The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[Dear attendees!]

Allow me to say a few words to introduce this attempt at a eurythmy performance. I am not doing this to explain the artistic aspect of the performance, which would be an inartistic undertaking in itself. Art must make an immediate impression and be understood in the immediate sensation; otherwise it would not be true art. But what is being attempted here as eurythmic art comes from very special artistic sources and is presented in a special artistic formal language. I would like to say a few words about this source and this special artistic formal language.

We are dealing with a kind of soundless language in eurythmy, a language that comes about through movements that an individual performs with their limbs or in some other way, or that groups of people perform through their movements or changes in their mutual relationships in space and the like. What comes about in this way should not be pantomime or mimicry, but it is important that it is based on the same organic law as the human tonal language as such. What is presented here is not acquired by bringing together some feeling or thought or the like – emotions, for example – with a gesture or something similar through a momentary connection, but it is also this art in the sense of Goetheanism, that is, Goethe's artistic view. And Goethean artistic sentiment is expressed through a kind of visual, sensory-supersensory seeing. This is a mode of expression in Goethe's Theory of Colors that he uses.

Through a kind of sensual-supernatural seeing, one can actually see what kind of movement tendencies are present in the larynx and the other speech organs when the sound language is heard. In the ordinary listening, one is busy turning one's attention to the sound. One does not notice this because one does not have the underlying organ that is based on something moving in the whole organism. One understands what is meant here if one starts, for example, from Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, this theory of metamorphosis, which will only be properly appreciated in the future for knowledge and for life as a whole. Goethe sees in the whole plant only a more complicated leaf and in the individual leaf only a primitive whole plant. Goethe applies this in his morphology in order to understand the living in its becoming, in its weaving. If one transfers this to artistic feeling, artistic creation and if one comes to understand through sensual-supernatural contemplation: what movements the larynx and the other speech organs actually want to carry out? [gap in the text] they only pause so that it is not these movements that are expressed, but rather the transformation of these movements into the fine vibrations of the air, which are then conveyed by hearing. So in ordinary hearing, only a tendency of the speech organs to move comes about - which is immediately transformed into air vibrations.

We will now try to explore this tendency of movement of the speech organs through sensory-suprasensory observation, and then transfer it to the whole human being. In this way, you will basically have a living, moving larynx or living, moving speech organs in front of you in the people or groups of people here on the stage: you will see what is being spoken.

At the same time, there is recitation or musical performance. For basically it is necessary that what is presented in the eurythmic art is also presented in another way, which brings language to revelation in musical form or in speaking, in recitation and declamation. This can be illustrated here, that the recitation practised today, the art of declamation practised today is definitely on the wrong track. It does not really take into account what arises in true poetry from the prose content. Today, we live more or less in an unartistic time, and so we do not always know in the deepest sense how poetry arises through eurythmy, which is brought into the prose content of what is presented in poetry. We must always remind ourselves, for example, of how Schiller first had an indeterminate melody in his soul. He was then able to create one poem or another according to this indeterminate melody. The literal content was not important at all, at least not in essence. This can also be seen in what Schiller then presented as his aesthetics.

What the recitation must now strive for here is to also feel the musicality in the poetic form and likewise the pictorial, the plastic. For language only becomes truly poetic through the differentiation of images, through the poetic and through the details of the musical. What is important here is not the content of what is being expressed, but how it is shaped. Thus, the recitation must accompany the eurythmically presented in such a way. And the eurythmically presented itself will be all the more perfect the less it approaches the content of prose, pantomime, and so on.

Those of our honored audience who have visited Dornach often and have watched our attempts over time will see that we have continued to make progress by overcoming more and more of what was initially there as an imperfection in pantomime and in mime. The same applies to music. We can reveal in the succession of movements, in the inner harmony and disharmony, I would even say in the theme of the movements, what the poet also wants to express by shaping language artistically. And so we can express serious things in a corresponding eurythmic style, and we can also express humorous things. I am working on gradually extending eurythmy to include drama. So far, we can only present the drama of the appearance of the ghosts in “Faust” or of some other sensually or supersensually conceived figures in “Faust”. We can only present the drama that rises into the supersensible. What is being attempted in this area is not yet complete; but a very serious attempt is being made to find a eurythmic form for the purely dramatic. These things take time. They need to be studied in depth through sensory and supersensory observation.

However, this will testify to the fact that, as I have said, a thoroughly solid presentation is being sought for what we call eurythmy here. And the more we gradually bring out all pantomime, all mimicry, all mere gesturing, all mere dancing, the more we approach the ideal that we actually want. That is something about the art of eurythmy.

But this eurythmy has another side. It has a significant therapeutic-hygienic side. I will not talk about that here. But please allow me to say a few words about the pedagogical-didactic side, which you will also see, since children are also performing. We have made eurythmy an obligatory subject at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Now, I certainly do not want to go as far as a famous physiologist who was here recently and who also watched such a eurythmic performance, heard my introductory words about eurythmy. And as he told me afterwards, from his physiological point of view, gymnastics is not an educational tool at all, but a barbarism. So I don't want to go that far. I can only say that if we think more objectively about this, gymnastics will be judged differently in the future than it is today. Gymnastics has great value in relation to what the human body is and can be understood physiologically.

But there is something else that goes beyond this. This is what we must also strive for in education: the will initiative, the impulsivity of the whole soul. For this is precisely what today's humanity lacks, and what the next generation in particular needs to receive. After a year of teaching at the Waldorf School, it can already be said that eurythmy has become a powerful factor in teaching, that it has formed a subject, as can already be seen from the way the children engage with into eurythmy, how the children are present, how they take part in what it means to perform soul-filled movement, where soul is truly in every movement, where the body moves in such a way that the child follows the movements with the soul. We can already see from what has been achieved in a year of lessons what else can be achieved and can be achieved through soul-inspired gymnastics. So, in addition to being an art form, eurythmy is soul-inspired gymnastics.

We will therefore endeavor to always give not only the purely artistic but also performances that are given by children. Somehow, through the child's organism, the eurythmic is presented in a very strange, childlike-genius conception.

On the whole, we still ask for forbearance. We are our own harshest critics, we know where the mistakes still lie. But everything is in its infancy. And such a beginning has to be made in all things at some point in the development of humanity. And so I ask you to see the performance as an experiment, or perhaps even just as the intention to experiment. But at the same time we are convinced that what is intended in eurythmy will one day be perfected – perhaps by us, or probably by others. And then this eurythmy, which uses the whole human being as a tool – that is, which basically uses the microcosm itself as a tool and needs it as a means of expression – will become an art in its own right, one that can stand alongside its older sister arts as a fully legitimate one.

The question was raised as to the causes of speech disorders (stammering) and how to treat them.

But then, little by little, we shall also recognize what a significant remedy we have in eurythmy for such and similar defects in the human organism. This eurythmy can, I would say, be pursued in two directions. One is the one I always draw attention to in the introductions I give to the performances. There I show how, through sensory-supersensory observation of today's human being, the speech organism becomes conscious with its movement tendencies, which are then transferred to the whole human organism.

But the reverse path is also important. You see, in what Dr. Treichler has presented to you so well today from a different point of view: in the development of speech, a primeval eurythmy of human beings undoubtedly and certainly plays a very significant role. Things do not have the sound within them, as it were, in the sense that the bim-bam theory asserts, but there is a relationship between all things, between the whole macrocosm and the human organization, this microcosm, and basically everything that happens externally in the world can also be reproduced in a certain way in movement by the human organization in a gestural way. And so, basically, we constantly tend to recreate all phenomena through our own organism. We do this not only with the physical organism, but also with the etheric organism. The etheric organism is in a state of perpetual eurythmy.

