The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1923–1925
GA 277d — 14 April 1924, Bern
Eurythmy Performance
From April 13-17, 1924, a series of lectures entitled “Anthroposophical Education and Its Prerequisites” (GA 309) took place in Bern, which also included a performance of educational eurythmy. Presumably, the program of the children's performance on March 23, 1924, was shown, see p. 502f.; the performers were the students of the advanced training school at the Goetheanum.
Draft for an Easter eurythmy program and Easter picture for the performance
The following program draft is reported in E. Brenda Biermann-Binnie, Agnes Linde, Anna Cerri: Memories of Rudolf Steiner and the Goetheanum School of Further Education (1921-1928), Basel 1982, p. 25: " When the students were asked to perform a pedagogical eurythmy performance at a conference in Bern, Rudolf Steiner drew another Easter sketch for the program. The students were given the task of copying it in watercolors. Everyone painted eagerly, quietly hoping that their copy would be chosen. When Dr. Steiner saw them, he said, “We'll hang them all up.”
Ladies and gentlemen!
A short time ago, we had the opportunity to perform samples of the art of eurythmy, which is cultivated at the Goetheanum, here in Bern. At that time, the main focus was on presenting eurythmy as an art form. Eurythmy is an art that works with means that are still unfamiliar today, speaks in artistic forms that are still unfamiliar today, and therefore perhaps requires a few words of explanation in advance.
Human beings reveal what lives in their souls through song, music, and language. Both song and music and language arise from what human beings experience within themselves. But they are, in a sense, concentrated in a certain organ, an organic system — in the organs of speech and singing. Now, even in everyday life, when we speak, we so often feel the need to support what we express through language with all kinds of gestures. And we believe, even if we do not always realize it, that gestures are suitable for making the soul's contribution to what we are saying greater than if we were merely saying the words.
That is one thing that can be taken as an observation from everyday life, and from which we will then see how it relates to eurythmy. Another is a small piece of knowledge that modern science already has, while a whole understanding can be developed from it. Modern science knows that the speech center, the ordinary speech center of the human being, is located in the left hemisphere of the brain, that there is a very specific organ consisting of convolutions of the brain, without which the human being is incapable of speaking — not because his speech organs are in any way incapable, they can be completely intact. [However], if this brain organ is not functioning properly, humans cannot speak or sing because they cannot attach meaning to these speech sounds.
Now, the strange thing is that most people have this speech center in the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere of the brain, with its convolutions, does not usually show this speech center in humans; the brain there is not shaped in the same way as it is on the left side of the brain. Only the few left-handed people have the opposite situation; they have an unformed part on the left side and the formed speech center of the brain on the right side. From this we can deduce that the movement of the arm and hand has something to do with speech. The child first expresses what wants to come out of its soul in hand movements, and we have the predisposition to use hand movements to form expressive gestures and expressive signs. In people whose right hand and right arm are predisposed to become expressive, to become language, this impulse from the arm and hand is transferred to the left side of the head through a mysterious inner organization. And one can certainly say that in left-handed people it is transferred to the right side of the head. So language must have something to do with the predisposition of the arm and hand.
Anthroposophical spiritual science, as we practice it in Dornach, is now able to further develop this idea, which is only known to a small extent. And ultimately, we see that everything that is organically predisposed in human beings has something to do with the ability to speak. Anyone who can see this only needs to observe how a person moves, how they put one foot in front of the other when walking. From this, they can discern whether this person has a language – even if they have never learned to speak – in sharp contrast to whether they emphasize individual sounds or say everything in the same way. When you watch a person move their arms and legs, you get an idea of the rhythm of their speech; the facial expressions indicate the melody of the speech, its melody. People do not develop this in the course of their lives, otherwise we would all be making strange observations all the time when we let the soul reveal itself in the expression of speech. We suppress the accompanying movements that our organism wants to perform for speech. You can even see, dear audience, how the members of one nation do this more than the members of another nation. The English put their hands in their pockets when they talk, while the Italians reinforce what they want to say, what is in their hearts, with all kinds of gestures.
If you look at these things closely, you can really trace every speech sound back to a movement of the human organism. Just as the movement that is suppressed in life is transformed into speech, so speech can be transformed back into movement. This then gives rise to eurythmy. Eurythmy expresses what we usually show in the inexpressive movements that accompany our speech. Just as the inarticulate babbling of a child relates to the developed speech of human beings, so the gestures of ordinary speech relate to eurythmy. What human beings have to support their speech is the babbling of their gestures. Here in eurythmy, you see the developed language of movement, a visible language that is more expressive, more artistic, because it is not subject to convention like ordinary language.
