The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 5 November 1922, The Hague

Eurythmy Performance

Dear attendees!

Even before last Thursday's performance, I took the liberty of saying a few words about the nature of eurythmy and its goals. Allow me to briefly repeat some of what I said then and add a few other things. I will only repeat excerpts of what I said on Thursday for those members of the audience who were not here last Thursday.

You will see, dear audience, in our eurythmic experiments on stage, individual people or groups of people in motion. So, at first, what is expressed in this way can be addressed as an artistic gesture, something that perhaps reminds one of the art of mime or pantomime, or even of dance. However, eurythmy does not aspire to be any of these things, and it should not be confused with these related arts, against which we certainly have no criticism. It seeks to draw on artistic sources that are still unfamiliar today and need to be explored, and it also seeks to make use of an artistic language of form that is still unfamiliar today and needs to be explored.

What is expressed through gestural movements – especially those of the most expressive human organs, the arms and hands, but also the whole person and groups of people – is a truly visible language. What we otherwise have as mimicry, pantomime, or dance could be said to relate to this eurythmic art of movement in the same way that the inarticulate babbling of a child relates to trained spoken language or trained singing. For in fact, the movements that are performed here as eurythmic movements are carefully extracted from the human organism.

When a person is a child, it is natural for the world to extract spoken language and the ability to sing from their organism. Eurythmy is intended to be a moving, visible language and a visible song. It is this in the sense that careful study in sensory-supersensory observation has first determined which movements the human being would like to perform from his whole being, but which he restrains when he expresses himself through spoken language or song. It is the case that what can initially be expressed in the human being, as long as they do not speak, in the child, as an inner emotion of will, as emotional content, is expressed in an inarticulate, chaotic way. Then the human organization intervenes in what would otherwise, when the human being moves in its verbal or vocal communication, become a gesture – this is transformed into thoughts.

A complete science of the human being can trace precisely how what goes on within our brain organism to carry the thought and, in a sense, submerge it in the stream of air conducted through the larynx and its neighboring organs, so that speech and song come to expression — one can study precisely how this emerges from the whole human being. Yes, in a sense, the human being comes to rest in thought; there, the inner organic calm of thought overcomes the flowing stream of air that passes through the larynx and its neighboring organs.

The same thing that is brought to rest here by the brain organism can in turn be taken back to its animated gesture, become facial expression, if one — instead of the brain organism, which can only be studied in a very difficult way — if one instead brings the impulse of the will, the human impulse of movement, into the same lawful activity as nature itself does in speaking or singing, which sets the brain mechanism [and] in its continuation, the speech organs, just as the brain can otherwise allow its revelations, which have become a resting image, to flow into the stream of speech: for every sound, for every word, for every sentence structure, a movement of the whole human being. And because one allows the same thing to happen in the motor system as otherwise happens in the brain system, through a movement of the whole human being, that which now reveals the inner life of the human soul, not from thought but preferably from the will, can be placed before the eye, just as language or singing brings to life before the ear that which the soul experiences.

So one could say: the human being has, in a sense, two poles, the pole of thought and the pole of will. Ordinary spoken language and ordinary singing bring into activity the pole of thought in the human being, which is led into the air stream. Eurythmy activates the movement or will pole of the human being. So that the whole human being becomes, as it were, a kind of larynx on the stage before us, only that now the movements, emerging from the will – because they have not reached the calmness of thought and thus pictoriality, but only proceed as movements – represent a visible language, a visible song.

Therefore, anyone who believes that the individual movements of eurythmy can be directly related to what the soul is experiencing at that moment is completely mistaken. Just as musical painting is not something truly musical, but just as in music everything must flow out when something is composed, in harmony, in melodies, so too must everything that sounds poetic or musical alongside eurythmy flow into the forms of movement in which one emerges from the other – in a sense also as visible melody, harmony.

One should therefore not say that eurythmy can only be understood when everything can be related to poetry or music. That is not the case. Art must have an immediate effect. It must affect the feelings. And so here too it depends on the roundness or angularity of the form, on the emergence of one form from another, on what is revealed in the movements in the immediate artistic enjoyment. Nothing speculative, nothing intellectual should actually enter into eurythmy.

