The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1923–1925

GA 277d — 17 July 1923, Dornach

Eurythmy Performance

“The Rune of the Four Winds” by Fiona Macleod
“The Moonchild” by Fiona Macleod
From ‘Kinderszenen’ (Scenes from Childhood) by Robert Schumann
“The Fairy Tale of Imagination” from the 6th scene of “The Portal of Initiation” by Rudolf Steiner
Air in D major by J. S. Bach “Sind unsere Wünsche so flüchtig” (Are our desires so fleeting) by Vladimir Solovyov Prelude in E-flat minor by J. S. Bach “Als am dritten Tage” (On the third day) by Albert Steffen Adagio con esprit, Op. 27,1 by L. v. Beethoven “Let Us Love the Trees” by Albert Steffen
“Edward” in the translation by J. G. Herder
‘Memory’ by Anton Bruckner
“Where Does Evil Come From?” from: “The Trial of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner
“Schlummerlied” (Sleep Song), from Op. 124 by Robert Schumann
“April” by William Watson
Theme with variations in G major, K. 379, by W. A. Mozart
“Who is Sylvia?” from “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” by William Shakespeare
“Spring” from “Love's Labour Lost” by William Shakespeare with music by Jan Stuten Address on Eurythmy, Dornach, July 17, 1923

Ladies and gentlemen!

When I always say a few words before our performances, it is because the sources of eurythmy can easily be misunderstood and because it is only gradually that people come to realize how simple, artistically simple, it ultimately becomes for immediate perception, what is brought out of certain depths of the world's being. And everything artistic, as well as every revelation of human nature, is actually drawn from certain depths of the world's being, where it then finds artistic perfection, above all human language itself. And eurythmy wants to be nothing other than a visible human language or a visible song.

But we need only remind ourselves how hidden those processes are within the human organism that then culminate in human language, and which are handled unconsciously by human beings, as they are first learned in complete unconsciousness, in an elementary way, in the naivety of the child. What ultimately reveals itself as language and is understood as language really emerges from the deepest innermost nature of human beings. External science is still far from sufficient today to look into the tremendous, wonderful, and also complicated organization that underlies human speech or singing. Today, because these preparatory words should never be too long, I would like to point out just a few things.

I would like to point out how breathing is connected with speech on the one hand, but also how everything that lives in human thoughts on the one hand and everything that lives in human blood circulation on the other hand is connected with this speech. We must be clear that every utterance of the human being, every soul revelation of the human being, is based on some change within this life of the blood in the human being. When we indulge in any sensory perception, our organism actively intervenes – on the one hand in the nerve currents that go to the sensory organs, but on the other hand also in the entire bloodstream. Only in the most extreme expressions of the human being does the connection between the soul life and the blood flow become apparent: we turn pale as a corpse, that is, the blood retreats from the periphery to the center when we are afraid. We turn red when we are angry, that is, the blood goes from the center to the periphery.

What is evident in extreme cases is, in a small, I would say “atomistic” way, the basis of everything that ebbs and flows in the small differentiations of our feeling and willing soul life. And when we focus our eyes on any object in the external world, it is initially what we pour into our bloodstream that constantly stimulates the eye, so to speak – but at the moment when we perceive through the eye, it also shapes the eye, shapes it from within. Just as we otherwise build up all our organs through the blood, so in the moment of perception, even if not in the strict sense of building up, we nevertheless act upon our organs. We carry our own being into the organ. And through the nervous system we take possession of what is the outside world. Through the activity of the blood, we grasp, as it were, what flows into us through the nervous system. I can only express this in words that are, I would say, approximately correct, because spiritual science or anthroposophy is able to supplement precisely this area, to supplement that which science can deal with in its very first elements.

And so it is in a similar way with speech. When we speak, what is connected with the human being's thinking and feeling flows through the nervous system into the corresponding organs of communication, again into the parts of our body that produce speech and song, from the vocal cords to all the various organs of speech. But breathing and blood circulation also play a role in all of this, infusing our speech with the elements of feeling and willing from our human nature. And when we speak, we experience an intermingling of breathing and blood circulation. These are wonderful, subtle processes that the crude science of the present day is not yet able to grasp, but which underlie ordinary speech and singing. Blood circulation and nerves interact like two polar abilities. In anthroposophical terms, the ego organization of the human being and the astral organization interact.

If one is now able to listen to the secrets of speech and singing, one sees how thought weaves luminously on the one hand, while on the other hand the will pulsates in the blood circulation, and how through this interaction the breathing process and the change in the breathing stream through the speech and singing organization bring about the tone and the sound and the connections between the sounds.

But everything that becomes thought and impulse of will in our everyday human life during our earthly existence also contains at the same time a reference to something completely different. In thought, we have always had the possibility of looking from it to something higher, something supersensible. Thought appears abstractly in earthly human life. So this abstract thought is only the earthly image of what lives in a more pictorial form in the supersensible, the super-earthly. In a sense, the super-earthly, with which human beings are connected, is shadowed in thought. It projects itself in thought. While thought must interact with the will in the blood circulation, that which thought no longer contains itself, but which, in a sense, vibrates above it like an imagination, like a pictoriality, can also grow together with the blood circulation, just as thought otherwise grows together with it. In the same way, this imaginative element above thought can grow together with that which now manifests itself in the human being as movement in space, movement of his limbs in space, and also through his ability to move at all.

And just as in speech, where we remain calm with our whole body, we associate blood circulation only with the nervous system, as if there were a kind of harmony between nerves and will, so too can there be a harmony between human movements in space—the limbs that are visibly manifested on the outside and the thoughts that underlie things. However, one can only really understand this if one knows how our entire language has developed from imagination to its current conventional use via the detour of thought. When we say, for example, “a” today, this is the last, shadowy attenuation of what actually lies behind it in a supersensible way. Only if one has a finer feeling for what the soul feels when recognizing a sound can one begin to understand how, behind today's human revelation on earth, the archetypal idea for what we express is expressed in a completely abstract, shadowed form.

