a matter of really understanding eurythmy as a kind of language, that is, of grasping immediately in the sense of sight what immediately presents itself to the senses [- in the case of language, to the ear; here, to the sense of sight]. Only then will one truly understand what eurythmy actually is. And it is that which otherwise only occurs in metamorphosis in speech and singing, imprinted on the whole human being through eurythmy and visibly expressed.

If one wanted to describe what eurythmy means from another point of view, one could imagine the following: Consider sculpture, the art of sculpting. It depicts the resting human being, that is, the human being who is completely at rest within himself, or, in most cases, the human being who comes to rest from a movement. If one has the ability to do so, one will want to describe what is depicted in such a sculptural manner in some way using language. One will say to oneself: what a real sculpture imbued with inner life conveys is the silence of the human being. But not idle silence, rather the silence that falls upon a person after a question has been asked. Speaking in response, that is, real speaking, is something that can be transferred into the moving forms of eurythmy, just as silence, but specifically the inner silence that follows a question, can be transferred into the art of sculpture. In eurythmy, one can see, I would say, the plastic coming into motion, just as, when one understands the whole human organism, one recognizes rest as the predisposition to movement.

Anyone who truly understands the form of a human arm or hand will say to themselves: in a state of rest, such a hand or arm or other limb of the human organism is actually meaningless. The resting form already has movement within it, demands movement, and is itself only movement that has come to rest. So when one understands the entire organization internally, one can also understand the transition of this eurythmic organization into movement in one's perception — perhaps not intellectually, not abstractly, but precisely through feeling. Thus, what is presented in eurythmy actually goes to the inner aspect of something musical, because one can also eurythmize to music—you will hear or see examples of this—as well as to the visible representation of something poetic. This is what eurythmy aims at, and if you enjoy art at all, you will also be able to enjoy this expansion of the artistic realm.

Eurythmy cannot be confused with dance because the movements performed in eurythmy are not movements that humans produce solely from within themselves, but rather movements that, just as in speech, humans produce by being a part of the whole world order. So that the human being, I would say the universal human being, does not reveal his or her arbitrariness [as in] mimicry or pantomime or dance through this eurythmy. One could say that in dance, the human being actually loses himself or herself, while in eurythmy, he or she lives out as a human being in every single movement, down to the smallest details. Recitation and declamation, which must accompany eurythmy and make audible what can be seen in eurythmy, must also adapt to this. Today, in an unartistic age, people prefer to emphasize and highlight the prosaic content of a poem. However, it must be clear that what is truly artistic in poetry is the treatment of language – the rhythm, the meter, the musical or pictorial theme.

And these must now – otherwise it would be impossible to accompany eurythmy with recitation and declamation – these must now come into their own. Therefore, the art of recitation that is cultivated here in connection with eurythmy will have to return to the good old forms of recitation, which focused more on the treatment of language than on the unartistic emphasis of the content of the poem.

That is essentially what I want to say in a few words as individual guidelines about what is actually intended with eurythmy. The special stylization practiced in relation to human movements shows how eurythmy is particularly well suited to what in poetry goes beyond the immediately materialistic. And today you will see a special example of this. In the first part of the program, before the intermission, the Norwegian “Dream Song of Olaf Åsteson” will be performed.

This is a poem that has been revived after centuries of only being spoken by people who spoke the dialect. It was revived after the so-called Landmål, in which the people spoke – not in which the great poets wrote, which is a Danish-Norwegian, the Stadsmål – after this Landmål, the actual older form of the language, has been revived. We find that wherever the more popular elements are expressed in poetry, these popular elements become particularly significant when they rise to the supernatural.

This dream song depicts how a simple person experiences the spiritual world, the supernatural worlds, during the thirteen nights from Christmas to New Year's Eve. This is described in a simple, folk-like manner, so that one actually has something where the person, when portraying it, feels compelled to a certain stylization because he feels that it cannot be portrayed directly in a naturalistic way. We have become convinced that eurythmy comes into its own especially when one wants to move from the naturalistic to the supernatural. Then one also perceives the silence of the visible language of eurythmy as something that can convey knowledge from the depths of the world's mysteries. And I believe this can be felt particularly in this “Dream Song of Olaf Åsteson.”

This is the more artistic side of eurythmy. It has two other sides. [First] a medical-therapeutic one, which is now also being cultivated by our medical-therapeutic institute in Stuttgart and by the one in Dornach. There, that which can be particularly beneficial to human health or recovery is brought out of the human organism in movement—it is not quite the same, it is in many ways different from what you see here as art. But I only want to mention this here. It is precisely the healthy movements of the human organism which, when performed in the right way, can also have a healing effect.

The third aspect is the pedagogical-didactic one, which is practiced at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and directed by me. Eurythmy has been introduced as a compulsory subject for all elementary school classes alongside gymnastics, and it is indeed evident how children grow into this language, when it is properly cultivated, with the same inner satisfaction as younger children grow into ordinary spoken language. The very way in which the children feel that not only the physical is cultivated, as in gymnastics, but also the soul and spirit, without neglecting the physical, shows how eurythmy engages the whole person. Every movement is imbued with soul and spirit, which is never the case in ordinary gymnastics.

In addition, the pedagogical and didactic justification is also particularly evident in the fact that eurythmy cultivates the soul aspect of the will in children in a very special way – and that is something that the generation of today and the near future truly needs.

So what we see today as eurythmy must be viewed from three different perspectives. Here, the artistic side will be presented. As I always do before such a presentation, I ask you, my dear audience, for your indulgence, because we know — we are our own harshest critics — we know that eurythmy today is only at the beginning of its development. But we also know that eurythmy has immeasurable potential for development. It does not make use of any external tools, but rather, to a much greater extent than the mimetic arts and the dramatic arts can, it makes use of the human organism itself as its tool.

And when Goethe says that the artist takes order, measure, harmony, and meaning from the world in order to express them through the tools of his art, we can certainly hope that something artistic can be expressed when the human being—who is, after all, a microcosm, a small world, that is, who has all the secrets of the world pictorially represented in his inner processes and [which] can therefore be brought out, when man makes himself the tool for artistic representation, that is, when order, measure, harmony, and meaning are brought out of his own organization. Because we are not dealing with an external artistic tool, but with that which is revealed in the human being, the macrocosm, the whole world, we can believe that once eurythmy has been further perfected, it will be able to stand alongside the older, fully valid sister arts as a fully valid younger art form.