The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1923–1925

GA 277d — 15 July 1923, Dornach

Eurythmy Performance

Prelude in E-flat minor by J. S. Bach
“Als am dritten Tage” by Albert Steffen
Adagio con esprit, Op. 27,1 by L. v. Beethoven
“Den Abgeschiedenen” by Vladimir Solovyov
“Ich weilte unter abgeschiedenen Seelen” by Albert Steffen “Du denkst dein Leiden” by Albert Steffen “Du starrst den Himmel” by Albert Steffen Sarabande in A minor from the 2nd English Suite by J. S. Bach “Extase” by Victor Hugo Largo in C major from Op. 7,4 by L. v. Beethoven “Schlummerlied” (Lullaby) from Op. 124 by Robert Schumann “April” by William Watson ‘Nachteinsamkeit’ (Night Solitude) by a Chinese poet with music by Max Schuurman “Le Samourai” by Jose Maria de Heredia “Melodie sans paroles” by Peter Tchaikovsky “Who is Sylvia?” from “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” by William Shakespeare
Mazurka in B flat major by Frédéric Chopin
‘Spring’ from “Love's Labour's Lost” by William Shakespeare with music by Jan Stuten

Ladies and gentlemen!

If eurythmy consists of being a trained revelation of human gestures, then it must be distinguished from the art of mimicry on the one hand and the art of dance on the other. Eurythmy does not seek to be either of these things. Eurythmy truly seeks to be, in the movement of the individual human limb or of the whole human being in space, what language is through the air formed by the human organism. And eurythmy really did come into being in such a way that the same impulses that the human organism otherwise releases into the shaped air as a mediator of speech or song to reveal the soul, that everything that lies in this impulse is poured into movement impulses. Eurythmy should therefore not be interpreted intellectually, but rather its individual movements and gestures should be perceived artistically in their form. And the more one approaches what is given eurythmically with artistic perception rather than intellectual interpretation, the more one will come to understand eurythmy.

For just as human speech is brought out of the human organism by the small child, albeit in an unconscious way, so eurythmy is brought out as a visible language or visible song, albeit consciously — and therefore no less elemental, no less inwardly lawful, from this same human organism. It is, after all, what is formed when we speak or sing, a gesture, just a gesture, which is formed within the exhaled air stream through the various formations of this air stream.

Let us take the letter a, for example, and go back to the elements of language: essentially, what is revealed in the letter a is an element of the soul which, if one wants to grasp it, expresses itself as a kind of wonder or amazement. But when the a appears in the context of language, this emotional wonder or astonishment is greatly weakened, melting, so to speak, into the context of the word, into the context of language. People no longer even think about it, let alone feel anything of what originally wanted to overflow into the a from the emotional, mood elements of their being. As an air gesture, this a is formed by a full stream of air pouring outwards and, in a sense, becoming shell-shaped, so that it recedes in its outflow before the air density that already exists outside.

When a person pronounces the e, it is as if a kind of congestion were to arise in front of their vocal organ; the exhaled stream of air first pours out into the outside world with full force, but is then stopped, blocked by the external air density, and splits. - When we pronounce the letter “i”, we essentially produce it at the very front of our mouth, giving it a pointed force. And we pronounce the letter “o” in such a way that a sharper, more arrow-like stream of air pours into the density of the outside air, splitting the outside air as if with a sword. - When we pronounce the o, it is as if we were simultaneously holding back the mass of air that we ourselves release into the outside world in a certain sense by expelling it; so that we ourselves work on the air outside us with the air expelled outward, thereby forming something like a direction into the outside air. - With the #, we split the outside air and perceive the # in the reuniting of the outside air that has been split into two air currents. And so, if we consider the shape that the air takes when we produce the sound, we can follow the movement of the air.

This can now be extended to vowels, as I have just mentioned, and can also be seen in consonants, and can then be seen in the way in which human beings express their soul, in the literal, sentence-like connection of the elements of language or the elements of song. When all this is artistically rounded off internally and transferred to human movement, especially to the most expressive movement possible through human arms or hands, a visible language or visible singing emerges. And we then obtain a very specific relationship between what is revealed to the eye as visible language, so to speak, and what is revealed to the ear in hearing in ordinary language or singing.

Human beings are constituted in such a way that when they speak and sing, they leave the rest of their organism unused in a certain sense, using only part of the rhythmic, respiratory, and cardiac organism as a foundation that sends its forces into the head organism. The head organism is then the main impulsator of what lives in the words or in the voice of song. And everything that comes from the human heart must pour into what we reveal in singing and spoken language in such a way that, in a sense, only the reflection, the echo of the heart's experience – and thus of the mind's experience – pours into speech and song.

This must be so because, ultimately, the entire human organism as a head organism is organized in such a way that what is expressed through the head is adapted to earthly life. The human being, who is actually a child of the cosmos at the same time, tears himself away from the cosmic by completely adapting his head organism to the earthly. But since the head organism lives on in speech and song, impulsed, as it were, only from below by what emanates from the rhythmic, the human being, in expressing himself through speech or song, is essentially the earthly being that he is between birth and death.