So we are dealing with something that is drawn out of the whole inner necessity of the human organism, like language, like singing. And just as you will hear in the performance in a moment, just as one can sing to a musical instrument, so one can sing to a eurythmic art of movement.

And one can declaim and recite a poem, as you will also see afterwards. What is declaimed and recited through poetry is simultaneously presented to the eye in the visible language of eurythmy from the stage. This brings out the depths of poetic art that cannot be brought out by spoken language, which is always dependent on thought. Great poets always have something musical or pictorial behind the words of their poetry. Schiller had something vaguely melodious in his soul, especially in his most significant poems. He did not yet have the words for the poem – he had something vaguely melodious. It was on this vaguely melodious basis that he first arranged the pure prose content, so to speak. It was only because it had something musical in the background that it became poetry. Other poets have something pictorial. They then use this pictorial imagination to shape what language makes possible in terms of sound formations and sound formulations.

Thus, our eurythmy must also be declaimed and recited differently than those who only emphasize the prose content of a poem believe. Apart from the art of eurythmy, there would be no artistic declamation and recitation, which can only arise when the musical, rhythmic, metrical, melodious, but also the pictorial and imaginative aspects of sound formation are artistically expressed in declamation and recitation parallel to eurythmy. In this way, the inner motives that would otherwise remain hidden can be brought out from both the musical and the poetic.

You will also see in the musical aspect that dancing here is not done in the usual way, but that the inner musical structure, intervals, and so on are actually worked out, and then the entire structures of a piece of music are expressed in forms, in spatial forms, through movements that are by no means merely dance-like. Dance also relates to what is being striven for here in the same way that babbling relates to perfect speech or perfect singing. With this, ladies and gentlemen, I have perhaps shown you the essence of eurythmy from a different angle than last time.

This essence of eurythmy now allows us to present the particularly lyrical and epic, which actually live in the soul of the artist, before the eye through the characterized art of movement. For the dramatic, however, it becomes apparent that where drama transitions from the representation of purely external, naturalistic events — in the broadest sense, of course — to the experience of something supersensible through the human soul, that higher sublimation made possible by eurythmy is particularly appropriate. We already made an attempt at this during the last performance here, where a fragment from Goethe's “Faust” — from the second part of Goethe's Faust, the Sorge scene — we attempted to illustrate how, on the one hand, in the figure of Faust, who stands naturalistically with both feet, I might say, on the ground, there is something naturalistic that can be portrayed in ordinary mimic art, but how the figures that can only be conceived spiritually — Sorge, distress, want, guilt—how these are declaimed from outside the stage and what they have to represent on stage is represented through the visible language of eurythmy.

Today, we will take the liberty of illustrating this with two short scenes from my “Mystery Dramas.” Before the intermission, in the first part of the program, you will see a scene from my Mystery Drama “The Awakening of the Soul.” If the [entire] drama were being performed—not just a fragment of it—I would, of course, say nothing about it. But since only a fragment is being performed, allow me to say a few words about it.

The point is that in this “mystery drama” there appears a person, Johannes Thomasius, who undergoes an inner spiritual development that leads him higher and higher into the spiritual world through various stages of inner spiritual experience, who thus leads such a spiritual life. Then, dear audience, in the course of this inner development, he comes to attain true self-knowledge. This true self-knowledge gives him a pictorial view of his own being. His double appears before him. I do not mean anything symbolic or allegorical by this. Both abstract symbolism and straw allegory are inartistic. What is at stake here is not symbolism or allegory, but a real soul experience that can occur before the soul if it only creates the inner possibilities for it to do so, [if it] appears before the soul like the outer sensory world. This is how Johannes Thomasius experiences his own being, his present being, as his doppelganger.

But then he also experiences, by realizing at that moment all the experiences he has had through his friend Strader, through his friend Capesius, through his teacher Benediktus, through his teaching friend Maria – everything he has gone through in the course of his life appears once again before his soul in this particular way, as will be depicted here on stage. But precisely because this is rumbling and roaring inside his soul, he experiences his doppelganger, and through this he also experiences his own youth as an objective figure. The spirit of Johannes Thomasius' youth appears before him, I would say like a second doppelganger. Both are figures from the spiritual realm that a person can experience when they surrender their soul to it.

