The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1923–1925

GA 277d — 10 June 1923, Dornach

Eurythmy Performance

Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9 by Frédéric Chopin
“Christmas” by Albert Steffen
“Die Seele fremd” (The Alien Soul) by Albert Steffen
“Die Geisterscharen” (The Ghosts) by Albert Steffen
Etude in A-flat major, Op. 25,1 by Frédéric Chopin
“Als wir auf der goldenen Insel” (When We Were on the Golden Island) by Albert Steffen
Sarabande in A minor from the “English Suite” by J. S. Bach
“Ganymed” by J. W. v. Goethe “The Singer” by J. W. v. Goethe ‘Longing’ by Dschung Tsü with music by Jan Stuten “Blissful Lightness” by Christian Morgenstern “Slavonic Dance, Op. 46, No. 2” by Antonín Dvořák Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Skirt”; “Nocturne in White”; “Korf's Jokes”; “Korf in Berlin”; “Palmström in Stuttgart” Minuet from Sonata, Op. 78, by Franz Schubert

Ladies and gentlemen!

From a few comments that have been made here and there recently about eurythmy performances, it is clear how slowly and gradually people are coming to understand what eurythmy is all about from an artistic point of view. It has been remarked, particularly in relation to eurythmy, that naive people who simply indulge in artistic enjoyment, who allow themselves to be influenced by what is presented in eurythmy through direct observation, very soon – precisely because of their naivety gain an understanding of eurythmy, but that people who are accustomed to speculating and thinking a lot about art, who are accustomed, for example, to writing reviews of art – because you have to think, don't you, otherwise you can't write a review – that such people have great difficulty in really accepting eurythmy artistically. And such people often say: Yes, there is so much intellectualism! Eurythmy – as was said recently – is very witty, but there is so much intellectualism in the movements.

Now, there is precisely nothing intellectual in it. And that is precisely what is unique about eurythmy: that there is nothing intellectual in it, nothing intellectual at all, and that those who understand eurythmy best are those who do not think about it first, but simply expose their artistic eye to eurythmy. For eurythmy is really something to be seen and absorbed in the immediate visual impression. It is to be accepted just as naively as one accepts language itself. With language, one allows oneself to accept it naively because one learns it in such early childhood that there is no doubt about it: language is driven out of the unconscious, it is not formed out of the intellectual. It would also be sad if the formation of words, the emphasis of words, the experience of the meaning of words, if all this had to be put into words by the child through reflection. If that were necessary, the child would certainly never learn language. But language is learned, which actually means that it is not learned at all, but experienced through imitation as one grows up. Just as one does not grow by thinking about it, but simply by surrendering oneself to being human, so it is with language, which one does not learn in detail, but which grows out of the child's interaction with its environment.

Now, it seems as if eurythmy is based on something different than the so-called learning of language. In reality, it is not based on anything different, but rather eurythmy is actually a visible language – and it is brought out of the human being in such a natural way, just as ordinary spoken language is brought out in a naive way. Humans also perform something like gestures when they practice spoken language, but they do not notice that they are sending out what is the air stream in their breathing in a gestural way. And just as the breath is sent outwards as a gesture, and only because the breath vibrates in a certain way due to what is mixed into it from the mental element, so the gesture that is in the exhaled breath is transformed into the audible sound.

The audible sound arises in the human head. The human head has the peculiarity in the human organism that it rests, while the rest of the organism is built for movement and mobility. Just as when a train is moving, you yourself are at rest in the train—or in a carriage, while the horses are moving, the wheels of the carriage are moving, you yourself are at rest inside it—so, in a sense, outside of their head, human beings are a kind of carriage, a kind of moving organism. The head rests, and everything that the human being experiences in the head is the movement of the other organism that has come to rest.

Externally, modern physiology actually only knows this in relation to a single element of language: from the connection between the gesture, the movement of the right hand, and the speech center in the left hemisphere of the brain, we know that there is a connection between what is happening in the right arm and right hand and the speech center. What I do when I interpret, when I make gestures — and unless you are a very phlegmatic person, you always accompany your speech with gestures, Nordic natures less so, Italian, southern natures more so), but what one expresses through gestures, through the gestures of the arms, comes to rest, is held back, fixed in silence in spoken language.