Therefore, in poetry or in composition for singing, everything that man is by breaking away from earthly life must, in a sense, be placed between the vocal and even the tonal. If we take language into account, the poet must, in the way he paints with sounds, in the way he lightens or darkens one sound with another, in the way he brings musical rhythm or meter or even the musical theme to life, not only in what lives in prose sounds, but also in what lives musically in the succession of sounds —the poet must make the heart speak within it. So that one might say: the heart does not live in the sound, the heart lives in the relationship between the individual sounds, in the movement of the stream.

What the poet can achieve, so to speak, in the treatment—in the entire treatment of the sentence alone, or perhaps only in the treatment of the stanza—can already be placed in eurythmy in the visible language in the formation of the individual gestures for the sound itself. And furthermore, through this speaking that occurs in forms of movement, through this language of eurythmy, what is to be expressed is pushed back into the human soul. For example, when we pronounce a word that has the sound a, when we pronounce the word “leaf,” the fully experienced feeling of this word “leaf” is based on astonishment or wonder, which in turn is formed in a different way by the other sounds. Every time we vocalize, it is actually a revelation of the soul, such as wonder, such as loving roundness, that is what is being described or the like.

But what has been worn away in language, which has become conventional and a means of expressing thought, one might say in the “sense of thought,” what lives in language from the mind, from feeling — language itself has become very prosaic — all of this is fully reawakened when, in full articulation, the visible means of expression of human beings, which otherwise appear only in their very rudimentary form, are revealed in the articulated gestures and soulfulness of eurythmy. This is what can be given in recitation and declamation [or] accompanied by an instrument other than the human larynx or other speech organs; it can then be recited and declaimed and at the same time eurythmized. When eurythmized at the same time, it is like the orchestral blending of two different instruments, which in their different expressions can reveal the full rich content of a truly artistic creation.

Basically, when eurythmy is performed and recited at the same time, it is something that should be felt artistically in the soul through the interaction of both. Eurythmy can therefore also be accompanied by recitation and declamation in such a way that declamation and recitation are treated artistically, as they were in more artistic times than today. Today, recitation and declamation are done in such a way that there is little artistic feeling, with the exception of a few artists who are sensitive to language. Today, most people just want to emphasize the prosaic. This is basically unartistic in relation to poetry. An artistic approach to poetry only occurs when the secret eurythmy already lies in the recitation and declamation itself and is now truly reawakened in the artistic recitation and declamation of the sounds, the movements that lie in the sequence of sounds, when everything that is inner soul movement, elevation or depression of the soul, and so on, when everything that lies between the sounds and in the movement of the sounds is taken into account in the treatment of language – not the punctuating of language.

The difference between the art of dance and eurythmy can be clearly understood by observing how a musical piece is played on an instrument or by an orchestra and then accompanied eurythmically. This is not a dance, but rather a song that is expressed in movements rather than sounds. The difference between the eurythmic movement you accompany musically and dance is that in eurythmy, everything is pushed back into those movement impulses of the human being that are embraced with full consciousness. So that in eurythmy, it is actually the soul that moves in the limbs, whereas in dance, the soul first surrenders to the limbs and the limbs then place themselves in the necessary spatial form. Therefore, in dance, the human being loses themselves in the movement, while in eurythmy, when accompanying the music, they reveal precisely what it is that makes them human in a soulful and spiritual way.

Compared to mime, which accompanies speech and is therefore suggestive, and compared to dance, eurythmy is the art of movement that most deeply touches the inner being of the human being. So when we allow eurythmy to have its proper artistic effect on us, we must say: In ordinary speech, even when it conveys poetry, it is actually only the heart that speaks through the head in a reflection. Eurythmy calls on the heart to speak through the whole human being and to suppress what is only thought in the use of language as something inartistic.

One might say: we look into the movements that are otherwise concentrated only in the heart, into the movements of the life element of the human being, the blood, and see what happens when we speak in the overall movement, in the overall waves and weaving of the blood. And what the human being otherwise first takes into the physical organ of the heart, from there passes on to the soul as excitement, so that it flows into the word, is immediately infused into the movement of the human being. So that one could actually say: it is one thing to follow what undulates and weaves in the movements of the air when a person speaks artistically, to follow it all the way to the heart, so that the heart would appear everywhere in its movements, its beats, as an echo of the soul, if one were to follow this directly, and on the other hand were to follow what is now being attempted instead of leading outward from the inner heart. If one were to follow this in the forms of the hands, the arms, or in the forms of the whole human being in space, one would actually have to find, on the wings of these eurythmic movements, the heart pouring out from the human being into the world space in artistic feeling. It is, so to speak, the heart given to the world that lives in eurythmy.

All these things are, of course, still in the early stages of experimentation. But there are so many possibilities for development in the shaping of the movements, which in turn should become apparent in the human soul and spirit as they develop further, that one can truly hope that eurythmic art, once it is fully developed, will also develop a full revelation of the human being who surrenders himself as an instrument of this art. Eurythmy will one day be able to stand alongside the fully established older arts as a fully justified younger art form. Therefore, we must ask our esteemed audience for their patience today; but interest in this art of eurythmy can already be aroused today, as has always been and can always be the case with the emergence of new art forms. Interest must be aroused for something that, as a new art form, wants to stand alongside the older art forms, arising precisely from the spirit, from the real spirit of our time.