Address on Eurythmy

Allow me to say a few words about the significance of eurythmy lessons and the education that children can gain from them. I would like to explain this using the figures that were made in the studio in Dornach, which represent in a certain artistic way what eurythmy is actually about. First of all, however, these figures are intended to provide a basis for the artistic perception of eurythmy. But I will also be able to use these figures to explain individual points relating to pedagogy and didactics. The point is that eurythmy is truly a visible language, not a mimetic expression, not a pantomimic expression, and not ordinary dance art either. Just as a person brings partial organs into activity when singing or speaking, so too can the whole person be brought into those movements that the larynx and its neighboring organs actually want to perform. But they do not get to do so; they suppress them immediately, and then the other movements take place in such a way that what actually wants to become, let us say, this movement in the larynx, so that the laryngeal wings open outwards: a, this is undermined at the moment of its emergence, in the status nascendi, and is transformed into a movement into which the thought content of language can be transferred, and into a movement that can then pass into the air and be heard. The underlying movement, the inner human movement, let's say of the a, you have it here [the figure is shown]. This is what the whole human being wants to do when he bursts out in a. And so every utterance of song and speech can be made visible in the movement that the whole human being actually wants to perform, but which is held back in the status nascendi. In this way, one can arrive at every such form of movement. Just as there are formations of the larynx and the other speech organs for a, i, I m, so there are the corresponding movements, forms of movement. These forms of movement are therefore the revelation of the will, for which the revelations of thought and will otherwise exist in speech and singing. The intellectual, the purely abstract intellectual, which is in language, is taken out here and everything that wants to be expressed is transferred into the movement itself, so that eurythmy is, in the broadest sense, an art of movement. Just as you can hear the a, you can see the a; just as you can hear the i, you can see the i.