If I am addressing these words today mainly to those who are familiar with anthroposophy or are even anthroposophists, I would like to say: That which in language is transformed into fixation, into rest, through the human head, through organs that are specifically impulsed by the human head — even if they are not entirely in the human head, they are impulsed by the human head — that which is transformed into fixation, into rest through such organs, is primarily an expression, a revelation of the human ego. And insofar as spoken language is a revelation of the human ego, it would be — it is certainly exposed to the danger — it would be something entirely egoistic, something through which human beings would only want to express their desires and cravings, more or less, if human beings were not restrained in their use of language by the whole experience of language in relation to their organism, so to speak. They would only express their inner experience, as is the case with children at the beginning of primitive language, where only inner emotions, expressions of will, and expressions of feeling are expressed in still unarticulated language.

But human beings depend on language to place themselves in their entire environment, in the environment of the earth, as human beings among other human beings. In this way, language is generalized, torn out of the ego. Language becomes a commonality of a people, of a group of human beings in general. It is always by adapting to the language found in the genius of the people, rather than the sounds of nature, which only express his egoism, that man works his way out of egoism into something universal, which in turn has its dark sides. It has its dark sides in such a way that the poet has expressed these dark sides very beautifully in the words: "When the soul speaks, alas! [already] no longer the soul." It is still the soul that speaks when the child begins to express inarticulate inner experiences, even if they are instincts and desires. And finding its way into something non-selfish, into something universal in language, initially spiritualizes the human being for earthly life. The soul is spiritualized in spoken language. If we then set out to accompany spoken language with gestures and facial expressions, we take what is in the language in the ego back into our astral body. We put it back into the soul. Just feel how the person who must naturally take his words from the common language, how the person who accompanies these words with gestures, actually has the need to bring something individual and personal into what is universal in language. Through gestures, one pushes language back into the soul, that is, into the astral body, back into the personal.

But this gives one a kind of sense of shame toward gestures—unless they are used as accompanying gestures for what seems too general in ordinary speech—because what is expressed through gestures belongs too much to the individual. Through gestures, one bares one's soul, so to speak. So when one resorts to mimicry — and this is now considered the element of all characterization in the art of acting — when one resorts to mimicry, that which has become more spiritual in language is pushed back into the soul, pushed back into the human being.

Now, dear audience, consider something else through which human beings reveal themselves externally in their nature. On the one hand, they reveal themselves, I would say, in the head pole through language, spoken language. On the other hand, they reveal themselves in the foot pole, the leg pole, through dance. Now, dance is something where, if the dance is to be truly beautiful, the human being must no longer be stuck in his egoism. Dance must be entirely rhythmic in form if it is to be beautiful. Dance must, so to speak, have stripped away that which comes from the human being. When dancing in a certain swing, one is actually dealing with the perception of the swing line. One is dealing with the perception of the objective rhythm in the line of movement. In dancing, the human being has actually completely left themselves behind. They are no longer stuck within themselves. They have become entirely body. The body dances among bodies, making movements as if there were ultimately no soul left within it when it dances. For what we admire in dancing is precisely the swing and rhythm of the dance line.

If the poet says, “When the soul speaks, alas, the soul no longer speaks,” then we must say of dance: When the body dances, alas, it has already lost its soul in the dance. The soul is stripped away in dance. Now, as with language, push [dance] back more into the egoistic part of the soul, into the mimicry of what is revealed, and you will see [when you push external dancing back from the physical body into the etheric body, language. Push back into mimicry that which lives as language in the I into the astral body: then you come too sharply into the inner self.

Eurythmy is pushing back the [rJeinen body movements of gymnastics or dancing from the merely physical, physical-bodily into the etheric body, that is, into that which is close to the soul again. One gives the movement that the human being makes back to the soul. And while the personal self is expressed in language—it becomes only commonality through the generality of language—that which is the movement of the human being in the physical world is pushed back [in eurythmy] into the spiritual-etheric. The movement of the human being is animated.

And when this is done in the right way – and in eurythmy it is done this way – so that just as every sound, a, i, l, m, emerges from the human organism according to a certain lawfulness, then everything that occurs in eurythmy in the individual movement, in the connection between movements, in the shaping of the movement, is derived from the nature and essence of the human being. So that through eurythmy, the human being expresses himself in movements in a visible way, just as he expresses himself in an audible way through spoken language. And just as an “a” is something very specific, an “e” is something very specific as a sound when heard, so a movement is something very specific as an expression in the whole human being, in that the movement of the human being is withdrawn into the human interior, into the etheric body.