As far as singing is concerned, it expresses what lives in human beings, what we might call the musical element. This is where things get even more interesting. When a person experiences that which elevates them above animals, it is experienced subconsciously as musicality. That is why we have models for other arts everywhere in nature, because the realms of nature contain what is cultivated in other arts. We have no model for music in nature. If someone wants to compose music, they cannot imitate nature. Those who can view human beings with a musical perspective will find in what humans experience internally through breathing, blood circulation, and in turn through what is connected with breathing and blood circulation in their constitution, a living, constantly moving musical instrument. Oh, it is so drearily pedantic and philistine when we describe human beings only in terms of ordinary anatomy and physiology. This wonderful structure of nerves that runs through the human being and is strung together, I would say, on the spinal cord, which runs into the brain. Viewed as a whole, this nervous system is actually a wonderful gradation of musical effects that pass from breathing through blood circulation into the nervous system, where they settle as the most wonderful music alive in the human being.
What is experienced musically is transferred back into the form of the human organism. Just as the movement of the hand, the movement of the leg, the positioning of the foot, just as this lives in language, so too does the inner rhythmic disposition of the human being live in music, in what he produces vocally. Just as the brain becomes the center of language, of meaningful speech, after the movements, so another part of the brain becomes the center of what does not appear externally in movement, but what appears internally in blood circulation. We get to know the inner life of human beings when we learn about the movement that actually takes place within them – translated into external gestures as the musical movement of singing. This gives rise to eurythmy. It is a representation of what comes out of the rhythmic human being. This creates visible speech and visible singing, which are just as expressive as spoken language and singing itself. Now, all of this can be artistically designed, is artistically designed, and joins the other arts as an art form. Now something else emerges. At the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, we have introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject alongside gymnastics throughout the entire elementary school and beyond. It is a spiritual and emotional form of exercise. If we look at gymnastics, which is actually somewhat overrated today, we see that in this age of materialism it has developed as a form of movement based on the perception of one's physicality. A very famous contemporary physiologist, who once attended a eurythmy performance and heard me say that gymnastics is one-sided and should be supplemented by such spiritual-soul eurythmy, [then] this very well-known gentleman said from his physiologist's point of view – so it wasn't me, but he said it, and if I were to mention his name, you would be shocked – he said: “I call gymnastics barbaric; it is not an educational tool at all.” In any case, I would not go that far, but at the Waldorf School we introduce what can now be developed just as naturally from the human organism – language and song – we introduce it in the classroom as a spiritual movement game, and as such you will see it here, dear audience, performed by the students of our training school at the Goetheanum in Dornach. It can be said that eurythmy runs through all school classes from the age of six or seven onwards. It can be practiced at all ages. I am often asked when one should stop doing it. I usually say: definitely not before the age of 80. But actually, one should continue practicing it until death. It is always something that emerges from the organism in such a harmonious way. Children find their way into eurythmy with the same inner pleasure and comfort that they found their way into speech and singing as much younger children. From this we can see that it necessarily emerges from the whole human organism.
And thirdly, we have developed eurythmy as therapeutic eurythmy, where – because it arises from the healthy movement of the human organism – it can counteract essential disease processes in therapeutic development and serve as an aid to other therapeutic methods. Mind you, in anthroposophy one does not become one-sided. Things are taken as they present themselves to each other in life. It would never occur to anyone familiar with anthroposophy to see eurythmic therapy as a panacea. But it will significantly support many healing processes, and curative eurythmy has therefore been introduced as an essential part of therapy. It is only in the way I have described that curative eurythmy has been introduced at the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute, which Dr. Wegman runs in Arlesheim in connection with the Goetheanum. This also shows the full significance of curative eurythmy. From this alone, one can see how eurythmy emerges from what the healthy organism wants. It had to be modified somewhat. What you see here and what you have seen in the theater as eurythmic art is not therapeutic eurythmy. Eurythmy must be modified so that its effect is designed to act on the sick organism.
Today we will endeavor to demonstrate what I mentioned second: the pedagogical part of eurythmy, which has proven itself by training people in such a way that spirit, soul, and body are equally emphasized. But all kinds of things come to light in the process. I would like to mention just one. The things that one encounters as a Waldorf teacher in education and teaching are sometimes very hidden in human development. It has been shown that pedagogical eurythmy counteracts the mendacity of children. It is also an experience that children who are not entirely truthful are the only ones who do not love eurythmy. The other children do it as a matter of course. People have only learned to call something untruthful that is expressed through language. But if you can also reveal untruthfulness through movement, you can push the lie back out of the soul, so that eurythmy is an excellent remedy for teaching truthfulness.
We all know, because we are our own harshest critics, that eurythmy is still in its infancy. It will gradually find its place in the three areas mentioned above. This introduction is expressed in every performance. Nevertheless, I can say that we are aware that we have made a start. And I believe that it is exciting to see something that has a significant future in its infancy. Gradually, eurythmy will find its place in the whole of human civilization, in everything that is considered artistic, educational, and also therapeutic for the whole of human development—both in education and in culture.