The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1923–1925

GA 277d — 8 July 1923, Dornach

Eurythmy Performance

Theme in E-flat major by Robert Schumann
“The rune of the four winds” by Fiona Macleod
Adagio in C minor, Op. 13, by L. v. Beethoven
“Ein riesenhaftes Antlitz” (A gigantic face) by Albert Steffen
“Remembrance” (Sonnet 30) by William Shakespeare
From a sonata by W. A. Mozart
“The Fairy Tale of Imagination” from the 6th scene of “The Portal of Initiation” by Rudolf Steiner
Etude in A flat major, Op. 25,1 by Frédéric Chopin
" April“ by William Watson
Bourrée in C major from the 3rd Cello Suite by J. S. Bach
”Schlummerlied“ (Sleep Song), from op. 124 by Robert Schumann
”L'Etoile“ by Alfred de Musset
‘Orpheus’ from ”King Henry VIII" by William Shakespeare with music by L. van der Pals
“Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred” from “The Merchant of Venice” by W. Shakespeare ‘Spring’ from “Love's Labour Lost” by William Shakespeare with music by Jan Stuten Minuet by Jean-Philippe Rameau “The Passionate Shepherd” by Christopher Marlowe Septet, Op. 20 by L. v. Beethoven

Ladies and gentlemen!

Since we began giving eurythmy performances, I have always characterized eurythmy in a few words before the performances. And today I would like to take the liberty of saying a few words about eurythmy from another perspective before the performance. It must be made absolutely clear that eurythmy is an attempt to create a visible language, a visible language through which what the human soul feels can be revealed in a more vivid, that is, more artistic and also in a certain plastic way – just as, on the other hand, this revelation can take place through sound and tone. To do this, it is necessary to have a truly spiritual scientific understanding of the process of language development and language formation as it is rooted in the human being.

Language is, first and foremost, the expression of what human beings draw from the depths of their souls and communicate externally with the help of their organic tools. If one considers language and singing insofar as they are expressions of human soul life, one comes to see singing, first of all, as a more differentiated external manifestation of human soul life than language, namely civilized language. Language imprints meaning onto sound, and in doing so becomes sound. Sound is the tone that carries meaning or significance. However, because meaning, significance, that is, thought, enters into sound, language takes on an inartistic character.

For only that which gives immediate insight into what humans experience in images can be artistic. We therefore see that singing becomes more artistic the more it succeeds in completely overcoming the word and, so to speak, returning to musical sound design. In language, the poet must strive to remove that which is there for the rationality of language, through which language seeks to communicate from person to person. He must overcome that through which language is an expression of abstract thoughts, of the actual meaning. And if he wants to be a real, artistic poet, he must condescend to seek what he wants to reveal in the formation of language, either in the pictorial formation — how one sound illuminates another, how one sound illuminates or darkens itself, and the like — or he must seek it in the musical formation of the sequence of sounds, in the rhythmic, the rhythmic, the melodic-thematic, the revelation of what is experienced by the soul.

One can say that in this respect, the very least of what passes for poetry in today's somewhat unartistic age is real poetry, in fact no poetry at all; ninety-nine percent of what is written today is certainly not poetry, but at most one percent. For the poet must not express the spirit through language, but let the spirit flow in language, that is, seek revelation in the pictorial and musical aspects of language.

Now, one can reduce language to its elements, so to speak, in such a way that one observes—and this can initially be done quite well from a spiritual-scientific perspective—how human language, as we have it and as it is spoken now, is entirely conditioned by human nerve-sense development. Everything that the nervous-sensory development experiences flows into the formation of the breath—and through this, the breath becomes a kind of airy gesture. And just as in everyday life, when language is not enough, we supplement it with gestures, with signs, just as signs have the ability to express something, so too is the sign internalized, formed as an air gesture in the air expelled in the breath. And this air gesture then conveys what is carried by language. But in this air gesture, the thought vibrates, weaves, and flows—the thought that is the abstract expression of the soul life.

Now, however, one can also give form to what the soul experiences from another perspective. The nervous-sensory system is, in a sense, only one pole of the human organization. The other pole is the motor system with everything connected with it. And in the ordinary gesture, the ordinary movement, the other pole already supports what is revealed as the air gesture influenced by the nervous system. But what is quite primitive as a gesture, incidentally supporting speech, can be further developed. Then there arises the formed gesture, the articulated gesture, then there arises the artistically formed gesture, which can then relate to the ordinary gesture in the same way that articulated, artistically perfected speech relates to the babbling of a child. One could say that what emerges in ordinary life is a kind of babbling in gestures, as opposed to what is to be revealed through eurythmy in perfect articulation as a trained, developed sign language.