But in order for a person to experience something, they must be sufficiently prepared for it. That is why it is said that they must now cross the threshold, must stand before the guardian of the threshold. The guardian appears in the form of a distant figure. He shows how one must become strong and powerful within oneself in order to cross the threshold and experience something in reality like this doppelganger, like this spirit of Johannes' youth. And yet another figure appears. This is the figure I call Ahriman. Everything that holds people down, everything that is intellectually materialistic, that makes them philistine, that condemns them to thoughts instead of a fully human grasp of reality, this figure appears to Thomasius as a supersensible experience. Finally, Benedictus and Mary appear, whom he met earlier and who now reappear to him, as it were, in a mirror image in the spiritual world.

All of these are inner experiences that humans go through, not naturalistic stage experiences, although they are not allegories or symbols. But precisely when one wants to portray something like this, and when, as in these dramas, the subject matter is already conceived in eurythmic terms, then eurythmy is particularly well suited to expressing such things. You will therefore see Johannes Thomasius appearing in a naturalistic, mimetic manner. The other characters are figures with whom human beings become acquainted in the spiritual world. They are therefore best spoken from outside, declaimed from outside, and presented artistically on stage in stylized eurythmy.

Similarly, after the intermission, in the second part, a scene is presented in which Johannes Thomasius is shown. He does not appear himself, but rather the representative of his thoughts appears in a figure who, in a sense, leads him into false theosophy in a mystical-enthusiastic way, causing him to want to transcend himself and lose his footing. The Luciferic figures will appear, as will their counterparts, the Ahrimanic figures, who lead people down into the coarse material world. Human beings are in a state of equilibrium between that which leads them into mystical enthusiasm and that which leads them down into the coarse material world, below the mystical.

With this, ladies and gentlemen, I have taken the liberty of drawing your attention to the artistic nature of our eurythmy. I would just like to mention briefly that this eurythmy has two other sides to it. Since all the movements performed in eurythmy are drawn from healthy human nature, it is also possible to develop a therapeutic eurythmy from this artistic eurythmy, a eurythmy that has hygienic-therapeutic goals. The forms are not the same as those seen here on stage; here, the focus is on the artistic. These movements are transformed, metamorphosed. But then they can have a hygienic or even therapeutic effect when performed by weak and sick people themselves. That is why this therapeutic eurythmy has already been introduced in our therapeutic-clinical institutes in Arlesheim in Switzerland and in Stuttgart as a branch of healing, of therapy.

A third element of our eurythmy is the pedagogical-didactic aspect. At the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and directed by me, we have a pedagogy based on spiritual science. At this Waldorf School, eurythmy has been introduced for all children from the lowest to the highest grades, in addition to physical education. And the years in which the Waldorf school has existed have already shown sufficiently how, just as the younger child finds its way into spoken language and singing out of an inner sense of well-being and the natural revelation of human nature, so the older child finds its way into this language of movement, this visible language. In language teaching, we even find that this visible language in turn has an effect on the handling and articulation of spoken language. But it is particularly important to note that we are not dealing here with one-sided gymnastics that only emphasises the physical, but with spiritual and mental gymnastics. The body is not neglected, but the whole person is educated—which is particularly important to us—to develop initiative of will. In educating initiative of will, it is certain that, if the pedagogical and didactic value of eurythmy is fully understood, eurythmy will be able to achieve something significant.

So I may conclude today by saying that Goethe once said: Those to whom nature reveals its obvious secrets feel a deep longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. And, ladies and gentlemen, an ancient Greek figure, Oedipus, is presented with a riddle, and the solution to the riddle is: man. In a certain sense, the solution to the artistic riddle must always be “man.” The revealed secrets of the world are also revealed to our artistic gaze. If we want to recreate them artistically, we can best do so by using the most perfect instrument, man himself.

And eurythmy makes use of this instrument, the human being. It thus becomes a moving sculpture, and in a sense answers the artistic riddle of the world by saying: And the riddle is the human being. It presents the moving human being, the human being who speaks through his movements, who reveals his soul, to the artistically viewing eye. In this way, it can cherish the hope that, as a well-founded art, it will be able to stand alongside other well-founded arts more and more, if it is now brought from its beginnings to those possibilities that certainly lie within it.