The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1923–1925

GA 277d — 3 May 1924, Dornach

Eurythmy Performance

Prelude in E major, Op. 28, No. 9, by Frédéric Chopin
“Vernichtung oder Verjüngung” (Destruction or Rejuvenation) by Robert Hamerling
Andante by Wilhelm Lewerenz
“In the Head” by Albert Steffen
“Fire-Red Foal” by Albert Steffen
“You Have My Heart” by Albert Steffen
Aria by J. S. Bach
“The Holy Supper” by Albert Steffen
Prelude by J. S. Bach
“Time: I Saw a Happy” by Fiona Macleod
“Christine” by Charles Leconte de Lisle
‘Warum’ by Robert Schumann
“My Heart's in the Highlands” by Robert Burns
“Poetic Tone Picture” by Edward Grieg
“The Moonchild” by Fiona Macleod
“Hark, hark! The lark” from ‘Cymbeline’ by W. Shakespeare with music by Jan Stuten
“When daffodils begin to peer” from Winters Tales by W. Shakespeare
Bourrée by J. S. Bach

Ladies and gentlemen!

Perhaps I may begin today with a few words about our eurythmy performance, not to explain eurythmy as a work of art, which would be inartistic in itself, because works of art must speak for themselves, but eurythmy is something that draws on artistic sources that are not yet familiar today and also uses an artistic form of expression that is still unfamiliar today. And perhaps a few words of explanation are needed.

Ladies and gentlemen, on stage you will see moving individuals or groups of people performing specific, lawful movements. This is not merely mimicry or dance. These two arts should be appreciated for their own merits. But eurythmy aims to be something else, a visible language or song that, like human speech or singing, can emerge from the human organism in a lawful manner. When learning spoken language, for example, we are dealing with the fact that the expression the soul wants to give itself is concentrated by the body on a particular group of organs, the larynx and its neighboring organs. One can say how the entire human organism is connected with what is expressed through a particular organ system when one considers that we have the speech center in our left brain. And from this speech center, the center of speech, where the impulse to speak in spoken language lies, all the stimuli that flow into speech originate – but [we do not have] a similar brain speech center on the right side. In contrast, the opposite is true for the few people who are left-handed. They do not have such furrowed brain convolutions on the left side of their brain that stimulate speech, but on the right side. So for all ordinary people who are right-handed, write with their right hand, and also perform certain tasks with their right hand, we look to the left hemisphere of the brain, from which the impulse comes that wants to enter the organism through the right arm and right hand, this impulse of the soul, which transforms into what then becomes language. This is actually only a small piece of the puzzle that is gained in the way that knowledge is gained here at the Goetheanum in anthroposophy.

When a child learns to speak, it is actually the case that when the child wants to perform movements, these movements are not performed immediately, but are transformed into speech movements. And in a similar way, learning to sing is actually what transforms an inner movement of the blood, namely breathing, into a movement of the singing organs. Now, when one studies this, for example, how the beat is expressed in the movement of the legs, how certain emotional modulations, modulations of tone, are expressed in the movement of the arms and hands, and so on, how other things are expressed in facial expressions, then one observes not only the connection between the right arm and the right hand and speech, but the connection between the whole human being and speaking and singing.

And then one can in turn transform what lies in speaking or singing back into human movements. Nature, so to speak, transforms human movements into spoken language or singing — in eurythmy, we in turn transform spoken language or singing back into movements, thus creating visible movements that express precisely the word, the rhyme, the rhythm, or even what is presented through instrumental music. And so you will see this visible speech and singing on stage, accompanied on the one hand by instrumental music and on the other by declamation and recitation. Exactly the same thing that is expressed through declamation and recitation is brought about in visible speech on stage through the movements of individual groups or persons.

It is not a matter of interpreting. Just as the musician must know counterpoint and so on, so the eurythmist must know the rules on which an a is built and so on. But when watching, it is important that the individual movement, the development of one movement from another, simply makes the appropriate artistic impression and that, for example, in a poem, the whole character becomes vivid through the posture of the movements and also the details of the poem through the execution of the individual movements, as if through a language consisting of movements.

The human body actually wants to translate its form into movement. When you look at a human hand, it only has meaning if it can not only be held still, but can also move, grasp, touch, and so on. All the possibilities for movement in the organism together form a language just like spoken language. In eurythmy, we seek to develop these movements from within the organism. It is natural that recitation and declamation must take into account everything that is happening on stage. The artistic element lies not only in the content of the prose, but also in the treatment of language. How something is said is what is truly artistic. Therefore, the reciter or declaimer should not do what is popular today in a somewhat unartistic age – emphasizing the prose content – but rather, what the poet emphasizes, the meter, melody, rhythm, and musicality of the language, must be brought out in particular through recitation and declamation. This is taken into account again. As a result, recitation and declamation as they appear in eurythmy today still make an unfamiliar impression in an age when, when reciting poetry, one does not actually speak artistically, but prosaically.

And so we have, in fact, a kind of moving sculpture. Sculpture, which can be presented in stillness, actually represents the silent soul. Those who can view such works impartially perceive the silent soul in the sculptural works. By using the human being as a tool here, we express the soul directly in the gesture, in the expression we give to the human being. So that plastic art is the revelation of the silent soul and eurythmy is the revelation of the speaking soul.

Of course, one can object to such a new art form in all sorts of ways. However, we can hope that more and more people will rediscover the joy of pure art. Those who have this joy will also enjoy every expansion of art. And eurythmy actually strives for an expansion of art. What we already have in everyday life, what we want when we accompany speech with gestures, what we want by bringing more of our personality and soul into [language], should be developed in a completely natural way. Just as a child babbles and words emerge from this babbling, so too does a person babble in a sense when they accompany their speech with gestures or facial expressions. This is babbling. When this babbling is perfected in movement so that it is articulated like a child's babbling in spoken language, eurythmy emerges, and it is understood instinctively. It must be understood entirely from instinct and not through intellectual interpretation.

We know that what we can offer today is still imperfect—we are our own harshest critics. But we also know that we are using the most perfect instrument that can be found in art: the human being itself. Human beings are the instrument, and they contain all the secrets of the great world as a small world, that which is the lawfulness of becoming, the content of world phenomena. And we hope that eurythmy will one day work this out concretely, piece by piece. Just recently, a course in tone eurythmy was held here at the School of Spiritual Science, where this was further developed. We also try to design something like stage lighting in a eurythmic way. So that it is not the individual, but rather the sequence that truly represents in a eurythmic way what is also visibly revealed in the language and song of human groups.

And so we can hope that eurythmy, even if it is still in its infancy in the manner described, will find its way to further development. All arts had primitive beginnings when they started out and only after a certain time did they arrive at what was already germinating in the beginning. And if one looks closely at what can be expressed through the soul of a moving human being, one can hope that, little by little, the whole human soul will indeed find expression in what eurythmy can become, just as the poet wants to put it into his poetry and the composer into his composition. In a certain sense, one may find it poor in tone and sound compared to the tremendous expressiveness that lies in human movement. Therefore, we may believe that the joy in art that underlies all that is human will also unfold in the expansion of art, as eurythmy increasingly reaches those levels of perfection that the other arts have also achieved with great effort.