The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1923–1925

GA 277d — 9 July 1923, Dornach

Eurythmy Performance

From Robert Schumann's “Kinderszenen”
‘Zueignung’ by Novalis
From a sonata by W. A. Mozart
“Den Abgeschiedenen” by Vladimir Solovyov
“Ich weilte unter abgeschiednen Seelen” by Albert Steffen
“Du denkst dein Leiden” by Albert Steffen
“Du starrst den Himmel” by Albert Steffen
Sarabande in A minor from the English Suite by J. S. Bach
“Lebenslied” by Robert Hamerling
“Nachteinsamkeit” (Night Solitude) by a Chinese poet with music by Max Schuurman
“Le Samourai” by Jose Maria de Heredia
“Mélodie sans paroles” by Peter Tchaikovsky
“Tell me where is fancy bred” from “The Merchant of Venice” by W. Shakespeare
Mazurka in B flat major by Frédéric Chopin
Minuet by Jean-Philippe Rameau
“The Passionate Shepherd” by Christopher Marlowe
Septet Op. 20 by L. v. Beethoven

Dear guests, dear friends!

If one wants to understand the full meaning of eurythmy, one needs to understand how eurythmy attempts to create a truly visible language or even a truly visible song, so that, on the one hand, what is played musically can also be represented eurythmically on stage, and on the other hand, what is present in declamation and recitation through spoken language can in turn be given on stage in the visible language of eurythmy.

Now we must be clear that every human expression, every expression of the human being within the physical world, reveals itself from the whole of human nature, but that in his consciousness, in his full waking consciousness, the human being actually only has the world of ideas. What we experience in feeling is not experienced at the same level of wakefulness as we experience ideas while awake; rather, what is experienced in feeling has the same level of consciousness as dreams. So we can already say: actual feeling is experienced in a dreamlike way. When the ideas rise up—and insofar as our feelings are transformed into ideas—our emotional life also appears to us as awake. But our will life is completely submerged, as if in sleep, and indeed as if in dreamless sleep.

This will life as such is completely pushed down into the unconscious of the human being. And we can say: Only what is imaginative [do we have of any impulse of the will]. We imagine what movement should be; this then passes into our organism and reappears when we move. But we receive only images that enter our waking consciousness, both from the intention underlying the will and from what ultimately happens. What goes on in our human nature to bring about the impulse of will is enveloped in sleep, just as the whole human soul life is enveloped in sleep between falling asleep and waking up.

Now, however, what we express as spoken language, as singing, is such that the whole human being draws from the whole of human nature. Let us first reflect on spoken language. When we express something in a sentence, that sentence reveals the whole human being. What is otherwise only experienced in dreams, the emotional, lives on as an impact in the words, in the sound, and the impulse of will lives on in the word, in the sound. But when we speak, we can — this is the case for most people, unless they are people who speak in their sleep, and we do not want to consider such abnormal phenomena now — when we speak, we must speak as fully awake human beings. So something unconscious enters our language, something that is in the depths of our being and that expresses itself in language by means of the sound being uttered, by means of the sound being strong or weak, and so on.

When we practice ordinary language, the ordinary languages of the earth, we adapt to earthly conditions, and then we allow thoughts to influence our words. But thought is an inartistic element. The artistry of language only begins where thought no longer has an effect—neither as a thought of cognitive communication nor as a thought that is to be communicated from person to person in conventional life. Intellectual life as such is inartistic. The poet needs the intellectual because thoughts must first live in language. For the poet alone, it is particularly important that what emerges from the unconscious is shaped in language, shaped by making language pictorial, shaped by making language musical. And artistically—artistically in the poetic sense—only that which is pictorial in language is artistic, where the plasticity of language, the pictorial coloring of sounds, is worked out, or that which is musical in language, meter, rhythm, and so on. So the poet must simply take the content of thought for language, but then shape it through the influence of the unconscious. He must allow the emotional and the volitional to flow into it. This cannot be allowed to flow into thoughts, because they have nothing emotional and nothing volitional; it can only be allowed to flow into the treatment of language.

When I say, “The tree is green,” I have first expressed a thought, and I have made the language as abstract as possible. If I try, for example, to lift the word order out of the ordinary conventional, when I say, “What a green tree” — then I already get a nuance of feeling into the language. But even more so by making the beat faster, by changing the rhythm and the like, by putting into the intonation that which pours into language as volition. Thus there is a secret eurythmy in language that comes from feeling and will and that the declaimer and reciter must preferably bring to life again. Otherwise, one is dealing with prose reading and not with real recitation and declamation, as has been taught and attempted here for years by Dr. Steiner – and as is repeatedly attempted with eurythmy, because only when the reciter and declamer has eurythmy in his recitation and declamation then this eurythmic quality can be represented on the other side. Now, through spiritual scientific observation, one can see that what flows from the unconscious into language also flows into singing — this can be traced with spiritual scientific observation. So one can trace: What is contained in anything that is spoken from feeling? What lies within anything spoken from the will? While in language everything is pushed upwards, towards the head, so to speak, and only the thought is colored or made musical, one can now go back to that which colors the thought from feeling and will, makes it plastic or musical. And because it comes from the human system of movement, one can now represent it in those images that come about in the human being himself through the human system of movement.

