The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1923–1925

GA 277d — 18 February 1923, Dornach

Eurythmy Performance

“Fünfeck” with music by Jan Stuten
“Des Engels Flügelschlag” by Albert Steffen
Sarabande in A minor from the “English Suite” by J. S. Bach
“Die Seele, fremd” by Albert Steffen
“Geisterscharen” by Albert Steffen Adagio, Op. 13, by L. v. Beethoven “Traumverwandlung” by Josef Kitir ‘Proteus’ by Friedrich Hebbel “Auf leichten Füßen” by Christian Morgenstern “Die Freude” by J. W. v. Goethe “Longing” by Dschung Tsü with music by Jan Stuten
“My Child” by Heinrich Heine
“The Little Bird” by Edward Grieg
“Deine Tänze” (Your Dances) by Albert Steffen “Caprice” by Max Reger

Ladies and gentlemen!

As I have often explained in these introductions to our performance attempts, eurythmy is intended to be a visible language, or rather a visible song. Now, what is expressed through sound and song, what is expressed through voice and language, lies at the heart of the human experience, which, I would say, takes place in complete inner peace, the inner life that human beings develop when they face the world in a contemplative, thoughtful manner, but with inner involvement and interest. This is where we develop our pure imagination. But this imagination is always permeated, lived through, and filled with our impulses of will and mood.

Those who enlighten themselves about their inner life will be able to know that even when they face the world with their whole body in complete tranquility [and they] allow the images that arise in their perception to enter their soul, expressions of will and mood always rush into their imaginative life, the imaginative life, I would say coloring and nuancing it in the most diverse ways. We experience one idea with a quiet joy, another with a quiet fear or apprehension, and yet another with a certain reverence. We then experience, deep in the background of our soul being, how the will stirs: you want to have this, you want to reach for that, you want to carry out this or that.

This is the life of the soul, where the human being, in a sense, withdraws completely from his physical expression and calmly allows within himself that which is multifaceted and eventful in the world to come to inner experience, to inner revelation.

An outward intensification of this whole inner life of rest is then speaking and singing. One might say: while in the mere contemplative, intellectual observation of the world, the nerves play the main role in the human being and the blood only to the extent that it interweaves and permeates the nerves in very fine currents as the carrier of the will nature, in speaking and singing, blood activity and nerve activity are equally involved, maintaining a kind of inner balance. The nerves express themselves by influencing the breathing process and setting the air in motion with the help of the speech and singing organs. The blood expresses itself by participating as an as yet undifferentiated living bodily expression in this whole setting of the air in motion through the speech and singing organs. Nerves and blood are involved in the same way. What we receive from outside is reproduced in the consonants. How the will and the mind stir within is reproduced in the vowels, so that it permeates what is reproduced and, in a sense, adds the human element to what the human being takes in from the world by expressing the consonants in speech and song. Thus, in language and song, feeling, imagination, and will meet in the soul.

Now there can be a third language, and this third language is the one that arises when the human being uses his entire organism and puts into movement and posture what remains completely still in the mere observation of the world, what in speech and song passes from a, I would say, stirring calm into an inwardly calm movement. This is now transformed in eurythmy entirely into posture and movement. What lies in the consonants of speech as an imitation of the outer world is expressed in the eurythmic forms through the whole human being. What lives in the vowels, coming from the blood as the will, is expressed in the posture of the human being, in the posture that is put into the movement.

When one sees moving individuals or groups of people on stage in eurythmy, one always sees them in a certain movement and, within this movement, in a certain posture. When one sees movement, one sees the consonant aspect of imitation of the outer world. When one sees posture, as is particularly the case in the eurythmic expression of the vowels, one sees that which comes from the nervous life of the human being. But it is the case that eurythmy is the complete opposite of what the human being develops inwardly in quiet contemplation of the world. Whereas there the nerve is the main thing and the blood only, I would say, as the expression of the will in fine currents, insofar as it pours into the nerve life, in eurythmy what the body accomplishes in movement and posture by performing all this out of the will anchored in the blood, so that in eurythmy it is primarily the blood organism that is active and the nerves only insofar as they actually serve the blood circulation, that is, the inner rhythm, the innermost rhythm of the human being.

And so one can let oneself be influenced by what is, in a sense, the inner rhythm of the human organism that has been transformed into movement and posture – coming from the will element of the soul – and what, I would say, lies somewhat higher, what is closer to the observing human being, namely speech and song.

When reciting to eurythmic movement, one cannot recite in the way that is popular today in an unartistic age, merely emphasizing the prosaic content of the poem, but must actually bring what is secret eurythmy into the shaping of the sound, into the rhythm of the sound, into the cadence of the sound, and also into the melodious harmony, into the harmony of the sound, into the harmony of the sound formation. If one sees and hears eurythmy and declamation or recitation in this way, I would say “orchestrated,” then one must become truly aware of what human beings actually experience when they feel themselves spiritually: because the soul is intimately connected with the body, they also want to reproduce what they experience spiritually within themselves in their bodies.

The soul lives in the human organism right down to the tips of the fingers and toes, and it can also reproduce everything that lives within it spatially and physically. In speaking and singing, it takes what could otherwise be expressed by the whole human being – movement and posture – and brings it back into the chest organism. And because the chest organism has certain organs to express what would otherwise be the overall movement and posture of the human being, what is also posture and movement comes about in human speech and singing, but then transitions into the formation of air, which is imperceptible as movement, while in the human being itself it is only revealed spiritually in tone and sound. And so, in fact, when depicting what you see here in eurythmy, my dear audience, only the observing human being is suppressed; while the human being in his mind, for which the chest organs serve, and in his whole form, for which the organs of will serve, the organs of movement serve, while the human being is revealed outwardly, on the stage and in declamation, recitation, the observing human being is not there at first.

This contemplative human being is then the spectator and listener. But he encounters what is presented to him on stage and at the declamation table. They take this in, that is, they immerse themselves in that most perfect instrument used by eurythmy, the entire human organism. They see and observe the human being insofar as the human being is a being that reveals itself outwardly. And so, through eurythmy, what the human being is for the world becomes, in the observation itself, entirely an inner world.

Whereas other arts deal with external instruments, and the human being actually only makes use of external instruments, in eurythmy the human being is the instrument itself. Therefore, in eurythmy, the microcosm, this small world, appears before the human being, and the observing viewer can say to themselves, in a sense: What is internal cannot become the content of art anyway, but only that which wants to reveal itself outwardly, because art must be seen and perceived. But everything that can unfold outwardly in human beings is presented in eurythmic art to the inner life of human beings, to the audience.

Therefore, although we must ask the esteemed audience for their indulgence every time such a eurythmic experiment is performed, because everything is still in its infancy, one can already say, when one really considers the unlimited possibilities for development that lie in eurythmy, that it has a future, because it wants to present in the finest movements and in the finest revelations everything that works outwardly in the human being, soul and spirit, before the inner life of soul and spirit. In this way, it will call the soul and spirit into fullest concentration for the audience to behold. And that is, in essence, the highest ideal of all art.

Therefore, we may hope that this art, as a complement to all the rest – the poetic, rhythmic, musical, plastic, and architectural – as a synthesis of all these, will one day be able to stand alongside the older, fully-fledged arts as a fully-fledged younger art. We can hope for this when we consider what eurythmy uses as a means of expression: the human being in his or her outward revelation, and what it appeals to: that in the human being which has the fullest, total interest in full, whole humanity, insofar as this full, whole humanity is an expression, a revelation of the great world, the macrocosm, in a microcosm.