The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 2 April 1922, Dornach

Address on Eurythmy

The performance took place in the temporary hall of the carpentry workshop.

“Hymn to Nature” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Lebenszauber” (Magic of Life) by Edward Grieg
“An eine Rose” (To a Rose) by Albert Steffen
Chorale by J.S. Bach
“Wie die Blumen im Garten stehen” (How the Flowers Stand in the Garden) by Albert Steffen
Sacred song by J. S. Bach
“Kophtisches Lied” (Coptic Song) by J. W. v. Goethe
8th scene (Ahriman's realm) from “The Guardian of the Threshold” by R. Steiner
“From the House to the Garden” by Albert Steffen
“Norwegian Folk Tune” by Edward Grieg
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Moon”; “Vice Versa”; ‘Mopsenleben’; “Hedgehog and Agel”; “The Vulture Lamb”
‘Melody’ by Volkmann
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Air”; “The Gramophone”
“Rural Song” by Robert Schumann
“The Horse” by Christian Morgenstern

Ladies and gentlemen!

One should not really give any further explanations about artistic performances. If I do so here before our eurythmy performance, it is particularly because this eurythmy involves a special artistic form of expression that is still unfamiliar today, and because it draws on artistic sources that are still unfamiliar today. And I would like to take the liberty of saying a few words about these artistic sources and artistic forms.

On stage, you will see moving individuals or groups of people. It is therefore very easy to confuse what is being performed with some kind of mimicry, pantomime, dance, or the like. However, eurythmy does not aim to be any of these things; rather, the movements performed by individuals, the movements of groups of people, and the positions of people in relation to each other in groups constitute a truly visible language, which of course must first be artistically shaped, just as spoken language is in poetry, for example.

This visible language came about through careful observation, through sensory-supersensory vision—if I may use Goethe's expression—of the movements that the human organism wants to perform when it expresses itself in spoken language or song. I say explicitly: which movements the human organism wants to perform — because it does not actually perform them. These movements cease as soon as they arise. Through our soul, we actually always want to be in motion when we speak. We actually always want to perform movements when someone speaks to us or when we are faced with singing or music in general.

Please do not misunderstand me: this is not a matter of conscious will, but rather that we experience through our entire human organism that which is expressed through spoken language or singing. If we observe what is already transforming in the throat movements, in the movements of the other speech organs, in the air movements that then make the song or the word audible, if we can observe that, then we can reveal what is otherwise revealed in spoken language or in musical tone through the whole human being. And in this way, eurythmy emerges as a visible language.

Just as in spoken language each individual sound is drawn from the laws, from the mysteries of the human organism, so too must each individual movement of eurythmy be drawn from the most intimate knowledge of the human organism. And this is the basis of what eurythmy is in relation to the actual artistic performance that it then brings about. What I have discussed about eurythmy is not yet the artistic aspect; but the artistic aspect cannot be discussed in words.

Those who have a plastic work of art before them do not need to know the inner anatomical and physiological laws of the human organism in order to find a work of visual art beautiful. Nor is it necessary to know how the individual sound is expressed in each eurythmic movement if one wants to judge what is brought to bear through eurythmy. Nor is it necessary to know what movements the larynx undergoes during speech in order to understand speech or even to comprehend what the artist or poet makes of it in its beautiful revelation. But precisely in order to elicit understanding of what underlies eurythmic expression, it must be pointed out that this is a truly visible language.

Therefore, it is not important to interpret the individual movements as gestures. Nor is it important to judge what appears before the viewer's eyes in eurythmic movement in the same way as one judges the mimetic art of acting. For the movements performed here in eurythmy are essentially different from the naturalistic, mimetic movements of acting. Eurythmy in the narrower sense has nothing to do with any of these related arts. It is something entirely unique. And we can see this when we consider the following.