When we pronounce the letter u, we may have a faint sense that the human soul expresses itself in the u sound when something becomes eerie, something indefinable that it cannot see, becomes eerie. Those who study these things closely will realize that the # sound springs unconsciously from the human soul wherever this human soul comes into contact with supernatural events outside itself that do not really concern it. So let us imagine, ladies and gentlemen, a supernatural event outside of human beings that has nothing to do with them, but which they become aware of. Human beings express this awareness in the # sound. Therefore, in languages that still reckon with these elementary things, we will find the u sound everywhere where there is, so to speak, something spiritual outside, but which does not directly affect the human being, rather, the human being must first put themselves in its place. This can be observed in [languages] the further east one goes. The further west one goes, the more one finds that these things have been stripped away. But let us take an ordinary word, the word “book.” The u is not entirely meaningless and groundless in it. And if a language has something completely different in the book — “libre” — it means that it is taken from completely different soul backgrounds. When I say “book,” it lies in the awareness of something that is present somewhere as spiritual content, where I first have to push myself to perceive it.

When we say an o, we are faced with something spiritual that is already announcing itself to us, that is telling us something through itself. When we say an “e,” we have the feeling that this spiritual element enters our own body and permeates us. When we say an “a,” we have the feeling that a spiritual element is entering us, which is related to our soul and actually splits us in two. When we say an “i,” we only have the right image if we already have in this “i” the anchoring of our spirit within ourselves—in a sense, the filling in of what is relevant to ourselves.

And so very specific images—imaginations—underlie the sounds of language, not just the meanings of words. And it is these images, like the other formative forces, that work from the etheric body of the human being into the human imagination, so to speak, and already bring about ordinary language. But to do this, these images must first be weakened into abstract thoughts. However, if the images are now carried directly into the human being, this can only happen if the human being represents these images in his own moving organism. When a child learns to speak, it learns to speak from its complex organism, unconsciously. The person who develops eurythmy now asks: What lies at the basis of the physical organism as something spiritual, supersensible? Ordinary language is drawn out of the physical organism. What lies at the soul-spiritual basis of the physical organism can be studied. Then one moves from language to imagination, to moving images in sound. These images can be transferred to human movements. This results in a language that brings the language of the soul much closer than ordinary, conventional spoken language, which conveys knowledge, or even singing.

And with this, one comes closer to what, for example, the poet strives for when he is not concerned with simply using the prose content of language as it is, but with shaping language in rhythm, rhyme, meter, and melodious theme. This is what makes language pictorial, precisely because what the poet said is actually quite true: “When the soul speaks, / alas, it is no longer the soul that speaks.” For the soul does not live in abstract sounds; the soul lives in images, and the soul moves according to its images. The poet seeks, at least in his treatment of language, in all that he achieves through Merrik and dialectics, to achieve the shaping of language as a secret eurythmy.

This secret eurythmy, which lives in poetry, is what also lives in song on another level. It is brought out and transferred to human mobility. This creates something of which one can say: when, for example, a poem is recited or declaimed, this gives one side that is expressed in things; if eurythmy represents what the reciter or declaimer achieves only through the treatment of language, then I would say that what must first be attained in the human being is deepened further into the soul when one merely listens to the declamation or recitation.

You will therefore understand that the art of recitation and declamation, which is fundamentally neglected in our somewhat unartistic era, can be restored to health through eurythmy. For through eurythmy, it is possible to represent not only what is artistic in the formal prose content of poetry, but also that which, in the treatment of poetry, rises to the imaginative — be it the imaginative of the image or the imaginative of the tone. But this must also be attempted in the art of recitation or declamation, as Dr. Steiner has been teaching for years, even in speech itself. Then the interaction of language with eurythmy can have the same effect as the sound of a musical instrument with eurythmy. When the musical instrument sounds and eurythmy acts upon it, one is not dealing with a dance, but with singing in movement. When reciting or declaiming to eurythmy, one is dealing with a visible language in eurythmy, which actually reproduces in movement what the true poetic artist experiences in his soul, so that the poetic work can immediately come to life for the immediate perception of those who appear before us on stage as moving human beings.

But this is precisely why we can understand that eurythmy is something that, despite being drawn from the deepest mysteries of human nature, must nevertheless be understood in all its simplicity. Just as natural language must be drawn from the deepest mysteries of the human organism, but is then understood naively when we listen to it without asking: What does an “i” mean? What does a # mean? – Eurythmy is likewise drawn from the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being, and we understand it when we do not interpret it intellectually, when we do not think about what one movement or another means, but rather when we surrender ourselves to the forms and shapes of these movements in our aesthetic perception. Eurythmy is the art that is least of all for thinking — thought is always something inartistic — but rather directly for perception, for sensory impression. And sensory impression directly reveals the spiritual, because it elevates language and thought to imagination, allowing imagination to be embodied by the human being himself. To the same extent that we need in our time to move away from the sensual to the supersensible spiritual human being, to the same extent we also need to deepen the arts by leading them back to the spiritual element.

Eurythmy is a first attempt in this direction. And since it uses the very same means that the earliest arts always used, we may hope that it has unlimited potential for development. Certainly, today we must still—and I am doing so at this moment—ask the esteemed audience for their indulgence before a eurythmy performance, for eurythmy is in its infancy. But when one sees how eurythmy has been drawn from sources similar to those of all the arts, one can hope that what is still in its infancy today will develop into a fully-fledged younger art alongside the fully-fledged older arts.