But what is achieved by this? Well, this is achieved: as human beings descend from their pre-earthly existence and enter the earthly world, they become what they are as earth citizens precisely through the special structure of their nervous and sensory system, which tends toward the head and head formation. The head structure is what enters when human beings, who are the expression of pre-earthly life as spirit and soul, envelop themselves in a body. The head structure, which the human being first forms when entering earthly existence, is actually there so that what strives in the human being to be outwardly earthly can fit into the earthly realm. The head rests on the physical organism in such a way that, through the special integration of all the forces in the head, the gravitational force exerted by the earth on the human being is integrated in the right way into that part of the human being which does not actually want to be subject to gravity, but which wants to be an expression of the cosmos, which the human head is modeled after. And one can say: the human head is formed in such a way that, on the one hand, it shows how it is born out of the cosmos, where there is no gravity, but [it also shows how it] integrates itself into that which governs the human body from birth to death, into the effective forces of gravity.

And by learning earthly language or by taking up the word in earthly song, human beings are, in a sense, subject to what emanates from the earth; they are subject to gravity. But the human organism is most subject to gravity in the human movement system. When humans walk, when they move their arms and hands, the forces of gravity are constantly at work in these movements of the human organism. Humans overcome the forces of gravity to some extent—with every step we take, we fight with our free, weightless organism against the gravity that weighs upon us, to which we are subject as humans in earthly life.

Now it is particularly appealing when, in a sense, the process that underlies language — the [bringing in] of the weightless, supernatural human being into the realm of gravity — when this process occurs from the other side, when the weight that is in our motor organism and which, one might say, in a very weak form, only detaches itself elementarily from the earthly with every step, with every gesture of the hand and arm, when one now tries to free it completely from the earthly, when one performs the song in rhythmic, measured movements, when one specifically transforms the most expressive human movements of the arms and hands from gestures burdened by heaviness to free gestures. In this way, one sees something very special in human beings. By looking at the organism that stands on the earth in this way, to which the forces of gravity are in a certain sense incorporated, one sees how it continually overcomes gravity through the power of its soul.

So while language, spoken language, becomes an abstract means of expression through itself—by placing the human being in gravity—what is attempted in this way, where gravity is overcome through the arms and hands in living gestures, becomes a language in which the human being achieves the opposite of what is achieved in spoken language. In spoken language, they bring heaven down to earth and, so to speak, insert heaven into earth. In eurythmy, which reveals itself through gestures by meaningfully overcoming gravity in the human organism of movement, humans wrest their own existence from the earthly and express their soul in such a way that they affirm in every single gesture: I carry a heavenly human being within my earthly human being.

And if one wanted to express this a little figuratively, one would have to say: In ordinary gestures, where the human being expresses what he wants to say in a discreet manner alongside spoken language, angelic beings help the human being to support his earthly language. But when everyday gestures are transformed into the articulated gestures of eurythmy, what we see, when translated into the language that flows from being to being, is actually what the archangels speak to each other.

Human beings thus lift themselves up from the heavy ground into the region where spiritual-divine beings pour out their messages in the special way that is peculiar to them: Where the movements are not like that – one could say that the component of heaviness is inserted into them, but where the [heaviness] component detaches itself and wants to vibrate quite peripherally in the cosmic freedom. And this non-insertion is the inclination toward the eternal. Through eurythmy, one unleashes the eternal human being in the human being. That which rests within them as the divine-spiritual is expressed through the temporary earthly human being. And the soul of the human being appears to us through its eurythmic activity; it appears to us as that which pours forth from the eternal nature of the human being into the temporary form of the physical body.

This truly brings about what is an essential support, for example, for artistic recitation and declamation — in which the poet's struggle was actually to overcome language as something earthly and penetrate into the musical, rhythmic. However, this must be done in the way that Dr. Steiner has been attempting for years: to seek the eurythmic in language, not the abstract emphasis of content, of what is meaningful, but precisely the shaping of language, the musical, plastic, artistic. But then, when on the one hand one adds to declamation and recitation that which is musical, which is achieved through activity, through the overcoming of heaviness [overcomes] in human beings, who in a sense bid farewell to heaviness by putting their limbs into action, when one allows music and declamation to be accompanied by eurythmy, then an orchestral interaction arises which, in essence, can create the full inner beauty of artistry in language or in song or in music in general [and] bring it forth in a different way, thereby bringing out further depths of the artistic.

The artistic is such that it has infinite depths. Of course, when I say something like this, I must first ask the esteemed audience for their indulgence. We are only at the beginning with all this, which sets such broad goals, and we ourselves, as our own strict critics, know that we are only at the beginning. But eurythmy carries within it infinite possibilities for development. It unleashes the deeper sides of the weightless human being, where the human being becomes free and presents itself as a divine-spiritual being. This gives us hope that eurythmy will continue to develop further and further, ultimately becoming an art form as legitimate as the other arts that have already found recognition. Even if this may take a long time, what we can do as a first step toward a new attempt at such an art form should nevertheless be of interest again and again.