The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 30 July 1922, Dornach

Eurythmy Address

The performance took place in the dome room of the Goetheanum.

Newspaper announcement of the performance

Romantic prelude with music by Max Schuurman
“The arrow and the song” by H. W. Longfellow
“Poor soul” (Sonnet 146) by William Shakespeare
“Summer Evening” by Edward Grieg
“Fairie's song: You spotted snakes” from “A Midsummer Night's Dream” by William Shakespeare
“Elf Dance” by Edward Grieg
“The Bandruidh” by Fiona Macleod
“The Fairy Tale of the Miracle Spring” from “The Trial of the Soul” by R. Steiner with music by Walter Abendroth
“Erlkönig” by J. W. v. Goethe
‘Hochländisch’ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Ariel's Song: Where the bee sucks” from “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare
“Winter: When icicles hang” from “Love's Labour's Lost” by William Shakespeare
“Amien's Song: It was a lover” from “As You Like It” by William Shakespeare
Cheerful overture with music by Leopold van der Pals
“The Violet” by J. W. v. Goethe
Minuet by L. v. Beethoven
“Clown's song: When that I was” from “Twelfth Night” by William Shakespeare

Ladies and gentlemen!

Allow me, as always, to begin our eurythmy performance with a few words. I always do this. Not in order to explain our performance—that would be unartistic; art must speak for itself in direct observation—but to show how what appears here as an attempt at eurythmic art is based on artistic means and sources that are still unfamiliar today. And I would like to precede today's eurythmy performance with a few words about these artistic means and sources.

Eurythmy should not be confused with related arts such as mime, pantomime, or dance, with which it could easily be confused, but from which it is fundamentally different. These arts, for example mime or pantomime, are concerned with expressing what immediately appears as soul content through movement. Dance is about allowing a certain soul content to flow into movement, so that satisfaction returns from this movement because it is directly related to the soul content. These arts are therefore quite different from human spoken language and also from human singing.

Human spoken language is not based on our directly expressing the contents of our soul – at most in the sounds of our feelings – but rather on our first forming, out of our own organism, the indirect, spoken language or sung tone, which then directly expresses the contents of our soul. And so the formation of language in humans has the task of first forming a possibility out of the organism, in the sequence, in the configuration, in the painting of sounds, also in the musicality of sounds, to create something through which the contents of the soul are expressed as indirectly as possible through the formation of sounds or, in singing, through the formation of tones.

Just as something is drawn out of the human organism in speech or tone formation, so it is here. The content of the soul is not directly represented or expressed through individual movements; just as in human speech, which, let us say, in the sound a creates the means to express all possible contents of the soul together with others, Eurythmy also refers to movements that do not directly express the content of the soul in a mimetic or dance-like manner, but are drawn out like sounds or tones from the human organism and only indirectly express the soul's expression in their configuration. In Eurythmy, therefore, one is definitely dealing with a visible language.

This means that what this visible language is – only when one wants to express it through a poem, when one wants to declaim or recite it visibly, so to speak, or even when one wants to sing it visibly – that what actually only contains sound formations as a moving human organism or moving group of people is treated in such a way that, just as just as meaning arises through the most diverse combinations of sounds, that this visible language is expressed through the most diverse combinations of movements only in visible speech or singing.

But this also means that a new art form has been introduced into the overall field of the arts. We can say: if, for example, the plastic arts essentially present the human being to us through a certain material in such a way that he is frozen in his movement, then this is actually the expression of human silence. If we take this as language, if we use the human being himself as an artistic tool, as in music, and thereby enable ourselves to create a moving sculpture, then we have eurythmy. Then we have the opportunity not to represent the silent, speechless human being, but to represent the speaking soul, the speaking human being, the singing human being itself.

This is how one can understand eurythmy – I would say in contrast to sculpture. One can also place it differently within the whole field of the arts. One can say: Music is a form of expression of human feelings. What emerges in the musical configuration, in the sequence, in the interaction of tones, is essentially a form of expression of the human emotional world. And what emerges from poetry is a form of expression of the human world of imagination. When we use music as an artistic means of expression, we go deep into our inner selves. We go even further out of ourselves in poetry, where we use language as the external, realized imagination; we go even further out of ourselves. For language does not arise solely from deep within the human being, like the feelings that find expression in music, but rather language arises where the human being enters into contact with the outside world and forms images of the outside world in the imagination.

But there is yet another way of going beyond oneself: this is in immediate perception, when the human being perceives in such a way that he feels what he perceives not only sensually but also spiritually. And this is essentially what must also live in the poet's creativity or in the musical composition of the poetic. So when the human being goes beyond perception — the poet must in a sense go back into the soul, using language, he must go back to the imagination. But those who look at what is actually realized in poetry see the perception and the extraction of the spirit from perception. If one now wants to shape the immediate experience of the human being in perception, then one cannot do this through language, but only through human movement itself. And that is where eurythmy comes in.