When we express ourselves musically, we bring to light, in a certain sense, the spirit that lives in human feelings. Human feelings, in their ebb and flow in the life of the soul, have a certain spiritual basis. This spiritual basis is expressed and represented in the melody, rhythm, beat, and so on of music. Another area of human soul life is the life of imagination. What we imagine and what is clothed in words is revealed by the poet according to his spirit, so that poetry presents the spiritual basis of the human speech organism and imagination organism.

But then, in addition to feeling and imagining, we have another relationship between human beings and the world: perception itself. When we confront our senses with the outside world, we first perceive, because we perceive the outside world in general. But the whole outside world contains spirit. If, just as we express the spirit of feeling through music and the spirit of imagination through poetry, we want to express the spirit of perception in sensory perception, we can only do so through the overall movement of the human form. And this is precisely what happens through eurythmy.

Those who take pleasure in the expansion of the arts will therefore not be able to resist the expansion of our arts that is intended in eurythmy. But for this very reason, eurythmy should not be understood as a mimic art, like pantomime, in which what is being represented is interpreted through words, poetry, and the like, through recitation accompanying the performance. Rather, just as in music we see the artistic in the sequence and harmony of tones, so here we must seek the artistic in the harmony and sequence of tones and in the creative possibilities of movements and tones. So I would also like to regard eurythmy as a movement art, a movement music, existing in space.

Only then, if one understands it in this way, will one have the right understanding of eurythmy. But in this way, by going beyond the usual naturalistic mimicry, beyond mere gestures, one arrives at a lawful art of movement, just as speech itself is something lawful, emerging from this or that, and in this way one arrives at a higher stylization.

Of course, it is also possible to stylize in the performing arts, going beyond the naturalistic. This then leads very easily to a kind of stage sculpture. One allows the individual sculptural formations to be presented. But eurythmy is not sculpture; rather, in contrast to sculpture, which represents the human organism at rest, eurythmy is the art that represents the human organism in its movement, that brings out the possibilities of movement from the human being through art, just as nature brings out spoken language from the human organism.

The fact that this really penetrates into the realm that also corresponds to language is evident from the way in which recitation or declamation must accompany eurythmy. For in eurythmy one can express music—you will see that today—and one can also express poetry through eurythmy. Just as one can sing to anything musical in a eurythmic way — that is, sing through the art of movement, just as one can sing through sounds — so too is eurythmy the representation of poetry, and it can be accompanied by recitation and declamation.

Recitation, which was more common among the Greeks, and declamation, which is more Germanic, must take on completely different forms when they are used to accompany eurythmy, than is popular today. Today, in a somewhat unartistic age, people love to emphasize the prose content of poetry. For the real poet, it is not the prose content of a poem that matters, but the form, the melody, or even the imaginative imagery of the language. Schiller worked more musically, Goethe more pictorially. So that with Goethe one is always referred to imagination, with Schiller one is always referred to the indefinite melody that he always had in his soul before he captured the words of the poem in the eye of his soul. So recitation and declamation, if they are to accompany eurythmy, must also go back to what is hidden within them: they must take into account the rhythmic, the melodic, the pictorial, the painterly. This is something that is not popular today, but was common in more artistic ages than our own. One need only remember how Goethe himself rehearsed his iambic dramas with his actors using a baton, focusing not so much on the prose content as on the artistic form expressed through the verses.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I have to say about the artistic nature of eurythmy. One can see how this artistry can be applied in a higher stylization on stage when presenting lyrical, epic, or dramatic works. That goes without saying, I would like to add. For this can be expressed just as well through this visible language as through the spoken word. But one gains a true understanding of eurythmy when one has to portray the dramatic, that through which the human being connects his soul with the outside world. We have tried various things in this direction, using eurythmy in different scenes from Faust – where the purely earthly gives way to the supernatural, the supersensible.