The original human being was much more mobile than the human being of today. You know, this development from mobility to stillness is still reflected in the fact that in certain circles it is considered a sign of education to behave as phlegmatically as possible when speaking, with as few gestures as possible to accompany one's speech. Certain speakers are said to always keep their hands in their trouser pockets so as not to make any gestures with their arms, because standing still like a block is considered an expression of particularly good speech delivery. But what is caricatured here only corresponds to humanity's progress from mobility to rest.

And we have to recognize a transition from a gestural language, from a kind of eurythmy to speech sounds, at the very basis of human development in primeval times. That which has come to rest in the organism has specialized in the speech organs, and of course the speech organs have actually developed first: Just as the eye is formed by light, so is the speech organ formed by an initially soundless language. And if we know all these connections, then, little by little, we will be able to use eurythmy very well to counteract anything that could interfere with speech.

And in this direction, if there is even a little leisure time, it will be a very attractive task to develop our current, more artistic and pedagogically trained eurythmy more and more to develop a kind of eurythmy therapy that will then extend in particular to such therapeutic demands as the one we have been talking about here. I don't know if what I have said is already exhaustive, but I just wanted to say a few words about it.

Of course, the more questions that accumulate in the same progression, the more the detail of the answers will have to be reduced.

Question: There is a question here about how the movement of eurythmy is related to the ether body, whether it has the same form as the body in spiritual scientific research. Is the etheric body localized in the larynx? Did the Hungarians, who were recently observed by Dr. Steiner playing cards in a Hungarian border town, themselves fall under the tables, or only their etheric bodies? Was this a process that could only be observed in the etheric body?

Rudolf Steiner: Please understand me correctly: eurythmy is such that it can be performed in the physical body and through the physical body, which today only the etheric body of the human being performs. The fact that a person as a eurythmist performs the movements studied in the ether body with his physical body does not mean that the person who is standing there doing eurythmy, when he has just, I mean any abominable thought, does not perform this abominable thought with his ether body. He can therefore perform the most beautiful movements with his outer physical body, and then the etheric body, following his emotions, may dance in a rather caricature-like manner.

But the people I characterized as playing cards on the Hungarian border were, of course, only characterized by me in terms of their physical behavior. I only said that one could study the passions within them that led them to carry out such things above and below the table and then to scratch and tear each other apart, that one could study this passion in a spiritual-mental way.

I would like to add the following: it is generally the case, when you look at a person at rest, that the etheric body, which is somewhat larger than the physical body, is calm. But this is only achieved because, schematically speaking, the physical body has a dilating effect on the etheric body of the human being in all directions. The etheric body, if it were not held in its form by the physical body, if it were not banished from the physical body, would be a very mobile being. The etheric body has the inherent possibility of moving in all directions, and in addition, in the waking state, it is under the constant influence of the mobile astral, which now follows all soul activity.

So the etheric body itself is something completely mobile. And as a painter, for example, you have the difficulty when you want to paint something ethereal that you have to paint, I would say, as if you could paint lightning. You have to translate the movement into rest. So in the moment when you step out of the physical world, in that moment, distance is also given to the concept. And all these things, which actually only relate to stationary space, all of that ceases, and a completely different kind of imagining begins. A form of imagining begins that can actually only be characterized by saying that it relates to the ordinary imagining of spatial things as a suction effect relates to a pressure effect. You are drawn into the matter instead of touching it, and so on, and so on. Such is the relationship between the etheric body and the physical body.

Eurythmy performances during the first college course at the Goetheanum.

Program for the performance in Dornach, October 9 and 10, 1920

Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (27th) by Rudolf Steiner
“Summer Picture” by Friedrich Hebbel
Saying from the soul calendar (28th) by Rudolf Steiner
“The Convert“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Fisherman” by J. W. v. Goethe
Music by M. Ravel (played by L. van Blommestein)
“Little Canon” (children's group)
“Wind, du mein Freund“ by Christian Morgenstern
“The Metamorphosis of Plants” by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Gnome” by M. P. Mussorgsky (played by L. van Blommestein)
Sylphs and gnomes from the 2nd scene of ‘The Awakening of the Soul’ by Rudolf Steiner
“Das Käuzchen“ with music by Jan Stuten (children's group)
“Physiognomisch” by Christian Morgenstern
“Das Mäuschen” with music by Jan Stuten (children's group)
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘Palmström am Teich’; ‘Das böhmische Dorf’
Satirical prelude by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Mousetrap”; “The Authority”; “Modern Fairy Tale”

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

As always before these eurythmy performances, allow me to say a few words in advance. Not to explain the content of these eurythmy performances, that would be an inartistic undertaking. Art, in whatever form, must work through itself; it must speak for the immediate impression of what it has to reveal as art. However, in the case of this eurythmic art, we are dealing with something that seeks to create a certain formal language and certain artistic means of expression from special sources that have hardly been tapped into so far. And so it is probably necessary to say a few words about these sources of eurythmy and about the special formal language of eurythmy.

What you will see on the stage are movements that individuals perform with their limbs, with their whole physical form, or movements of groups of people in space and the like. None of this is any kind of dance art in the usual sense of the word, nor anything pantomime-like, mimic or so on. Here, there is absolutely no attempt to express any kind of soul content directly through a gesture. Such a connection between a gesture and the content of the soul, brought about, as it were, by the subjectivity of the human being, is not sought here; or rather, since we are still at the beginning of this art, where one should point out such mimic or pantomime expression here or there, there is still an imperfection in our eurythmic art, which it will outgrow. What is needed is a truly visual language, not an audible one, but a visual one, a language that has arisen through the use of sensory and supersensory means of observation - to use this Goethean expression - it is, as it were, read which movement tendencies then prevail in our speech organs, in the larynx and in the other speech organs, when we express ourselves through the sound language.

First of all, we know that spoken language – like sound in general – is also conveyed through movements, through the vibrating air. But that is not what is at issue here. Rather, the issue is that movement tendencies are present in all speech organs, which, as it were, by moving the speech organs,

stir the air, which then translates into the vibrations of the air, these underlying movement tendencies of the speech organs can be observed through sensory-supersensory vision. This can certainly happen, just as something else can be observed sensually and supernaturally, so too can that which simply eludes ordinary attention when listening, because it is based on hearing and seeing, it can be observed sensually and supernaturally. And then, according to the principle of Goethe's metamorphosis, what takes place in an organ, so to speak, invisibly to ordinary vision, can then be transferred to the whole human being.

Goethe sees the whole plant only as a complicated leaf, and in the individual leaf he sees a simplified whole plant. What Goethe brought to light through morphology can be transposed to the artistic-creative through the merely functional. What takes place when we speak – as a sum of movement tendencies in our speech organs, or in a single organ or in organ complexes – can be transferred as real movements to the whole person. So that you will, as it were, see a moving larynx as a whole human being.

In this way, one can evoke a silent language that is just as internally logical as one has a speaking language. Only by the fact that now every sound, every word, the combinations of words, the rising and falling intonations, the rhyme and so on, [that] everything corresponds to something in this language of movement, just as in ordinary language the inner corresponds to the outer, to something factual, only by the fact that our ordinary language is transposed into such a language, something very special is achieved.