So that the musical-artistic shaping of human feeling, the poetic-artistic shaping of artistic imagination, is the eurythmic-artistic shaping of human perception itself.

But if, as we shall see here, eurythmy is accompanied by recitation or music – one can certainly sing to the music in a way that can be heard, just as one can sing through movement – if eurythmy is accompanied in this way, then we must return to the actual artistic training of artistic recitation and declamation. Not to what is particularly popular today in a somewhat inartistic age, with its emphasis on the content of the prose, but rather the necessity must simply arise from the work itself when reciting and declaiming – because one must accompany the eurythmic – [it] must take into account above all the speech formation and the musical and picturesque aspects of language, as was the case in artistically significant eras.

Goethe himself rehearsed his iambic dramas, because it was important to him not so much to emphasize the prose content as to bring out the actual poetry, which lies precisely in the speech formation. Goethe himself rehearsed his “Iphigenia” with his actors, baton in hand. And so recitation and declamation, precisely because they must be used as a linguistic art form in accompaniment to eurythmy, must in turn be reduced to artistic elements.

Today, when a large number of the individual numbers will be recited not in German but in English, we will see how eurythmy adapts to every language because it is adapted to the sound. When we create facial expressions or pantomime from the meaning, the meaning, the soul meaning, is simply transferred from one language to another, just as we transfer pantomime from one language to another in accompaniment to some poetry. The same thing does not happen with eurythmy. Through eurythmy, the different character of the language is actually expressed in the treatment of this moving, inaudible but visible language of eurythmy, the character of the language. Whether a language is characterized by the presence of -i, n, d sounds, or whether it is a particularly melodious language due to the presence of u, a, and so on – this special, picturesque, poetic character of language also comes to the fore in eurythmy. Everything linguistic is captured by eurythmy – it is not just the meaning that is transferred from one language to another. Eurythmy is indeed a visible language. This is particularly evident when poems in different languages are presented eurythmically. This is the artistic side of things.

I would just like to mention briefly that eurythmy also has two other aspects. [First] a therapeutic, hygienic aspect: there are movements in eurythmy that are drawn out of the human organism as a whole. Therefore, although not the movements you see here, transformations of these movements can also be used in healing processes. Because they are drawn from the healthy human organism, they can be used as countermeasures against tendencies toward illness. And healing and hygienic eurythmy can be provided, as is practiced in our Therapeutic-Clinical Institute in Arlesheim.

The third aspect is the pedagogical-didactic aspect. At the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and directed by myself, we have introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject in all classes alongside gymnastics. And it is quite clear to see – if the subject is taught properly – that children find their way into this moving language, which is a kind of spiritual gymnastics, with the same naturalness with which they found their way into spoken language as small children, which is also a completely natural and therefore desirable expression of the organism. If we simply make people aware of how movement can flow naturally from their entire organism, from spirit, soul, and body—the spirit is definitely taken into account—if we make people aware of this, they will see from their own experience that it is something desirable for them and that this will soon become apparent in the practical application of eurythmy lessons.

We can see particularly clearly how eurythmy gradually develops when we take into account that it is not the individual movements that are important, but the sequence of movements. That is why I have recently tried to [design] what belongs to the eurythmic presentation, but could also be omitted. But because it is part of it, the lighting can also be designed in a eurythmic sense, so that in the lighting you will also see what suits a particular mood, what is expressed in the sequence of lighting as a visible language, just as eurythmy is within it.

And so eurythmy will find more and more means of expression. But the most important means of expression for eurythmy is the human being themselves. And that is what can give us, I would say, complete reassurance that even though eurythmy is still in its infancy today, and therefore we must necessarily ask our esteemed audience for their forgiveness because the formal language of eurythmy is still unfamiliar, and even though we ourselves are our own harshest critics, we must nevertheless say: Because human beings create eurythmy entirely from within themselves, that is, from their own organism, which is truly the most perfect combination of forces we have in the world—a small world compared to the big world itself—because they use their organism as a tool, we can build on the immeasurable potential for development of eurythmy, even though it is still in its infancy today.

This potential for development can be seen particularly clearly today when something is already conceived as eurythmic poetry. I would like to refer to what was performed here before the interval as the last piece in the first part, my “Fairy Tale of the Miracle of the Spring,” taken from one of the “Mystery Dramas.” When one has already perceived what [one] — as in this case — has already perceived as thoroughly eurythmic in poetry, when the tones and sounds are already shaped in such a way that they express what is in them, not merely through thought, but as sound formation, then it is almost self-evident that something like this should also be represented through eurythmy.

This will therefore form the conclusion of the first part. There will then be a pause after this fairy tale, and then the second part will follow. This is what I wanted to say in advance, to draw attention to the inner justification for the fact that the hopes of eurythmic performances are based on the fact that human beings use their own organism, not an external tool, for creation, in other words, in eurythmy, they make use of the microcosm, a small world, so that we can hope that eurythmy, once it has been further and further perfected, will be able to stand alongside the older, fully recognized arts as an art form in its own right.