The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1923–1925

GA 277d — 29 July 1923, Dornach

Eurythmy Performance

“The rune of the four winds” by Fiona Macleod
“Summer Evening” by Edward Grieg
“Your deeds are entwined” by Albert Steffen
“I dwelt among secluded souls” by Albert Steffen
“Davidsbündler Tänze” op. 6,11 by Robert Schumann
“Sind unsere Wünsche so flüchtig” by Vladimir Solovyov
Prelude in F minor by J. S. Bach
“Edward” in the transcription by J. G. Herder
‘Erinnerung’ by Anton Bruckner
Adagio con esprit, Op. 27,1 by L. v. Beethoven
“Hark, hark! The lark” from “Cymbeline” by W. Shakespeare with music by Jan Stuten
“Full fathom five” from “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare
Bourrée in C major from the 3rd Cello Suite by J. S. Bach
“Caprice” by Max Reger

Ladies and gentlemen!

The attempt to create a eurythmic art is based on an understanding of the human being that stems from insight into the true nature of language and from what results from this insight into the nature of language. Even a superficial observation of people speaking and singing should teach us that in speaking and singing, human beings reveal what their souls experience with the world through the body. Today, it is extremely difficult to revive the insights that arose from older human concepts. But this can be done on anthroposophical ground, because what humanity once possessed from an unspoiled, sublime primordial wisdom can now be regained through spiritual contemplation – I would like to say as a kind of higher naivety.

In language — as in every manifestation of the human being — the whole human being, the whole human being when we consider him or her spiritually, as a thinking, feeling, willing being, is at work. If we look at language, we see that in its entire manifestation it offers a decisive predominance of thinking and imagining. It is therefore also that which – if one may say so – emanates from the human interior and actually forms social relationships. But this also leads to language, on the one hand, becoming the expression of abstract knowledge and thus being exposed to the danger of being inartistic—for thought is always inartistic—and, on the other hand, language falling into conventionality, into pure utility, which in turn is inartistic.

We therefore see how the poet wants to make true in his own artistic and poetic endeavors what he says: “When the soul speaks, / alas, the soul no longer speaks.” This means that in speech, the soul becomes external in two ways—in terms of abstraction and in terms of usefulness. But the poetic artist brings speech, which on the one hand tends toward the abstract and on the other toward the useful, back into a kind of constantly dissolving and restoring balance in the imaginative and rhythmic-musical elements of language. He shapes language by gaining an imaginative view – at least approximately – of the inner essence of the nature of sound and also of the flow of speech in rhythm, meter, and melodious theme. For language is only artistic insofar as it is musical or – if one uses the word in a broader sense – plastic.

For those who today live only in what I might call the “civilizational elements” of language, sound is actually something abstract. They no longer have the whole world with them in sound. They no longer experience how language was originally drawn out of the soul in human development, in that sound as such is the expression of the emotional content, the emotional experience of the soul. Today, we only really feel this in the sounds of feeling, in the interjections, when we express our amazement in an “oh” or “o” when we have grasped the feeling within us of what can be felt in this way — when we have grasped something — which can be expressed in the “i.” This picturesque quality of sound can be reawakened, however, by returning to the imaginative and musical.

But then one sees how language, so to speak, favors the life of imagination and pours the mind and will into the life of imagination. So that in the treatment of language, in the way people speak, speech, which otherwise tends to be neutral and abstract, is lived through in the mind and feelings and is permeated by the will. And to what extent the emotional lives in the sound, the volitional surges, to what extent this can take place, the poet must succeed in expressing in his treatment of language. Otherwise, we are not dealing with true poetic art. And ninety-nine percent of all that is written in verse—to put it conservatively—is not poetry, not artistic poetry, but is born of abstractly felt language, is actually more or less a matter of imagination, that is, fundamentally inartistic.