In our everyday language, on the one hand, what is organized by thought, so to speak, from the head to the speech organs, and on the other hand, the will element, flow together. Now poetry seeks, so to speak, to push back the inartistic element of thought by organizing the will element into the thought element. But precisely because language is increasingly becoming the language of civilization, it loses the possibility of being a means of artistic expression of poetry. In a more artistic time than today, one would feel how language - by being a means of expression for abstract science on the one hand, and on the other hand becoming more and more the more social life develops - becomes more and more a means of convention, whereby it depends on the content of what is to be communicated, so that language loses the artistic element all the more. The will element is lost, which wants to reveal itself from the whole person, because what lies in thought is one-sided, and the mere thought kills what is actually artistic. And so, in this abstract age, we go back to the place where the will element, the whole person, can reveal itself again. We go back to that in man which is precisely this moving language, and thus we gain the possibility of casting off the conventional as well as the abstract of language, and of expressing, if I may say so, of bringing to light in the representation precisely the more artistic, the will element.

In language, only that which has linguistic, literal content in its development can actually be artistically shaped. Again and again, I have to remind myself how true artists like Schiller did not first have the literal content in their souls when writing a poem, but rather a kind of indeterminate melody, a musical element. Goethe had a pictorial, a plastic element in the scene. Only to the extent that language can be shaped musically or plastically in tone coloration, in tone nuances, can be made colorful and pictorial, only to that extent can language actually be brought to poetry. By having what is represented eurythmically in this moving language accompanied on the one hand by the musical, which moves in the tonal in just the same way as the movements in their succession in eurythmy, or by having the eurythmy accompanied by recitation, the relationship between the individual arts that are presented becomes apparent.

But in recitation, as is necessary, one can already see how to go beyond what today's inartistic taste considers appropriate for reciting great and significant works. I have already pointed out in other parts of this lecture cycle what the essence of declamation and of recitation actually consists of; I will talk about this further. In the sense in which we recite today, where we actually emphasize the prose content of the poetry, in that sense, one cannot recite in parallel to eurythmy. It is self-evident that the eurythmic and plastic element in language should be emphasized in recitation and declamation, that is, that the formative, the creative, that - as the poet does - the content of the prose, that this must be particularly emphasized in recitation, [that] to a certain extent the inner eurythmy of the poetry should already emerge in recitation and declamation. Well, that can still be discussed in the lesson that will be devoted to further presentation of this in the next class. I would like to mention now that this is the artistic element in eurythmy.

But this eurythmy has other moments as well - it has an important hygienic-therapeutic [moment]. I will not speak of that. But I would like to say a word about the pedagogical-didactic element of this eurythmy. We have introduced it as a compulsory subject in Waldorf schools because it will gradually become clear that although ordinary gymnastics, which only follows the physiological laws of the human body, can be very good, what can be given to the child - you have also seen samples of children's eurythmy for children, that which can be given to the child by introducing this soul-filled gymnastics of eurythmy to the child, by showing the child how it can put soul into every movement, how the whole body becomes a means of expression for it, as the speech organs are otherwise a means of expression. In this way something grows in the child that will give something in particular to our time - [which] will extend far into the near future - that is entirely absent from our present time: namely, initiative of the will, initiative of the soul, which ordinary gymnastics cannot give.

And so one would like to say: by animating gymnastics and spiritualizing it, and doing so in an artistic way, one will be able to insert a significant element into it, especially in terms of pedagogy and didactics.

Of course, this should only point to what is at the root of it, what is the means of expression of eurythmy. The artistic must have an immediate effect in eurythmy, that is, what one does first with the help of this means of expression. Above all, it is so important precisely because our language, at least in its present form, does not already have something artistic about it. That is why it is so important that eurythmy can have an effect. As the honored audience has often been told and as those who have been here before will have seen, in recent months we have increasingly been expressing in the forms, in the larger forms, what the poet, what the artist has already done with his poetic art from some material, how we strive to get the mood and temperament of the poetry out of the design, and thus preferably the how, how we strive to distinguish the serious from the humorous. You will see samples of all this presented.

What I would still like to say on this occasion is the following. In all our undertakings here – I ask you to take note of this in particular and to be patient, since everything here with us is in its beginnings, including this eurythmy: We know very well where this and that is still, what is missing here and there. But we are also convinced that if we continue along this path, if we develop eurythmy in the same direction – although it will probably be others who do it rather than us – then, because the path can only be a slow one, in time, as this eurythmy becomes more and more developed, we will see that this eurythmy will certainly be able to stand alongside the older, fully recognized arts as a younger art in its own right.

Program for the performance in Dornach, October 16 and 17, 1920

“Howards Ehrengedächtnis” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Dornröschen“ with music by Johannes Brahms (children's group)Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (28th) by Rudolf Steiner
“Die Freuden” by J. W. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (29th) by Rudolf Steiner
“Cheerfulness“ by F. Hiller
“Will-o'-the-wisp” by Theodora Wertsch
“Seasons“ by Hans Reinhart
“The Wonder of the World” by Hans Reinhart
“Reflection"
From the 6th picture of the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’ by Rudolf Steiner (lucid. a. lucid. beings)
“Fromme Wünsche“ (Pious Desires) by Gustav Graben-Hoffman (group of children)
“Kläffer” (Barker) by J. W. v. Goethe
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “Die Zeit” (Time); “Der Salm” (The Salmon); “Nach Norden” (Northward); “West-östlich” (West-East)
Tropfenauftakt with music by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern (Magpie series): “Magpie”; “Enquiry”; “Answer”; “Draft of a Tragedy”
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten

I would like to say a few words to introduce the eurythmy performance we are presenting to you today. I would like to draw your attention to the sources from which the eurythmy art we are cultivating here has been developed and to the artistic means we work with. On the stage you will see movements performed by individuals through their limbs, through their whole bodies, or also movements of groups of people, mutual positions of the groups in relation to each other, of people in relation to each other, and so on.

What needs to be said is this: these are not arbitrary gestures or movements, as one might make in pantomime or mime, or as one might make in dance. None of this is meant here. Rather, eurythmy is based on a real silent, that is, visible language. The movements that are carried out here are a visible language through and through. In particular, these movements are such that – to use a Goethean expression – through sensual and supersensual observation, one can see which movements underlie the larynx and the other speech organs when a person speaks. I do not mean the movements that are then carried out in the air and that convey the sound, the speech, but I mean deep, internal movements in the speech organism itself, which of course cannot be observed externally. But they can be observed and then transferred to all other parts of the human body and also to movements of groups of people. In doing so, one is able to create an equally expressive visible language that the whole person performs, as otherwise only the sound language comes about in the individual person through partial organs, namely through the larynx and its neighboring organs. There is nothing arbitrary about this eurythmy, nor is there anything arbitrary about language itself. Everything is based entirely on intuition and on the transfer of this intuition to the whole person. This enables one to express the same thing that is recited or, let us say, is expressed in music, through this visible language.

Eurythmy itself only comes about through the fact that this visible language is expressed through various forms and the like, which are then not the individual sounds. Everything that is revealed in the formation and artistic design of language is such that it can also be expressed in eurythmy. On the stage you will see poetry or music expressed through visible speech. You will also hear the music itself, for that is only another expression of what is happening on the stage. You will also hear recitation and declamation of poetry, which are in turn expressed through eurythmy. I would like to say: in addition to the fact that eurythmy is an art in its own right, an art in the way that painting, architecture and sculpture should work, I would also like to note in particular that this eurythmy also has a great educational value, a pedagogical value. And since we can see a school here today, I would like to say a few words about this pedagogical value.

