The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 17 September 1922, Dornach

Eurythmy Address

Rudolf Steiner's explanation of the performance

The third Sunday in September — September 17, 1922 — is a public holiday in Switzerland, the federal Day of Thanksgiving, Repentance, and Prayer, on which events for entertainment purposes were prohibited. Rudolf Steiner issued a statement explaining why a eurythmy event was justified on this day. The context in which he made this statement — whether it was, for example, a draft letter to the community — is unknown. The performance took place in the dome room of the Goetheanum building.

The following should be noted regarding the eurythmy performance on September 17, 1922: The organizers cannot possibly regard the performance as one of the prohibited kind, for eurythmy is not entertainment or something like dancing, but serious art; and the audience is in the same position as someone visiting an art museum.

Furthermore, the seriousness of the day was taken into account on the 17th by the fact that only serious poems and the scene of sorrow from the second part of “Faust” were performed, which is not cheerful, but rather points people deeply to the seriousness of life. — Poster for the performance

Poster for the performance

Ladies and gentlemen!

Allow me, as usual, to say a few words by way of introduction before these eurythmic experiments. Not to explain what is being offered artistically, for that would be an inartistic beginning, because art must work through direct viewing, through itself – and that should be the case to a very special degree with eurythmy. But since what appears here as a new art, eurythmy, is drawn from new artistic sources that are still unfamiliar today, since it works in an artistic language of form that is still unfamiliar today, allow me to say a few words about this artistic language of form.

What you will see here on stage is by no means to be understood as dance, as [mimic] or pantomime art, but is a truly visible language. For, if I may use Goethe's expression, one can study through sensual-supersensual observation how the entire human organism seeks a special expression through the larynx and its neighboring organs when singing or speaking. Singing—that is, the music that comes from within the human being—and spoken language are in fact such that they engage the whole person. And basically, what happens in other people is only announced in ordinary speech and metamorphoses in a special way in the special organs of singing and speaking.

If one really studies what underlies movement tendencies and creative tendencies, then one can transfer this to the whole human being. However, this will be changed in a corresponding way, because it must then be seen, whereas the movements of the speech organs cannot be seen, but their translation into air movement can be heard. What is otherwise heard in singing or speech is seen in eurythmic movement. Therefore, a eurythmic gesture differs completely from a mimic or pantomime or dance art. Just as one cannot arbitrarily associate any human sound with a soul experience, one cannot associate any gesture with a soul experience. If a person wants to reveal themselves through eurythmy in a very specific, lawful way, movements are related to sound, words, word stress, word formation, [sentence structure], and so on – just as in speech and singing. Therefore, one should not direct one's perception to the individual gesture: Just as in melody one must direct one's feeling to the sequence of tones, so here it is a matter of the feeling that must be drawn out of the movements – both when the individual moves eurythmically in artistic transformation and when groups of people, as you can see here on stage, face each other or move in eurythmic norms. Eurythmy can certainly be understood as a moving sculpture.

Those who have a feeling for such things say to themselves: when I have a statue, a sculptural work, standing quietly before me, it is actually an expression of human silence, of the silence of the soul in a certain form. What is expressed here by the moving human being is the expression of the stirring of the soul, which now makes use of gestures in the same way, but regular gestures that belong to it in a lawful manner, just as sound belongs to the soul experience in a lawful manner. Thus, when eurythmy unfolds as an art, it can be developed as a moving sculpture.

We are gradually striving to incorporate everything in eurythmy into the stage design, so that the entire stage design appears as a eurythmic revelation. Those of you in the audience who have been here often will see how we have endeavored in recent months not to add the lighting and successive lighting effects to the individual in a naturalistic way, but to shape them eurythmically from the colored forms in their sequence and in their harmony with the accompanying eurythmy. So that here, too, one should not look at the individual elements, but at the emergence of a preceding movement or also at the retarding, the retroactive effect that the stage lighting has on the accompaniment of the individual performances.

In this respect, eurythmy in particular can lead back to a more artistic conception of recitation and declamation than is available today in what is, in a sense, an unartistic age. Today, although some people already realize that something else must be sought, recitation and declamation are still often performed in such a way that only the prose content of a poem is expressed. The prose content is emphasized, as they say, out of the depth of feeling. The real poet does not initially work with the prose content in his soul, but rather with uncertain melodious, harmonious, musical elements—or he works with the imagery of language. For the true poet, insofar as he is an artist, the prose content of his poetry is preceded by an inner necessity, a weaving, living or rounding off, or a deepening or rising, or a forming of this or that thought in language. The truly artistic form has nothing to do with the prose form of thought, which is expressed in two four-line stanzas [and] in two three-line stanzas, but rather with a departure that is first struck, with a return in the first two stanzas, with a look at the departure, with a look back at the decline in the last two stanzas—or in similar imagery lives the one who creates a sonnet out of a real sense of art, out of artistic imagination.