If we then go further back into the inner nature of human beings, where people experience the great world, the universe, in their actual soul, more in an inner wave and weave – that is where the musical element arises. And this musical element reveals itself through people themselves in song. If the element of imagination is preferred in language, the element of feeling is preferred in music. Now, the will is something extraordinarily hidden in human nature. When humans imagine, they live, so to speak, in the imagination. Imagination is light-filled, imagination is clear in itself. Feeling is already darker, it already has something dreamlike about it. Will is, so to speak, something that remains as unknown to humans as the states of the soul in dreamless sleep from falling asleep to waking up. When one surrenders to an impulse of will, one actually has only the beginning and the end: the beginning in the imagination, which is the intention to accomplish this or that; the end, the shaping of the organs of movement for useful purposes in the world. But what goes on inside a person, and what brings out the actual impulse of will from the innermost depths of a person's being, remains unknown to a person's waking consciousness, just like what goes on during sleep.

But this is precisely what spiritual science is for, to reveal the deepest inner being of human beings, and indeed to reveal the will. How little our age is inclined to respond to such things is shown by the fact that it was only a few decades ago that Schopenhauer portrayed the will as something blind, as something dark in itself. And only when he experiences that illumination, for example in morality, where the will rises up, is projected, as it were, into the emotional realm, only when he experiences this illumination does he attain moral content in Schopenhauer's sense.

Anthroposophy must descend completely into the human being. Hence the mysterious weaving and essence of the will, shaping human expression, human revelation, just as language does through imagination. Now, human beings have organs in which they can reveal their will, supported at the same time by what they feel in their movements of will: These organs are the arms and hands. Therefore, the movement of the arms and hands, which is only supported — just as facial expressions support our speech — which is only supported by the movements of the other organs, the legs or feet or movements of the whole human being in space, by moving the human arm and hand, a language of will can arise, just as a language of ideas exists in ordinary language, in spoken language. But one must be able to respond to the essence of language. Just as a child learns to speak from the unconscious, in an elementary, naive way at an age when consciousness does not yet play an active role, so too can a person learn to express the element of will through movements of the arms and hands.

What happens when people express themselves in this way? We can say that when poetry, for example, is expressed through spoken language and artistic treatment, everything is projected toward the intellectual nature of human beings. The will and the feeling appear to permeate, pervade, and interweave language, but at the same time they weaken it. The poet strives to bring feeling and will into rhythm, meter, and the imagination of sound. And to the extent that he succeeds in doing so, his language becomes artistic.

When we turn to eurythmy, however, we leave behind the other pole of the human being – we leave behind the conceptual, we bring feeling together with will, and express this in the same lawful way that the human being reveals itself in spoken language. Therefore, eurythmy is not something that can be interpreted entirely intellectually, but rather something that works primarily through observation, because the movements of the arms and hands carry the will imbued with feeling.

When a poem is recited or declaimed, especially in declamation and recitation, as it must be, for there is no other way to do it, [than] to accompany eurythmy [with] recitation and declamation, then declamation and recitation in particular, which is not immediately understandable today in an age that is not very artistic – Dr. Steiner trained it for years, whereas otherwise the prosaic is simply pointed out, simply pointed out in declamation and recitation – the inner eurythmy is already emphasized in declamation and recitation here, as it were, as that which is present in the background of language [as] weaving. Then there is simply the other, the will and also the mind, which enters into the arms and hands, I would say, as if expressed through another instrument, that which the poet has alive within himself when he creates poetically, artistically. So there is an orchestral interaction between what is recited and declaimed and what comes to light on stage in eurythmy. What the poet must conceal in his treatment of language, I would say, is revealed through what comes to light in eurythmy.

