60. Eurythmy Performance

Now, with eurythmy, something is to be created that - like everything here with us - is born out of a truly Goethean worldview and artistic attitude, out of real Goetheanism. I need only point to a single word used by Goethe, and it is the one word that, I would say, characterizes the whole essence of artistic creation and artistic urge. It is the concept, the word sensual-supersensible [contemplation]. Art must certainly strive to work through the sense image or through the audible sense, and not only must that which is directly sensuous work in art, but the supersensuous must one day speak through the sense, hence Goethe's word for everything artistic can be used: “sensual-supernatural”. The source of the sensual and the supersensible is what this eurythmic art seeks to rediscover in its originality, and in the following way: you will see on the stage how the individual performers express movements of their limbs, how movements are performed by the whole person, how movements are performed by groups of people. These movements could very easily be mistaken for arbitrary gestures, for an arbitrary mimicry that has been invented in addition to what is encountered musically on the one hand and rhetorically on the other. But there is nothing arbitrary in our eurythmic art. It has really come about through careful study of human speech and singing itself. To make it clear how people do this, I would like to refer to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, the principle by which Goethe dared to bring something into the science of the living, into the knowledge of the living, whereby one can really come closer to understanding it. Despite all efforts, Goethe's theory of metamorphosis is still far too little appreciated today, even in scholarly and artistic circles. It looks simple, but there is a lot in the impulse that Goethe describes, when he says: If I look at a plant, then every single leaf, whether it sits [in a simpler form] deep down on the stem or sits in a complicated way on a normal part of the stem, is thought to have emerged directly from the other through a metamorphosis. amorphous, to think that each individual leaf, whether it is [of a simpler form] and sits low down on the stem or is intricately arranged at a normal point on the stem, has emerged directly from the other, but also that the colored petal or even the stamen and pistil are only metamorphosed, transformed leaves and the whole plant is a complete [leaf], just as each individual leaf is a simplified whole plant.