This achieves the following: in ordinary spoken language, human beings express themselves as earthly beings. In the movements that are so intimately connected with his entire etheric being, which become visible language when he performs eurythmy, the human being actually expresses what the gods wanted to make of him. The entire divine human being, not the earthly but the divine, who dwells in form, also dwells in form, comes to expression. It is no longer just admiration for the swing of the dance and the rhythm of the movement, but admiration for what is to be said to us through the human being as a cosmic being, because he is a spirit-animated human being and has something to say as a spirit-animated human being.

Therefore, when a poem is recited or declaimed or a piece of music is played and eurythmy is performed to accompany it, one can indeed say that there is an orchestral interaction. In recitation and musical performance, what the human being is is revealed insofar as he expresses himself on earth as a spiritual-soul human being. Insofar as he is a stranger here on earth, having brought the spiritual-soul aspect with him when he descended to earth, but still carrying it within him as a legacy from other worlds, he expresses himself by speaking in the visible language of eurythmy.

One does not need to know all this, but only to have a corresponding feeling, an artistic feeling and view. Then one will have a naive impression of what is happening on stage. The reason for predicting a few words is simply to draw attention to how what we encounter there in all its naivety is derived from the whole essence of the human being, indeed from the human being's position in the world. But what is ultimately naive is drawn from the deepest mysteries of human life in the world. Nothing is more magnificent and wise than the utterances of a very small child, which are brought out in an unconscious way. Whether this is brought out more or less consciously in the foundation of eurythmy makes no difference to the immediate artistic impression.

Therefore, one should not think that eurythmy is based on anything intellectual, but just as in facial expressions, in the art of mimicry, what occurs in the head is pushed down from the head into the arms, in the same way, one pushes what is otherwise human movement up into the movement of the arms, thereby gaining an animated impression of the human being, of how the whole human being expresses itself through its essence within the world.

All this naturally makes it necessary that eurythmy also requires that the parallel declamation and recitation take into account that every real poet already has a certain hidden eurythmy in the treatment of language, in what can be called the imaginative, musical element of language, which creeps into the language and comes to rest within it. And this must be heard when reciting and declaiming for eurythmy. In our time, people do not like this because our time has much that is inartistic in it. Dr. Steiner spent years trying to develop precisely such a form of recitation, which in turn goes back to the actual artistry of language treatment. Unfortunately, it must be said that she is now unable to recite due to her illness, even today, unfortunately.

But it is precisely through eurythmy that we will return to the eurythmic nature of language. And if you want to really feel the essence of eurythmy, just consider the following. There are always people who say: Yes, we are told that eurythmy is a visible language, that eurythmy is not dance and not mime. And indeed it is not! But the best thing – and this is not said by the naive person, but by someone who has just thought intellectually about the art forms – is that we liked best what was danced to the music. But it is not danced to music at all! The cutest thing about it is that people believe that because there is music, it is danced to in eurythmy. That's how crudely people view things today. It is not danced to music in eurythmy, but rather sung in movement. It is singing in movement, just as eurythmy is movement and language [and] singing, so too is what accompanies the music singing, not dancing, just singing in movement. You have to feel this difference when you watch it, then you can judge it correctly.

And so, little by little, an understanding must gradually emerge of the significance of eurythmy as an art form drawn from artistic sources that are still unfamiliar today. One will have to understand the very specific characteristics that lie between dance, mime, and language. But what is truly linguistic is not something that is led up to the head from human movement. When it is led up to the head, it becomes spoken language. If one stops what is actually conducted up to the head and becomes spoken language, if one stops it in the arms and hands – which lie between the head and the feet, between the two poles – then the essence of the human being, as he is placed on the earth, is expressed, I would say without breaking away into extremes on either side.

And one might say: in mere language, the temporal human being expresses what he feels about something. In eurythmy, the eternal human being expresses through movements what he experiences in any event. And that is why it is quite natural that eurythmy can say, even though it is still in its infancy today — this must always be said — and because it is still imperfect, only in its beginnings, we know this very well, we are our own harshest critics, it will continue to develop, because it makes use of the human being himself, who is a small world, containing all the secrets of the world within himself. It will continue to develop and will be able to stand alongside the other, older, fully-fledged arts as a fully-fledged art in its own right.