The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1923–1925

GA 277d — 20 April 1924, Dornach

Eurythmy Performance

“Vom Sieben-Nixen-Chor” (From the Seven Nixies Choir) by Eduard Mörike with music by Jan Stuten
Intermezzo in A-flat major, Op. 116,5 by Johannes Brahms
“Schön-Rohtraut” by Eduard Mörike
Romance in F major, Op. 118,5 by Johannes Brahms
“Die traurige Krönung” (The Sad Coronation) by Eduard Mörike with music by Jan Stuten
Larghetto by G. F. Handel
“Du denkst dein Leiden” (You Think of Your Suffering) by Albert Steffen
“Es träumt die Braut” (The Bride Dreams) by Albert Steffen
Aria from the opera “Clearco in Negroponte” by Domenico Gabrielli
“Wind, du mein Freund” by Christian Morgenstern
Allegro by G. F. Handel
Prelude in B major by Frédéric Chopin
Gavotte from the orchestral suite in D major by J. S. Bach
Allegro con brio in D major Hob. XV1.37 by Joseph Haydn

Ladies and gentlemen!

If I am saying a few words before our eurythmy performance, it is not to explain anything about the performance. Artistic things should not be explained, but only viewed, and an explanation of artistic things is itself inartistic. If I do say a few words beforehand, it is because what we call eurythmy here draws on artistic sources that are still unfamiliar at present and uses an equally unfamiliar artistic form of expression. Therefore, not to explain the details, but rather to explain the overall character of the art of eurythmy, it may be necessary to say a few words. You will see, dear audience, moving individuals and groups of people on stage. This is neither mime nor any form of dance. This is not to say anything against these related arts, whose value should be fully recognized, but rather to emphasize that eurythmy is something different, that it is a real visible language and a real visible song.

These come about – I can only briefly touch on things here, of course, because eurythmy is drawn from the depths of human nature and a complete discussion would naturally take many hours – so what comes about as movement is that which in human beings, by being suppressed as movement, as movement of the human organism in its limbs in the course of individual human development, is concentrated in a single organ system, completely metamorphosed, and becomes something else: namely, spoken language or singing.

Current knowledge has only a small piece of the puzzle when it comes to what this is all about. We know today that the physical speech center is located on the left side of the human brain and that this speech center is connected to the ability to use the right arm and right hand; for that is how it is distributed. But only in right-handed people; for the few left-handed people, the speech center is always located on the right side of the brain. From this alone, it can be deduced that what is the actual human activity, the activity of the ego, wants to overflow into the gesture of the arm, the hand, that this is, so to speak, withdrawn, does not appear as movement in ordinary life, but is transformed into spoken language.

However, what has been correctly understood here can be further explored by pursuing anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is practiced here at the Goetheanum. Then one comes to the conclusion that in fact there is not only this partial relationship that I have just discussed, but that there is a relationship between every possible movement of a limb — or even just what resembles a possibility of movement in the limbs — and between what comes to the fore in speech and singing, a relationship exists, a relationship that reveals itself in such a way that, for ordinary life, for ordinary consciousness, the gesture is more or less suppressed. At most, when we speak with greater emotional content than is possible with spoken language, which is particularly conventional in civilized languages, when we want to speak with greater emotional content, we more or less resort to gestures. But otherwise, gestures are actually suppressed; and not only suppressed, but transformed.

We can study the character of different peoples based on this fact. There are peoples who suppress their gestures more, peoples who suppress them much less, and so on. But what happens in the course of individual development, I would say as a metamorphosis from gesture to sound or tone, can be transformed back again. And if we look into the physical and soul-spiritual organization of the human being, it is possible to extract every sound of spoken language, but also every sound connection, sentence connection, right down to the punctuation, from spoken language and transform it back into the movement of the human organism, where, of course, once we have the movement, we can then move on to the movement of groups of people.

The same applies to singing. However, it must be clear that what is achieved through eurythmy as visible singing is more suggestive than what is achieved through speech eurythmy. Speech eurythmy as language is really quite equivalent to spoken language. When one experiences it, one experiences it as equivalent, as a revelation of the human organism that is just as natural as spoken language, only not the usual kind. With singing, it is precisely the case that what underlies singing as a gesture is actually always present when singing, even in a quiet way as a vibration, when a person is merely listening to music. And then what is an inner gesture, a gesture, I would say, in breathing, as it underlies circulation, singing, must be brought out from within and transferred into the outer gesture.

But now there is another important psychological fact. It is a fact that human beings do indeed have an inner urge, that what is latent within them as a gesture actually wants to come out, wants to become movement. So that anyone who feels correctly, I would say congenially with human nature, with physical and psychological human nature, will also be able to see in the gestures that appear as eurythmic singing, as visible singing, a genuine revelation of the human being.

One can particularly appreciate the difference between dance and eurythmy when one has accompanied the music, the instrumental music, with what is presented in visible singing on stage. Then one will have to realize that one is not dealing with a dance movement, but with visible singing. Things simply have to be felt. What I am saying here is only to help you understand the matter. It is, of course, not an interpretation of the matter.

And how do the ordinary gestures of everyday life relate to what you see here? They relate in the same way as the babbling of a child just beginning to make its first attempts at speech relates to the later articulate speech of an adult. Just as this childish babbling relates to developed speech, so the ordinary everyday gesture relates to the developed gesture – which is precisely why there is nothing mimetic about what we are dealing with, because it is first and foremost an artfully developed gesture – to the developed, articulated gesture that occurs in eurythmy. One could say that eurythmists, just like musicians, must learn a great deal. But just as music cannot be understood through music theory, eurythmy cannot be understood by imagining what the eurythmist must learn in order to produce the individual sounds. Rather, it is simply a matter of following the course of the movement, the transition from one movement to another, and so on, with the eye. The immediate representation must be absorbed in the immediate impression. If eurythmy did not have this effect, it would be something conceived by the intellect – as many people believe who do not know eurythmy and do not want to get to know it. But it is not something conceived by the intellect; rather, it is actually drawn out of the expressive capacity of the human being with the same necessity as spoken language and singing.