The fact is that human speech, as it is used by man, sounds out from an independent part of the human organism, the larynx. But actually, the whole human being is involved in the creation of speech, and speech sounds out of the whole human being. It is just that in the course of human development, that which comes out of the whole human being and through which he wants to reveal that which is felt, sensed and thought in his soul, has gradually been concentrated in his speech organs. You can also see that When less civilized people speak, they accompany their speech with all kinds of gestures; they feel that they have to move their bodies in some way. Among more civilized people, this gradually diminishes and is limited to a few. But basically, everything that is spoken comes from the whole person. Now, however, because language is concentrated in the speech organs – relatively, I might say; it always depends on habit, but on the whole it is true that the whole human being is involved in speech, he lives in every word, in every sentence, but we gradually get used to weakening the will that lives in every word, in every sentence, and to regarding speaking as something that flows indifferently. But we do have the feeling that, when we speak a sentence, when we express a poem, the whole person should live in it.

Now the following may be said here, which is of great importance for the pedagogical relationship. The fact that language is gradually becoming something automatic, conventional, mechanical, especially the further civilization advances, means that the human being's participation in and interest in his own speech is also coming to an end. One can almost say: the more civilized any part of humanity is, the more mechanical language becomes, the more conventional it becomes, the less man is tempted to invest himself in what he speaks with his will, with his whole mind.

And even if it seems strange today, to the extent that it is said, there would be less temptation in the world to speak untruthfully if people were more fully engaged in speech with their whole being. Precisely because language has emancipated itself, becoming only the expression, the manifestation of a part of the human organism, lies, untruthfulness, and especially empty phrases have found their way into it. This will be recognized more precisely later when these things are viewed more objectively. The more a person is present with his whole being in speech, the less he will tend towards lying, towards empty phrases; the less he will be inclined to speak just so that the speech flows. Or he will be less inclined to put only the conventional into speech. He will pay more and more attention to the fact that speech is truly a revelation of his inner being.

For this reason, because it is so, we have introduced eurythmy as an obligatory subject in our Waldorf School in Stuttgart. And we have had the very best experiences with it during the first year of the Waldorf School's existence. Firstly, those who are taught eurythmy feel how eurythmy is truly inspired gymnastics - not in the way that gymnastics takes hold of the mere body, but in the way that soul enters into every movement, how the whole person lives in every movement. The human being is much less inclined to train in untruthfulness or in empty phrases if they have to perform such a silent language with their whole body.

Therefore, two things come into consideration, which then become abilities when eurythmy is introduced as a school subject. Firstly, what cannot come about through mere gymnastics develops in children: initiative of the soul, initiative of the will. The will becomes stronger because speech actually flows from the will. And this will is only suppressed when speech rolls along, relying only on the speech organs, without the person feeling as a whole in what he speaks. And the other thing, which is just as important as this development of the initiative of the will, is that the person actually develops a longing for truth precisely by using this visible speech. One does not like to lie with the gesture. One is much less willing to lie with what is done as a movement than with mere words. So it is in fact – and this is felt particularly strongly in Waldorf schools – eurythmy is a means of education against phrase-mongering, against the parroting of words without feeling the responsibility that everything one says is truly permeated with truth.

So eurythmy can be used as a means of educating the will and an education in truth in the pedagogical and didactic fields, among many others. During our college course, which was held in the last few weeks, the two lecturers who spoke about language emphasized how one only begins to understand the actual essence of language when one observes how speech emerges from human movements, which always underlie it invisibly and supersensibly. The artificiality is gradually improving. After all, human beings actually want to accompany speech with movements – so we also learn to understand languages better when we have this eurythmy.

And especially when reciting and declaiming has to be done at the same time as a eurythmic performance, one notices how one cannot recite and declaim as it is often done today, where one actually only speaks prose, when what is actually to be revealed in terms of rhythm, meter, and the poet's entire use of forms. Here, too, when eurythmy is accompanied by declamation, it must be done in such a way that much more attention is paid to the formal aspects of the language than to the prose content of the word. Everything that is already in the language in the form of eurythmy is particularly evident. Time and again, one has to say that a true poet feels how language is based either on imagery or on music.

Schiller always had an indefinite melody in his soul first, before he had the literal content of a poem. And Goethe himself studied his Iphigenia with his actors using a baton, because he placed the greatest value on the flow of iambic verse in the performance, on that which is not merely the prosaic, literal content. All this is felt by those who are truly brought to life in this eurythmics, where the whole human being becomes a speech organ, or where groups of people become speech organs.

This eurythmy is, however, only in its infancy. Recently, we have tried hard to work out the style of each poem, to find out distinctions, how to eurythmize seriousness - you will see samples of this - how to eurythmize humor in the second part of the program. We have tried to develop the subject, but nevertheless this eurythmy must go further and further if it is to achieve the goal that one sets for it. You will also see children's performances and see how the still youthful body can really put what lies within it out of its inner being through this visible language, so that one actually sees directly soulfulness in the movements that are performed.

Thus eurythmy is not only an art, but also an educational tool of the very highest order, and one that is a joy to practise. Gymnastics, on the other hand, is something that only involves the body. The movements performed in eurythmy are directed towards both the physical and the spiritual. But it is precisely this that enables the human being to feel like a whole human being by performing the eurythmic movements in the appropriate way. By weaving oneself into the artistic process, one does feel that one's own self is the noblest instrument one can possibly use in art.

Goethe said: When man reaches the summit of nature, he feels himself again as a whole nature, takes harmony, measure, order and meaning together to rise to the creation of the work of art. This is best felt when the human being is not just holding the violin or playing the piano or using the paintbrush, but when he uses himself as an instrument to express what is actually going on in his soul.

If this eurythmy, which is still in its infancy and must be treated with forbearance, if this eurythmy continues to develop through us - or probably through others - then it will be able to stand alongside the older, fully-fledged sister arts as an art in its own right. But it will also be recognized as one of the most significant educational tools of humanity - both in terms of the will and in terms of the inner sense of truth in the human being. What is still in its infancy in eurythmy today will be developed and then be able to stand fully entitled alongside the other older artistic and educational tools.

Address on the Song of Initiation

Before Rudolf Steiner delivered the farewell address at the first School of Spiritual Science course at the Goetheanum (in: Grenzen der Naturerkenntnis, GA 322, Basel, 6th ed. 2020, pp. 128-148), “The Song of Initiation” was performed in the domed room - ‘at Dr. Steiner's special request,’ as the stenographer Helene Finckh noted in her transcript: ‘Dr. Steiner had said it would be necessary to have this prelude.’ - Rudolf Steiner introduced the performance with the following words:

We can, my dear audience, just as we turn to a truly spiritual scientific culture, art and so on, we can just as strongly reject everything that turns to the so-called spiritual out of dishonest, untruthful, insincere feeling, what is called “mystical” and the like. And to show you what we can feel about false mysticism, flirtatious mysticism, insincere, dishonest mysticism, we would like to show you a short eurythmy piece.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to say a few words before our eurythmy performance, not to explain the performance. Artistic things must not be preceded by an interpretation or an explanation; they must work through themselves, otherwise they would by no means belong to the field of art. But what we have conceived as eurythmy, especially in its further elaboration, does come from certain artistic sources that humanity has so far made very little use of, and it lies in an artistic formal language that has also hardly been used in the other arts and in artistic life in general. For our eurythmy must not really be compared with anything else that is similar, because the similarity could only be an external one with certain pantomime arts, dance arts and the like. Our eurythmy is not meant to be any of those things, because it makes use of a special means of expression, which consists of a kind of silent language that works through movements.