When a person moves in this way, there is first of all a spatial image in their movement, which is the imaginative, which in language lies only in the formation of sounds. Or there is something temporal in the movement, the sequence of movements, the coordination, the harmonization of the movements, the melodic nature of the movements – what is temporal can also be made into a melodious theme: this lives in recitation, in poetry – it can be seen precisely in the musicality of language. One can see it in relation to the will and the feeling, how they live or resonate in the system of movement. Through the will, this is the case. And so one can bring out something figurative and something rhythmic, melodious, from the way in which human beings move. That is to say, everything that is to be taken into account in declamation is brought out from unconscious insight [illegible passage in the stenogram], which cannot lie in thought.

All this is carried out through the movement of individual human limbs or through movements in space. This creates something artistic that is neither dance nor mere gesture. The gesture is, however, a kind of eurythmic babbling, because it is precisely what we cannot express in abstract thought language that we come to the aid of through gestures – only if we are temperamentless fellows do we put our hands in our pockets and try not to make any gestures. If we are people with feelings, then we are itching to make gestures. However, these gestures are initially like babbling compared to the articulated language of eurythmy. In eurythmy, we have gestures that do not merely signify some feeling, but which themselves express a feeling through the figure of the gesture, through what arises in space as a figure through the moving person themselves, or what arises through the temporal course of eurythmy. In this way, we transform what is actually always an unconscious guess in the gesture into immediate perception.

And while we have to feel the gesture itself unconsciously, what appears as movement in eurythmy must be viewed with the senses. And [it] is presented to the outer senses as sensory perception, precisely that which otherwise, when we speak or sing, takes place in the subconscious and only resounds in the temperament, in the sound of the notes, in the color of the sound; that is precisely what is made visible. So that eurythmic art is something that is, in the most eminent sense, a vivid thing. And those people who believe that eurythmy must first be interpreted intellectually misunderstand eurythmy. One should not first interpret these forms that arise, but rather enjoy them, enjoy them artistically and aesthetically, take pleasure in them in a beautiful way, as is the case with art in general, that one takes pleasure in the beauty of art. Everything that can be said about eurythmy in abstract terms is really only a substitute. The actual content of eurythmy is the perception of the figures and the perception of the temporal sequence of the eurythmic movements. That is what matters. And this expresses in a visible language the content of a poetic-artistic or musical work. When we look at it this way, it becomes clear to us: Human beings have the language that they learn to speak and then continue to speak for the rest of their lives on earth, and it is foolish to believe, as spiritualism does, that departed souls can speak in ordinary human language. Departed souls no longer have any national language, but work their way out of the national language. When you are dead, you cease to be English or French or Italian or anything like that. You enter a very different realm. Therefore, it is of course foolish to believe that you can immediately receive some kind of manifestation in any language. What the dead speak must first be translated into human language. Language is a result of the earthly and is adapted to earthly conditions. But when a person wants to give their language a less earthly character from the depths of their soul, they resort to gestures. And one can always say: a person who wants to stand stiff as a board and speak stiff as a board is actually always materialistic and earthly, if not in their worldview, then in their feelings. Those who speak more from the spiritual world are always inspired to accompany their speech with gestures, because what is accompanied by ordinary gestures has meaning in the spiritual world that is directly adjacent to ours. There it is experienced as language. There is actually always something, as if beings from the angelic world, from the world of the angeloi, were inspiring people to support language, which is an earthly language, from the supersensible.

But when we move on to eurythmy, when we examine this visible language of eurythmy, then the human being unconsciously – more or less naturally, but if one wants to create eurythmy, then it must be created out of consciousness – but he places himself on the plane of the archangels and performs those movements that signify language in the world of the archangels. And so we actually accompany with an eminently supernatural element that which the poet in turn wants to elevate to the supernatural by not taking language in its prosaic sense, but treating it pictorially, sculpturally, or musically.

It might seem a little eccentric to say that eurythmy is the earthly reflection of the language of the archangels. And even if it does seem eccentric, for a materialistic thinker it is just that. And one must rightly say: when the poet says, "When the soul speaks, it speaks / alas, [already] the soul no longer" — the poet says this because he feels that what is actually to be poetically shaped is dragged down under all circumstances when it is poured into prose language. And [the heavenly] must first be brought in through the art of recitation and declamation, which reflect this intention in art.

But what the poet experiences, what is not meant for the sensory world, should be expressed precisely through these movements in the language of eurythmy. Basically, everyone who has truly lived in an artistic atmosphere has always known that all art elevates what happens on earth to the perspective of the heavenly. And it is actually only the materialistic present that has retained a lack of desire to look at Raphael's paintings, as I experienced with many painters at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, because these things were too unearthly for them. They preferred to paint every single wart on a person's face so that as much of the earthly as possible was there. And someone who was particularly appreciated as an artist among theosophists once told me that he was the first to have the courage to paint nudes in such a way that they had hair in places where humans have hair. While the others wanted to refrain a little from the completely earthly, he saw this as a special boldness. And now, well, Michelangelo can still be accepted today, because he at least tried to descend to earth. But Raphael is unpalatable to some. But now: every art form actually has this aspiration to give the earthly the splendor of the supernatural. And in this, every art form actually has its real justification. And so we can say that eurythmy, in seeking to create a new art form out of the elemental, is attempting to follow the path that has always been taken when true art forms have arisen in the development of humanity. Therefore, we can hope that eurythmy will flourish as an art form, because it does not deny the genuine, true spiritual origin of art, and this will secure its future.