Eurythmy thus creates what could be called a moving sculpture. With the static sculpture — with what is called sculpture in the art of sculpting — the silent soul is actually captured. Anyone who has an unbiased perception can know that when one expresses the human form sculpturally, one actually captures the silent soul. It is the silent soul, of course in the broader sense of the word, but it is more what a person is in terms of their temperament and natural disposition, which can be expressed through sculpture. The more I had to participate in the work here at the Goetheanum, the more I became convinced that sculpture reveals the silent soul. As soon as the soul speaks, its inner being is in motion; it is not the resting form that the soul can express, but movement. Then you need the human being itself as an instrument, and that is how eurythmy arises. It arises through a real knowledge of the human being.

Now, on the one hand, eurythmy must be accompanied as visible song by instrumental music. It is unartistic to sing to eurythmy, because then one song follows another. That doesn't work. You have to feel it too. On the one hand, it must be accompanied by instrumental music if it is tone eurythmy; on the other hand, it must be accompanied by recitation or declamation if it is speech eurythmy.

This is precisely where we see how eurythmy is something self-contained and essential, when it is now necessary, in our somewhat unartistic times, to move towards more artistic conceptions of recitation and declamation than we usually have today, especially in the recitation and declamation that accompany eurythmy. One need only remember that the only thing that is truly artistic and poetic about poetry is what is imaginative or musical about it. In his most important poems, Schiller did not have the prose content of the poetry in his soul first, but rather some general melodiousness, which the prose content then climbed up, like a ladder, I might say. Goethe himself rehearsed his iambic dramas like a conductor—seeing the language more than the prose content—with his baton. In this way of speaking in more artistic times than today, the emphasis was not on the prose content when declaiming and reciting, but on bringing out the imagery in the language or the musicality. Thus, through the work that Dr. Steiner has done over the years in the field of declamation and recitation, an art of declamation and recitation will emerge as an accompaniment to eurythmy, which focuses primarily on the musical and pictorial aspects of language, rather than on the emphasis of the prose content. For in this musical and pictorial aspect of language, the poet has already revealed a secret eurythmic element, or, let us say, kept it hidden in the formation of language.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I have to say about the artistic nature of eurythmy. I would just like to mention in passing that eurythmy arises from the healthy nature of human beings; it is an unfolding of healthy human nature, which is already evident from the fact that the human form – take the form of a human hand, for example – cannot be understood as a static form. The resting human hand, understood as resting, is actually an absurdity. It is only understandable in its calm form if one knows that the resting form can transition into certain movements; the resting form is the movement that has come to rest. The movement of the human hand is the natural unfolding of the resting form. One cannot think of one without the other.

It is extremely important that the forms involved in eurythmy really emerge from healthy human nature. That is why therapeutic eurythmy can exist. Eurythmy can be used therapeutically, not as it is presented here, but in a slightly modified form. Of course, it is not a panacea; we do not have such a thing and do not take that position, but rather take a comprehensive view of things. However, as a support to many other therapies, this eurythmic therapy in particular has been extraordinarily successful since it was first used.

Thirdly, eurythmy has been introduced as a compulsory subject in our Waldorf school in Stuttgart, alongside gymnastics. While gymnastics actually arises only from the consideration of the human body, eurythmy, I would say, arises as a spiritual-soul gymnastics from the whole human being, body, soul, and spirit. And that it does so is actually shown by the way children empathize with eurythmy. They learn eurythmy at a later age and also during their school years with the same naturalness with which small children learn spoken language – with a certain inner comfort and sense of well-being that naturally accompanies every activity of the human organism that arises naturally from the human organism.

And anyone who recognizes the one-sidedness of gymnastics will understand that this can actually be of service. I do not want to go as far as a very famous contemporary physiologist—if I were to tell you his name, you would be extremely surprised—who was once here in this very hall when I said these introductory words and spoke about the one-sidedness of gymnastics based solely on physicality, and who afterwards said: You call it one-sidedness from your point of view, I call it barbarism for youth education from my physiological point of view. As I said, I am not the one saying this, but I would like to mention it to emphasize that there may indeed be justification for supplementing gymnastics with eurythmy as something necessary for pedagogy and didactics.

In any case, as I always do at the end of my presentations, I would like to emphasize very clearly today that we are aware that eurythmy is still in its infancy. We are our own harshest critics and do not overestimate what we are already capable of today. We would not even call what we can do a beginning, but rather the beginning of an attempt.

But on the other hand, anyone who really looks into how eurythmy comes about, anyone who knows that it truly uses the most perfect instrument one can have: the human being themselves — not an external instrument, but the human being themselves — must say to themselves: Because the human being is a microcosm — he is a microcosm, that is not just a phrase, but the more one penetrates into the human being and into the world, the more one comes to realize it is a profound truth – because human beings are microcosms, those who use human beings as instruments can hope that a weak beginning, as was necessary in all arts, will develop into ever greater and greater perfection. And as much as we are aware that we are still at the beginning today, we nevertheless believe that – probably not through us, but through others – eurythmy will one day, precisely because it makes use of the most perfect instrument, the human being itself, be able to stand alongside the older, fully-fledged sister arts as a younger art form in its own right.