And so you see on the stage the moving human being, that is, the human being who moves from within — the human being who moves his limbs in a certain way or also groups of people who carry out movements [that] change in their mutual relationships in the spatial relationships, so that movement, lawful movement of groups of people, also arises there. All this has not come about in a haphazard way, one might say, a random gesture with what takes place in the soul, but all the movements that are performed are in fact connected to the human soul and spiritual life in the same way as the tone languages themselves. The movements that are performed by the person doing the eurythmy are created in such a way that, through sensory-supernatural observation, to use this Goethean expression, it is observed which movement tendencies the larynx and the other speech organs of the person have when the person reveals himself through the sound language. There are only movement tendencies present. For as soon as a person is in contact with the outside world when speaking, what actually happens directly in the larynx and in the neighboring organs is transferred to the moving air through which the sound is conveyed, and the actual movement tendency is interrupted as it arises.

If we can recognize these movement tendencies, which are excited by the larynx and all of its speech organs, and observe them through sensory and supersensory observation, then we can also, by elevating the principle of Goethean metamorphosis into the artistic, move the whole person and also groups of people in such a way as they would otherwise, I would like to say, want to move, by into the handling of human functions. According to this principle of Goethe's metamorphosis, one can move the whole person and also groups of people in such a way as the larynx and its neighboring organs would otherwise, I would like to say, want to move in ordinary tonal language.

Goethe pointed out – and this will play a much greater role in the future study of the living than humanity can even dream of today – Goethe asserted that the whole plant is nothing more than a more complicated, developed leaf and that the leaf is a simply formed whole plant. So we can also say that what is present in the larynx and its neighboring organs is actually the whole human being. And we can, in turn, observe what is happening in the speech organs and apply it to the whole human being and to groups of people. This is how we arrive at this moving language, which is presented to you as eurythmy. There is nothing mimic, pantomime, nothing merely dance-like in it, but the succession of movements is as the succession of sounds in human language. And the forms in which we execute the movements are, as it were, to represent the artistic design of the literal, these movements are modeled on the pure creation, the design of the human being, as the poet shapes it out of mere prose language and so on.

This indeed gives us a special kind of art that is very much adapted to the demands of our time. The present time must strive for it, if man is not to descend into barbarism, which many people today already predict and which even Spengler wanted to prove scientifically. if we want to achieve a new ascent and not sink into barbarism, then an inner elevation of the human being, an inner illumination with new forces, new forms and so on must take place.

Now, eurythmy is such an inner strengthening of the human being, and in order to show this, I will have to put this eurythmy in the series of the other arts with a few words. For example, we have sculpture. One understands it only, the sculpture, the art of sculpture, if one understands the shaping of the physical human body from its form. Because basically, everything else we sculpt can only be modeled three-dimensionally if we understand the sculpture of the human body.

Architecture is an art that initially appears to have no real model. It appears as it does, through proportionality, symmetry, through a sensed or perceived balance and equilibrium of the individual architectural elements and so on. We feel no model for architecture because this model is in the outer being of the human being himself. What we experience, for example, as a small child, from the state in which we cannot walk, gradually learning to walk, swinging up to the vertical, what we experience as balance when we learn to move our limbs. In short, everything that we experience within ourselves, can experience as the innermost part of the human body's formation, when this body is alive, we carry it out into the outer world and develop it into architecture.

And by giving ourselves to the outer world itself, to its intense impressions in colors and chiaroscuro, we develop painting. But then, when we live with that which is actually below the surface of things, with what essentially painting deals with, when we live with that which the exterior of nature presents in terms of supersensible uniformity, when we can feel that, we can surrender to nature, not as a mere observer, but go along with the inner secrets of nature, and instead of feeling the balance of our own body, the symmetry, which we already do as a child, if we instead feel the enigmatic, mysterious symmetry of natural things outside, the proportionality and symmetry of spatial things, and if we then develop this within ourselves to a certain extent as an echo, holding up to mute nature the counter-image in the secrets contained in it, then we develop the musical through adapting the organization of our own bodily members to the external relationships of symmetry and proportion in nature.

We carry our sense of symmetry and proportionality into the outside world in the form of architecture. For singing, we take into ourselves that which exists in the outside world in the way of symmetry, and we bring it, through our own body, through a part of our body, to a kind of echo of mute nature. And a branch of this is what we make resound in language, especially in the meter, in the rhythm of language, and so on, in declamation, recitation.

But in all this it is our etheric body that remains, so to speak, at rest in itself, but makes parts of itself - that is, its interior - a resonance of natural events. But in the moment when we let the secrets of nature flow into us more deeply than is the case with singing and declaiming, then we will let them flow through the organs of speech and song, into the whole bodily organization, into that which is in outer nature. Then the person does not feel as if they are holding – as they do when singing or declaiming – what they are making sound as an echo of nature, but they feel as if they are immediately transforming into movement what they have overheard from nature as secrets. So although the human being is the instrument for bringing the moving or symmetrical or proportioned supernature to expression, he immediately passes over into nature. He does not retain what he absorbs from song or music, but passes immediately into outer nature. The human being is completely selfless, physically selfless. He becomes an instrument of that which the secrets of nature itself are when he eurythmizes.

Then the eurythmic art is indeed something for internalization, and it is something truly artistic. For that which becomes internalized is somehow manifested in the movements of the objective, sensual world: the spirit of the world in human movement. One could say that eurythmy works entirely in the sense of Goethe's beautiful words: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn perceives himself as a nature, takes in order, measure, harmony and meaning and rises to the production of the work of art. But he rises most beautifully and nobly to the production of the work of art when he gives himself as a tool. He does this, of course, in song and in declamation, but he does it in such a way that he does not form that which he can develop in his own physical organization, but immediately makes it perceptible to the outside world as a visible language in eurythmy.

Thus this eurythmic art has something that makes it particularly suitable for the modern human being in a very special way. It also has a therapeutic-hygienic side, which I do not want to talk about here, but which also needs to be further developed. But it also has a didactic-pedagogical side. That is why we have included it in the curriculum, as a compulsory subject at our Stuttgart Waldorf School. And it has to be said: one day people will think more objectively and impartially about the things we are considering here than they do today.

It must be said that gymnastics may be a good thing; it is based on an understanding of the physiological laws of the human body, and what it achieves relates only to the training of the human body. But for children, what is brought to them through eurythmy has a very special value. Firstly, when they really get to know it, children love eurythmy very much, as has been shown in lessons in the Waldorf school. But then eurythmy is an inspired form of movement. No movement is performed without spirit and soul being put into it. Every movement of each limb is the expression, the revelation of something spiritual and soul-like. This is something that the child grows into, so that initiative of will and strength of soul will be in him. And this is something that should actually be given to humanity today, because it is this that is most closely connected with our decline, that humanity does not have this soul energy, and terrible phenomena of cultural degeneration would occur if the next generation were brought up in the same way, with sleepy souls and without energy, as was largely the case with the generations that then sailed into the terrible catastrophe of the present.

So, dear audience, we are certainly expecting a great deal from eurythmy. But we must ask for indulgence for everything that we can currently give, because we are only just beginning, and what we can already present today must therefore be seen as a beginning. We are our own harshest critics and we know very well what we are still lacking today. But those of our esteemed audience who have been here before will also have seen how we have progressed again in the last few months, particularly in the shaping of the forms. They will also notice how we have worked to truly express the inner artistic form of a poem in a particularly characteristic way.

During the course, I spoke about 'declamation and recitation', and it is indeed the case that our eurythmy, which is accompanied on the one hand by the musical — which is just another form of expression for what eurythmy also presents — on the other hand by recitation and declamation, which is another form of expression. For in recitation the human being uses only a single organ, whereas in eurythmy he uses his whole body. But what becomes apparent is precisely this: it is in eurythmy that one can recognize how justified the things are that I spoke about in our current course on recitation over at the Bauhaus.