Today we will only be able to present one scene from my Mystery Dramas, but it is one in which the supersensible realm is to be portrayed. In this one scene you will see the chapter from my Mystery Drama The Guardian of the Threshold that we will attempt to portray: the twelve soul forces. This is not meant to be allegorical or symbolic, because everything allegorical or symbolic is actually inartistic. The aim is to depict spiritual figures, namely human souls, in the same way that one would otherwise depict physical human beings in the sensory world or imagine beings of the natural order. Human souls should be depicted in a thoroughly realistic manner, souls that are asleep and dreaming of what they have learned mystically. And so what is depicted here in the twelve nuances is mysticism, but learned, unnatural mysticism, second-hand, so to speak, mysticism that has not been properly understood.

Then these twelve souls are confronted by the entity I call Ahriman. Ahriman is the sum of all the forces that are always at work in human beings, pulling them down into philistinism, pedantry, materialism, and intellectualism, turning them into ironists, mockers, and doubters. All this appears in Ahriman, in concrete form, not in allegory or symbolism.

And Ahriman mocks in many different ways. But he mocks in the right way! He judges these twelve mystical souls, who parrot their learned mysticism in a sleepwalking manner, quite correctly. One should see from this that opponents have no need to mock what appears here as anthroposophy. For we ourselves can mock the excesses of anthroposophy. And it is precisely in this scene of my “Mystery Drama” that what can be put forward as a mockery of their excesses of mysticism and the like is to be depicted. Such a scene should be taken into account, especially if opponents believe that those who practice anthroposophy here do not already know very well what can be objected to when one takes the standpoint of the mocker, the doubter, and when one is dealing with what is a kind of fanatical parroting of a completely correct mysticism, but a mysticism that comes from the sleeping soul. Such things do come into play from time to time.

One can only stylize such things if one is able to use a language for these scenes such as the visible language of eurythmy. That is about the artistic aspect.

Eurythmy has two other aspects: a medical-hygienic-therapeutic aspect, which is also taught here. Since eurythmy is derived entirely from the healthy human organism, the movements that you will see here as artistic cannot also be the content of therapeutic eurythmy. They are then transformed. But they can certainly be developed so that they can be used in the hygienic-therapeutic aspect.

The third aspect of eurythmy is the pedagogical-didactic aspect. In the Waldorf school founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and directed by me, eurythmy has already been introduced as a compulsory subject from the lowest elementary school class to the highest. And one can see how education and teaching are promoted by this, I would say, spiritual gymnastics, which is added to the usual physical gymnastics.

Physical exercise trains only the body. This soul-spiritual exercise — for that is what eurythmy is when used pedagogically and didactically — trains above all the initiative of the will, the will energy of the human being. But one can also see from the natural way in which children find their way into eurythmy, when it is done correctly, that eurythmy brings out what is healthy in healthy people. Just as the small child gradually becomes immersed in language with an inner satisfaction, so the older child becomes immersed in eurythmy, in the eurythmic element, with an inner satisfaction.

Ladies and gentlemen, I must ask for your indulgence before every performance of this kind, because we are still in the early stages of our eurythmic art. We are our own harshest critics and know that we are still in the early stages of our eurythmic development. But eurythmy makes use of the tool that must actually be the most perfect of all: the human being itself.

When Goethe says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as the whole of nature, which must once more produce a summit within itself. And to this end he elevates himself by imbuing himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking harmony, order, and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art—[it is truly so:] Man truly takes measure, harmony, and meaning from all beings and from his surroundings and forms a work of art from them! If Goethe arrives at such a statement from his truly lively view of art, then such a statement may be continued, and it may be said: The highest artistry must actually intervene when measure, harmony, order, and meaning are taken from one's own human organization. For human beings are a small world, a microcosm, and as a microcosm, as a small world, they carry within themselves all the secrets of the great world. Therefore, the most eminent artistic expression must come to fruition once eurythmy, which today can only be a weak beginning, has reached perfection.

Even though we know that eurythmy can only come into being in a very imperfect form today, we are convinced that it has unlimited potential for development and that, precisely because it does not use an instrument like the other arts, but the most perfect instrument that can be had—the human being itself— it must one day be able to stand alongside its fully-fledged older sister arts as a fully-fledged younger art form.