And so it is that something like this really underlies everything, for example in Schiller, for whom the prose content was never the most important thing in his main lyrical poems – he only strung it together after he first had an indefinite melody in his mind, just as Goethe had an indefinite feeling. Goethe, who lives more in vague feelings than Schiller: this must be expressed in the recitation and declamation that accompany eurythmy as well as the music. One cannot declaim in a prosaic manner when one has to accompany eurythmy with declamation and recitation.

It can also be sung visibly. Then eurythmy accompanies the music, the instrument, the instrumental. But eurythmy can also run parallel to recitation and declamation. We will allow ourselves to demonstrate both to you. But then, when reciting and declaiming to eurythmy, attention must be paid to the special form, to the visualization of language, to the musicality of language. And in this sense, the art of recitation and declamation, as we are attempting it here, must return to what it was in more artistic ages than our own. Therefore, the special form of declamation and recitation that we are training here as a purely artistic form may still be perceived as something unusual today. However, when our age returns to a truly artistic one, this will be truly understood.

Nevertheless, despite all this, I must say today—as always at the beginning of our performances—that we ourselves are our strictest critics, that we know exactly what needs to be improved, and that we ask our esteemed audience for their indulgence, because eurythmy is only at the beginning of its development. We know this very well. But we also know how much potential for development, immeasurable potential for development, lies within this eurythmy.

For today's performance in particular, I would like to add that in the second part after the intermission, we will be presenting a scene from the second part of Goethe's “Faust,” from the fifth act, where the four gray women—mainly “Sorrow”—appear. And in this context it must be said that the usual style of stylization that comes about through the art of eurythmy — where every single gesture, every single movement must be elevated to a higher stylistic form because it springs from the whole human organism — makes this eurythmy particularly suitable for dramatic — not lyrical — [for] such representations that ascend into the supersensible, where the human being is connected in his soul with the supersensible of the world. There are many such scenes in Goethe's “Faust.” One such scene is the scene where the four gray women appear. However, it must be taken into account that where Faust stands as an earthly human being, what he says must be portrayed using ordinary naturalistic stagecraft. But what is going on in his soul and what he sees from his relationship to the supersensible worlds, and what is dramatically, truly, not merely allegorically portrayed by Goethe in the four gray women – this can be translated particularly well into eurythmic language.

So that here, eurythmic style will be mixed with ordinary stage style. But it is precisely with the eurythmic style that one can perceive that certain parts of Faust—certain scenes, especially in the second part of Faust—also come into their own on stage in their special language form, if they are not presented naturalistically, but in a higher stylization through eurythmic art.

There are two other sides to eurythmy: One is therapeutic eurythmy, where the movements you see embodied artistically here are transformed so that, because all eurythmy flows from the healthy human organism and sets it in motion as a healthy organism itself requires, these movements can also be used therapeutically as a healthy organism, as has already been demonstrated in our institutes in Arlesheim and elsewhere.

A third element is the pedagogical-didactic side of eurythmy. Here, eurythmy is used in school lessons alongside gymnastics, as a kind of animated gymnastics. And we have already seen for ourselves at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart how such an application of eurythmy, from the youngest children to the oldest children we currently have at the Waldorf School, has such an effect – especially on the initiative of the will – that the child finds its way into the eurythmic language in the same way that it otherwise finds its way into spoken language. It is precisely in animated gymnastics that one can see what an important educational and teaching tool eurythmy is. One can see the soul, spirit, and body of the child becoming healthy through the use of eurythmic gymnastics—if I may express it that way—in teaching and education.

Through eurythmy, the human being itself is used as a tool in its liveliness. When Goethe says: When the human being finds itself confronted with nature, it takes measure, harmony, order, and meaning from it and, by using them, rises to the creation of a work of art. So it can be said that because human beings, as microcosms, hold all the secrets of the world within themselves, when these secrets are brought out – and this happens especially through the art of eurythmy, where no external instrument is used for art, but the human being themselves is the instrument – then the secret of the human form can be brought out through them. In this way, the human being can be a reflection of the mysteries of the greater world, of the entire macrocosm.

Precisely for this reason, because eurythmy brings out harmony, order, measure, and meaning from within the human being and also represents them through the human being, one can nevertheless say: even though eurythmy is still in its infancy today, it will certainly undergo further refinement and will be able to stand alongside the fully established older arts as a fully justified and worthy art form.