In the present unartistic time, people consider recitation art to be something quite different from what it really is. It is believed that it is important to get the prose content across by emphasizing what is often called “feeling nuances”. No, when reciting and reciting - and this becomes apparent when one has to recite to eurythmy - when reciting and reciting, it is important that the inner eurythmy - rhythm, beat, and the form of the of the literal content, as done by the poet — that this is particularly expressed in the formation of the sound, in the shaping, in the tempo and so on, in the rhythm of the sound. And only by practising this art of recitation, as described above, and by practising the recitation that Dr. Steiner recited during the course over there in the building, can one show how, on the one hand, the content is expressed in the visible language of eurythmy movement and, on the other hand, through the eurythmic formation of the sound in recitation or declamation.

But this is all, of course, in the beginning, and it must be further developed, either by us or, more likely, by others, because it will take a great deal to perfect what is only a beginning today. But when it has been perfected to a certain degree, then it will be seen that this eurythmy, which is formed here out of Goethean artistic sense and artistic attitude — like everything else that comes from here — that this eurythmy will be able to establish itself as a fully-fledged younger art alongside the other sister arts. These sister arts also had to gradually conquer their position in the course of human development. Eurythmy will, when some one-sided prejudices or preconceptions have been cast off, eurythmy will also conquer this position alongside the other arts in the future.

Dear attendees:

As always before these eurythmy performances, allow me to say a few words about the whole character and essence of our eurythmy. This is not done to explain the performance – that would be an unartistic undertaking. Artistic work must make an immediate impression and must make this impression naturally without explanation. But since our eurythmy is an art that draws from artistic sources, that is not drawn from forms of previous art, and that also makes use of an artistic formal language that was also not previously in use, it is possible to say a few words about the essence of eurythmy. What you will see on the stage is movements performed by individuals through their limbs or performed by groups of people who also change their mutual positions in relation to each other and so on.

None of this is meant to be pantomime or mime or even dance, but something completely different. It is based on a visible, mute language, but one that is just as much a human means of expression as the spoken word. [pause]

Now, nothing is arbitrarily chosen from these or those gestures. Rather, it is carefully investigated – to use this Goethean expression – through sensual and supersensory observation how the human larynx and the other speech organs want to move, what movement tendencies they have within them when sound language comes about. By this I do not mean movements that are carried out in the air, for example, when speech is conveyed or when I hear what happens through the movement of the air, but I mean what goes on in the larynx and its neighboring organs in order to set the air in vibration in the first place. This is something that one does not notice at all, of course, when one listens to speech, because there one is concerned with the sound, with the tone. But through sensory-supersensory observation, one can study what the speech organs want to carry out but hold back because the forces are to pass into the air waves that then convey the sound. Then, according to the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, one can expand what Goethe meant only for form, for example in plants or in the growth of animals, by translating it into the artistic, expanding it to the method. So that one can – just as Goethe saw a more complicated leaf in the whole plant and in the simple leaf plan a simply designed whole plant, which is what he meant by his metamorphosis, so one can expand what in ordinary speech is one-sidedly based on the speech organs as a law can be extended to the movement of the whole person [and] to the movement of whole groups of people, so that they will actually see on the stage the whole person or groups of people moving in the way that the speech organs want to carry out their movements, but only hold back.

This gives rise to a genuine mute language, which can then be formed and shaped artistically in the same way as spoken language, and in this way we achieve something that serious artists are striving for right now but cannot be achieved directly with the artistic means of the older arts. I do not want to present eurythmy as a special model art in this direction, but I just want to note that eurythmy, because it uses certain artistic means, wants to be a thoroughly artistic form of expression that achieves what one actually strives for in other arts. In our case, in our structure, there is nothing [conceptual] in painting, and even though the pictorial appears here according to [...][illegible passage], what should be achieved in art is manifested: that thought should be completely suppressed in the work of art above all else.

For to the extent that thought is effective in art, to that extent art is actually inartistic. But in our language, especially in civilized languages, it is at least not the case, as it is with more primitive peoples, that language is an expression of what a person feels as passion, what a person feels in general, and thus of his or her entire being. Our language has gradually developed into a means of expression, into a vehicle for the more abstract thoughts. Of course, that doesn't prevent good poetry from being written today, although – and this is a parenthesis – almost 99 percent of all the poetry that is written today, if it were only a matter of art, would not need to be written. But on the whole, one must say: the more language becomes civilized, the more it loses the character of the truly artistic because it can no longer be a means of expression for the whole human being.

In eurythmy, we have a means of returning to the most original sources of human expression in language and raising this means of expression to a higher level. In ordinary spoken language, I would like to say, thoughts flow from the human head, impulses from the whole human being, and what is in what is presented as eurythmy, but language remains silent. In this way, the thought is also more or less pronounced. But through this, eurythmy is led to the art, and through the fact that those forms are taken out of the whole human organization, which are carried out by the individual human being in his limbs, or are also moved by groups of people, the will mainly works into this movement, and we have a soul-inspired will that is directly seen and, in addition, through the instrument of the human being himself, becomes visible. In the highest degree, this serves that which Goethe expressed so beautifully: “When man is placed at the summit of nature, he perceives himself as a whole nature, taking in order, measure, harmony and meaning, and finally rises to create a work of art.

He rises in particular to create the work of art when he uses his own organism instead of a violin or a piano or a brush and paint. If, as a result, more of that which works so mysteriously in the speech organ is brought out, and is sometimes suppressed, that is brought out of the human being, this microcosm – that is, the human being – this small world really reveals the secrets of world existence. And here too we come close to Goethe, who said: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets, one feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” In the human being himself, the highest secrets of the existence of the world truly come to life through the human being in a way that corresponds to his or her entire organization. Then one encounters not only the secrets of humanity but also the secrets of the world in the movements of the human being.

And so one is able to follow the poet and also the musician with eurythmy, by achieving through this silent language of eurythmy what the truly poetic artist seeks to achieve through the revelation of language. On the one hand, you will see the eurythmic presentation often accompanied by music, which is just another form of expression, or also accompanied by recitation or declamation. In particular, you can see very clearly in the recitation or declamation [what peculiarity lies in art] /illegible passage]. With the inartfulness of what is practised today as the art of recitation, one could not accompany eurythmy at all. Today, [illegible word] is basically only recited in passing. But it is just a speaking of prose. This is particularly regarded as art today. What is actually artistic about poetry is suppressed: the rhythmic, the metrical, the musical or even the pictorial. Both the poet's intentions for language can be given greater expression in the silent language of eurythmy.

It must be constantly recalled how Schiller, before he had the literal content of a poem, had an indeterminate melody living in his soul, and this indeterminate melody was for him the actual artistic element. He could, so to speak, think of any content in connection with such an indeterminate melody, because the musical element that lies in the poem is the actual artistic element. In Goethe it is more pictorial. Therefore, when rehearsing his 'Iphigenia', Goethe himself worked with a baton like a conductor, seeing the main thing in the flowing of the iambus, not in the reciting of the literal words. These poems make it possible — precisely through eurythmy — to return to the sources of poetry in a higher sense. And to say this at all in our time, which is so unartistic, was the truly artistic.

In eurythmy, it seems particularly artistic that one has movements in front of one, so one sees something with the senses. Everything artistic must become such that it is, as it were, directly perceived in the physical world with the senses, not with thoughts. But everything artistic must also be shaped. We can observe that the human being itself is the tool for artistic representation, that soul is in each of its movements. What a real poet writes is elevated when, in addition to being recited, his poetry is presented eurythmically – which you will see here.