It is similar with the vocal and musical elements. If we play any musical piece on an instrument, it can be accompanied by singing and movements of the arms and hands. However, it must always be borne in mind that eurythmy differs from dance in that in dance it is primarily important for the person to put what they want to achieve into their legs, so to speak, whereas in eurythmy the essential element lies in the movement of the arms and hands, and what resembles dance movements can at most be an accompaniment to the actual eurythmic movement that takes place in the arms and hands, just as our facial expressions and gestures complement what we express through speech. There is always something unartistic about eurythmy when it merges into dance. And there is something brutal about eurythmy turning into dance, because eurythmy is singing to what is played musically on the instrument.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, we can see how attempts are being made to create something artistic in eurythmy using means of expression that were less accessible to humanity. Today's psychology speaks only of ideas, at most of emotional emphases. The will is a very minor chapter. But what is actually real in human beings is the will, only the formed will, not the indefinite, blind will that played a role in the philosophies of the 19th century. And one will perceive eurythmy as an aesthetic expression of human nature when one says to oneself: when we observe human beings and see how their will is expressed prosaically in the outer world via their legs and feet, we generally pay little attention to how human beings execute their movements in this case, how they form and shape their limbs. We say that one person has a beautiful gait and another a less beautiful gait. But we are so preoccupied with relating what the legs do to usefulness, to purpose, that we take the beauty of the gait, so to speak, only as an added bonus of life.

On the other hand, anyone with aesthetic sensibility cannot help but look at someone with a certain pleasure or displeasure, depending on whether they grasp something gracefully or beautifully, reservedly or greedily with their fingers. It is so that we recognize the whole person, so to speak, by the way they hold a fork, how they pick up a pear at the table, and the like. There is a tremendous difference between a person snatching a pear with their fingers and a person cupping the pear in their hands. There is tremendous expressiveness in what comes from the human hand. In this regard, one only needs to be receptive to such things. If I may state a paradox, I would like to say: I have shown in various articles how much I appreciate and love Franz Brentano, who recently passed away in Zurich a few years ago. I am often compelled to emphasize the special way in which this man held the sheet of paper on which he had his lecture notes during his lectures: The only thing that shows the unique position of this philosopher in the intellectual world is the way he held a sheet of paper with his fingers. Of course, this applies to every human being in a certain sense. One can pretend in the language of the mouth; in the language of the fingers, hands, and arms, it is impossible to pretend, because this remains unconscious in humans. Anyone who studies this comes to the conclusion that the human being can actually speak much more clearly and luminously through the arms and hands than through the mouth. It is so!

And bringing all of this into a real organization results in something that is then like [eurythmy]. Actually, every eurythmist on stage here should be able to make the movements themselves when they hear the poem or the piece of music, because you cannot express any sound or any tone differently than they are expressed there. Just as when you say “wall” you cannot say ‘wound’ or “wind,” just as you can put the right sound in the right place, so too must you put the right movement in the right place for the right sound. It is only a guide that you give to people because they find these things difficult. So one can say: This, which is concentrated in the human microcosm like a revelation of the spiritual world, is also active in what has already led to expression early on: The Logos lives in human beings – which is actually embodied in what human beings let out of their throats. Thus, another form of the Logos also lives in what is revealed with the arms and hands. [This] expresses in a real, first of all appropriate and then artistic execution what one sees there.

It is not a thought, it is a view, it is not a principle, not a program, but it is an expression of the view. The expression of the view contains what must lead to eurythmy. When I say a few words about eurythmy from this point of view at the beginning, I always want people to really hear how we ourselves are our strictest critics, to know exactly how we are only at the beginning, at the very beginning of a development, and that we must ask our esteemed audience for their forbearance.

But anyone who can immerse themselves in the whole mystery, I would say, of human nature on the one hand and in all the possibilities of artistic expression on the other, must also sense the potential for development that lies precisely in this art of eurythmy, which truly makes use of the human being themselves. Namely, this art makes use of the human being in their totality, in their most expressive essence as an instrument — not external instruments, or not only, I would say, as an accompanying instrument in the mimetic arts, but it makes use of the human being in their most expressive essence, the whole human being as an instrument. One must actually feel this when considering its potential for development: how this art is predisposed to develop further and further, so that it can truly appear as an art in the world one day — now it is only in its infancy, perhaps only in the attempt of a beginning — but how it will be able to develop in the sense of an art that will be able to stand fully justified, even summarizing the other, older arts.