Art and Anthroposophy The Goetheanum Impulse: Summer Art Course 1921

GA 77b — 26 August 1921, Dornach

10. Eurythmy in The Dramatic Arts

Dear attendees! In the introductory words to the last but one performance here, I took the liberty of saying a few words about the educational and artistic aspects of eurythmy. If I now also take the liberty of saying a few words before today's performance, it is for a special reason. Today, we will not only have eurythmized lyrical and similar material in the performance, but also dramatic scenes, and indeed dramatic scenes from my Mystery Dramas. We are dealing here with the use of eurythmy in the dramatic presentation of the dramatic. Now the peculiar thing about eurythmy is that it moves away from the treatment of speech and sound as practised by the poet and the composer and back to that visible language that expresses through the movements of people or groups of people what would otherwise be expressed through music or speech.

But now, in order for the poetry, the tonal, to be real art, one must go back from the mere content of what is heard to the deeper treatment of the tone, the sound, the word, the word connections and so on. One must go back to what rhythm, beat, what rhyme treatment is, what the musical or imaginative theme is and so on. Why is it necessary to go back from the literal content or the musical content, which is basically just an invisible eurythmy, to this eurythmy? Because all art, ladies and gentlemen, must carry what can be experienced into the realm of the supersensible, of the spiritual. And it is precisely through this that one is able, for example, to carry the linguistic up into the spiritual, that one carries this formal - the rhythmic and so on - into speech treatment.

Since eurythmy is particularly concerned with bringing this imperceptible, or rather, only indirectly perceptible, into direct sensory perception, it is particularly suitable for depicting dramatic scenes in which the actions that otherwise take place on earth in the sensual-physical realm move up into the supersensible-spiritual realm; when something is to be presented on stage that connects the human being in the innermost being of his soul with the world soul and the world spirit, in fact with the supersensible.

We have had this experience, at first in particular in the performance of individual scenes from Goethe's Faust – where Goethe is compelled by his entire Faustian plot to carry the individual actions up into a supersensible realm – in order to reveal that which cannot be represented by ordinary gestures in the sensual-physical realm. The prologue in heaven, the Ariel scene at the beginning of the second part, the scenes in the classical or romantic Walpurgis Night, much of what is found in the second part in particular, is treated by Goethe in language in such a way that one sees that the poet as an artist feels that in this case must depart from the more or less naturalistic of stage presentation in the gesture — and proceed to something that also stylistically elevates that which the human being presents on the stage through himself, into a stylized realm, and thereby brings the supersensible to revelation on the stage. Such scenes, in which the supersensible plays, do not tolerate the ordinary gestures that have to be used in the reproduction of such actions that play in the physical-sensual realm. And in particular, it may be said that this can be illustrated by my mystery dramas, which in so many cases have to carry the developmental impulses that play in these mysteries into the supersensible realm. And here one can say that they can easily be carried upwards. For, you see, my dear audience, these mysteries are slandered if one believes that something is conceived abstractly in them and then brought into a poetic-artistic form. I may say, without committing any immodesty, that these mysteries, as they appear before our eyes in their pictorial sequence today, were originally seen in pictures in the mind; everything in these mysteries, in space and temporality, everything in these mysteries has been conceived in pictures, and I always feel annoyed when people appear who interpret these mysteries symbolically in some way, because I had nothing symbolic in mind. I also had the supersensible scenes in imaginations, in pictures, so precisely, so down to the hearing, the inner hearing of the sound of the words, as they stand there. They were conceived literally and are only copied from what was seen.

Therefore, the scenes that play into the supersensible realm must have a certain eurythmic quality right from the conception, and I would say that this is particularly brought to life in the art of eurythmy in an elementary way. We may believe that precisely where drama must rise into the supersensible, that is where eurythmy will be able to render great service to drama.

I do hope, however, that ordinary naturalistic theatre, where gestures are used to imitate natural gestures, will one day be able to be treated in some way using eurythmy, if not in terms of the gestural-mimic expression of the individual action, but at least in terms of the stylization of the ductus that runs through the entire drama. It is possible that a eurythmic style can be found for more naturalistic dramas. So far I have not succeeded, but I cherish the hope that, as with lyric, epic and so on, the dramatic will also be able to make use of eurythmy on a larger scale, where it does not rise into the supersensible either.

But precisely through that which can be achieved in the dramatic field today with the help of eurythmy, perhaps in a way that is convincing for the spectator, one may perhaps also say, from a different point of view than before, that eurythmy can become something – even if is still in its infancy today, and if basically we can only make attempts at it today, that eurythmy will be able to become something that can one day stand as a fully-fledged art alongside the other fully-fledged arts in all its individual branches.