Now, those of you who have been here before will also see how we are trying to truly penetrate to the stylishness of the poems in the way we present them, how we are trying – for example, in particularly expressive forms in the humorous pieces – to express, through the way we present them, what lies in the artistic form itself, not in the prose content of the poem, which is actually not part of the content of the poem at all, in other words, to express the serious attempts in other forms, – thoroughly like attempts borne by seriousness in other forms, express that which lies precisely in the how of the artistic creation, not in the prose content of the poem, which actually, basically, does not belong to the content of the poem.

These are a few words about what is intended as art with eurythmy. But there are other sides to this eurythmy as well. First of all, I would like to mention what is to be added to the training: the hygienic-therapeutic side, since the movement that is performed comes entirely from the nature of the human organism itself. In this way, a kind of eurythmy therapy can also be developed. A eurythmy [healing] art will be developed and it will speak far more through the therapeutically trained [will], through the movement regained in the [through the trained] sensitivity of the will.

A few more words about the pedagogical-didactic side. I would like to point out that in the future, people will really start to think more objectively about all these things. A famous physiologist who had come to see eurythmy and had listened to my remarks] told me afterwards that gymnastics are not an educational tool at all, but a barbarism. As I said, I do not want to go that far. It is an otherwise very spiritually minded contemporary physiologist who has expressed this. I will just say that gymnastics is concerned with the physiological, with that which is intended to cultivate the body. And it is precisely this eurythmy, which can be practiced in this way, that has an effect on children as a special means of education [as] a soul-filled gymnastics. And precisely according to [our experiences] is yes / gap?] at the Stuttgart Waldorf [School], where eurythmy has been introduced as a compulsory educational offering and has been in effect for a year and one can really see can be seen in what a clearly defined way it can affect children - precisely because of this and [...] the Stuttgart Waldorf School has [already] provided the proof.

So this soul-inspired gymnastics can be applied. Firstly, the child experiences it as something that it naturally grows into, because it feels that the movements that are made belong to the whole organization of the human body. But then, it is not just seen physiologically, as the people are [in terms of their bodies], but every movement is animated. Therefore, the child's body, soul and spirit are educated at the same time, and this is something that the child feels and that is particularly effective as an educational tool. And once this eurythmy is used more extensively as an educational tool, which will certainly be the case in the future, it will be said that it is an important educational tool in other respects as well. I do not want to say that it can already be used as such for adults today; it does not need to be, but when it is used as an educational tool for children, it will be a tool for educating the sense of truth. As I said, it does not need to become that for adults. But it certainly does for children, because that is the dilemma of our civilized language, that it does not come from the whole human being, but only from a part of the human organs. And precisely by the fact that we then achieve the whole human organization expressing (gap), through this, the participation of the whole human being in what he speaks is gradually achieved. Movement comes about that stimulates questioning, that leads to the fact that through this mute language of eurythmy, the human being can participate with his entire organism in what, as meaning, emerges from the soul.

Then, with such a means of education, the sense of truth, if only it is started early enough, will receive very special care. Language is gradually perceived. What is really necessary for it today - that it be stripped of the phraseological - will be achieved by eurythmy: that it becomes a means of education for truth. So much for the pedagogical-didactic side.

Of course, we must ask for your indulgence, because however high the goals we have set ourselves with eurythmy may be, what has been achieved so far is only just the beginning. But it must also be further developed – perhaps by us, but more likely by others. And however much we ourselves are strict critics, however much we also know how imperfect everything still is today, we have already striven. In the near future, there will certainly also be [all kinds of] mere pantomime, mimic and gestural endeavors, and eurythmic movements will flow into them in such a sequence [of] laws, from such successive laws, [as those] that connect melody, the musical. But for that, a further development is needed. [Fragmentary final passage, see notes.]

Program of the performance in Dornach, October 30 and 31, 1920.

Mercury prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Devachan scene: 7th picture from the Portal of Initiation by Rudolf Steiner
“In the Sistine Chapel” by C. F. Meyer NZ 2420
Prelude ‘Fateful Question’ with music by Leopold van der Pals
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (29th) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (30th) by Rudolf Steiner
Opening of the elves
“Erlkönig“ by]. W. v. Goethe
Opening of the planetary dance with music by Max Schuurman
“World Soul” by J. W. v. Goethe
Children's poem (children's group)
“The Walk” by Martin Opitz with music by Max Schuurman (children's group)
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘The Problem’ by Christian Morgenstern; ‘Muhme Kunkel’ series: ‘Muhme Kunkel’; ‘The Parrot’; ‘Lore’; ‘Lorus’; ‘Word Art’
“The Pied Piper” by J. W. v. Goethe

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

Allow me to say a few words before these eurythmy performances, as I usually do, not to explain the presentation. Art must work through itself, through the immediate impression, through what you are able to see by participating. But this eurythmy, which we cultivate here, wants to draw from artistic sources that have been used less so far. It seeks to express itself in an artistic formal language that has also been used very little. And so I would like to say a few words about the nature of this eurythmic art.

What you will see on the stage is people or groups of people in motion. The movements that are performed are essentially not gestures, they are not a mimic representation, nor are they a completely dance-like , but is in fact a visible language, and a true language at that, a language that is not derived from the interpretation of words or the like, but that is based on a careful study of the essence of the sound language itself.

In the case of sound, we are also dealing with movements that the larynx and the other speech organs want to carry out, but which do not emerge as such, but are, as it were, stopped in their development, so that they then transform into the air movement through which the sound is conveyed. Through sensory-supersensory observation – that is a Goethean expression – one can actually form an idea of how the larynx and the other speech organs want to move, what this inner movement is like as it is developing, and how it is transformed into sound. And then, as it were, through the movement of a single organism or a group of organs of the human organism, one can bring about a visible language through the whole person, so that the whole person moves, namely his arms move in such a way as the speech organs want to move in the sound language, but stop in the will, so that sound comes out.

Now one can say that by making the whole human being the larynx, so to speak, or making groups of people the larynx, to a certain extent speech organs are transformed, that one able to tap into truly artistic sources and an artistic formal language, including for that which is otherwise expressed musically or, in particular, that which is otherwise expressed poetically. This happens in the following way.

The poet must express himself through language. In more advanced civilizations, language becomes more and more conventional on the one hand, but on the other hand, language also increasingly becomes the expression of abstract thought. Neither conventional nor abstract thinking can have any kind of artistic effect. Therefore, if I want to express myself in a somewhat trivial way, it can be said that poetry becomes increasingly difficult in civilized languages unless other elements of expression are used to help.

We can already imagine something under what I call a visible language here, when I refer you, I would like to say, to the other pole, to the abstract, inartistic pole of language development, the other pole in relation to eurythmy, which we will talk about in a moment. To a certain extent, writing, which we then fix on our paper, is also seen as a metamorphosis of speech. It is, in a sense, a kind of visible language. But writing develops in the other direction. We can trace writing back to where it was in its original stages. We see how the thought, the idea that a person formed of an external object, is still placed into the written character or characters, how the mental element becomes a kind of mute language in writing, a kind of visible language.

But then what was initially present as pictographic writing or hieroglyphic writing develops into completely conventional writing. That is one pole. I would like to say that the thought life of language enters into writing. Language becomes mute in writing. The thought element enters into writing. Writing is thus also a kind of visible language.

The further a civilization advances, the less one can tell from its writing how it wells up out of the living language. In the original writings, one would still notice this human-individual-personal element in the writing. You would still feel a kind of silent, visible language in the writing when you look at the original manuscripts. But then, little by little, as humanity develops, the element that lives in language passes completely into the conceptual and the conventional, that is, into the inartistic. And the more man wants to capture the conceptual in writing, the more inartistic writing becomes. Isn't it true that the highest potency of the inartistic is stenography, which is already terrible in itself because of its contrast to everything artistic.

Now one can come to the other pole, where one does not consider the mental element of language, but rather the will element. When a person speaks, the mental element, which is borrowed from the things of the external world, and the will element, the part that the person has in the external world and what wells up from within, flow together in his speech sound element. What flows into writing is completely rejected – it is completely rejected. When one studies the sound language in order to make eurythmy out of it, one introduces, as it were, that which is externalized in writing, thrown out, so that one then has the written word in front of one and nothing more of the human being is in it, it is completely separated from the human being: In a sense, this is incorporated into eurythmy. Through movement, the human being is made to express in his totality, in his wholeness, that which is the will element in speech.

But this means that while in writing, which is also a mute language, the linguistic element detaches itself from the human being, it becomes more and more intimately connected when one moves on to eurythmy, which in turn lives entirely within the human being where the human being does not fixate in a separate sign what is expressed in language, but where the human being makes himself the tool, the artistic tool, of what lives in language, for example in poetry. So one can say: language is structured towards two poles. On the one hand, there is the non-artistic element of writing, which is completely rejected when one studies language inwardly through sensory-supersensory vision in such a way that one then metamorphoses it into eurythmy. In this way, the human being takes everything into his own being, everything that lives in his will, in his mind, lives through poetry and is revived in the movements of eurythmy.

Therefore, for example, on the one hand, what can appear in eurythmy as an artistic movement can be set to music. But basically eurythmy is the best expression of the inner artistic quality of poetry. The inner artistic quality of poetry is not the prose content of the poem, but rather that which lives in rhythm, in beat, in short: in the musical, which is therefore that on which the words move as if only on waves. Or it is the pictorial. Both the pictorial aspect of language and the musical aspect of language are particularly emphasized in eurythmy. Because the human will expresses itself through the human instrumentality, we can say: when we see the human being in motion — but who acts as if he were the soul-content expressing itself in speech — we have before us something that we can see directly, that we do not need to understand first.

Of course, people are not yet accustomed to eurythmy. That is why they say that much of it is incomprehensible to them. But the more accustomed we become, the more we will find that every eurythmic movement, every sequence of movements, is an immediate expression of what is simultaneously evoked in the recitation of the poem. And then one will see this whole human being as an instrument for the soul. One will see it, and at the same time one will have the soul. For naturally the human being puts his soul into eurythmic movement, that soul which the poet can only imperfectly express in language because the unartistic element of thought enters into it.

So what the human being experiences in civilization, I would like to say, in terms of “prosaicization”, if I may choose the expression, where he becomes more and more prosaic and prosaic the more he writes, [is balanced]. Sometimes people no longer have a real inner experience of what is being said; they come to no longer hear the language but actually to transfer it directly into writing, whereby from the outset the human being flows entirely into prose. Poetry will return to human feeling, to human emotion, when we come to eurythmy, by taking language into the inner being of the human being, into his movements.

Therefore, recitation as it is done today in our unartistic time, in our paper age, cannot be done as eurythmy is recited. For eurythmy, it must be recited in such a way that one hears rhythm, beat, and musicality, that one senses the image that lives in the poet, and that the words, so to speak, only provide an opportunity to bring to revelation the deeper, more artistic aspect of the poetry. In eurythmy, the words as such do not live, the heard words do not live. But in this way the inartistic element of the thought also disappears, and in eurythmy only that part of the poetry that is truly artistic comes to life.

In recent times we have often tried to shape through forms that which otherwise lives in the feeling of language. You will see, especially in the case of the things we are performing today, how, on the one hand, in the case of the serious poems, the form expresses the how of the creation, and how, in the case of the humorous and comic poems, we also express the style of the poem through the different style of the forms. That is one side of it.

Eurythmy has many other sides, including a hygienic and therapeutic side, which I will not discuss here. It also has a pedagogical and didactic side, which has already proved to be a blessing in the one year that we had eurythmy as a compulsory subject at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. There we could see how children benefit from this soul-filled exercise, which is quite different from mere gymnastics that only trains the body, where they do not merely perform movements that are first studied from a physiological point of view to see whether they are beneficial for the body, but where the child puts its soul into every movement it performs.

This is something that adults who engage in eurythmy can no longer feel, that no longer has any great significance for them, but that is evident in children, because in eurythmy the human being has a revelation of his soul nature, and this connects him with his humanity in a very significant way. If eurythmy is used as a teaching tool, it will also have a teaching effect on the sense of truth. The more abstract languages become, the less truthful they are. The element of set phrases is particularly developed in more advanced languages because the language becomes detached from the human being.

In eurythmy, everything that becomes detached in language is taken back into the human being. When we make ourselves an instrument and completely immerse ourselves in what we feel, we cannot be untrue. And when children are allowed to do eurythmy, they develop a sense of truthfulness and an instinctive feeling for all that is meaningful. These are the educational and didactic results that will be found when these things are thought about objectively.

I must always ask for forbearance when it comes to demonstrations, because eurythmy has only been cultivated for a few years. It is in its infancy, it is an experiment. But anyone who engages with the sources and with the artistic language of forms can know that there is an unlimited potential for development in it. We will discover more and more possibilities for presenting the art of eurythmy.

For some time now, I have been concerned with the question of how to express the dramatic. We can now only express the epic and the lyrical, and the actual drama, when it expresses the supersensible, you will find portrayed today, drama that expresses the supersensible, in a piece of one of my “mystery dramas”. The supersensible can also be adequately portrayed in eurythmy in a drama. But the ordinary dramatic, which, so to speak, takes place in the world of the senses, is something I have set myself as a problem, for which we will also find the eurythmic forms.

As you can see, everything is still in flux. Therefore, as I said, I still have to ask for forbearance. We are our own harshest critics and we know very well that eurythmy is still in its infancy. However, we also know that if it continues to develop, the eurythmic art will grow from its beginnings into a complete art that can stand alongside the other, older, fully-fledged arts, so that it will be recognized as equal to them.

Dear attendees,

I am taking the liberty of saying a few words in advance, not to explain our eurythmy performance – for artistic things must speak through their own impression, through direct perception, and to want to explain them would be unartistic – but for the reason that I would like to say a few words in advance because what we are trying to do here at the Goetheanum with eurythmy is to research and create from artistic sources that have been little considered by art so far, and because this eurythmy wants to express itself through a particular artistic formal language that has also been little used so far.

It is very easy to mistake what we see here on the stage, with people and groups of people moving, for something borrowed from neighboring arts. But eurythmy is not meant to be what dance art is, what pantomime is, what mimic performance is, and so on. Rather, eurythmy wants to develop as an art, building on a special visible language. And this visible language, which is revealed through the moving human being, is not something arbitrarily conceived. The individual gestures, the individual movements that you see are also not at all arbitrarily conceived, but have come about in such a lawful way as human speech, the speech of sounds, comes about in a lawful way.

What is expressed as sound language is based on movements of the larynx and the other speech organs. These movements, however, take place in a special way, in such a way that basically these speech organs only attempt the movement; the movement is arrested and converted into air movement. And it is through the vibrations of the air that the sounds and tones of the speech sounds are conveyed.

But that which is actually only present in the speech organs during ordinary speech, which is held back in order to become external air movement, can, if I may use Goethe's expression, be truly recognized through sensory-supersensory observation. It is possible to recognize, if one is able to turn one's attention to these movement tendencies of the larynx and the other speech organs through sensuous-supersensuous observation, it is possible to recognize from which speech predispositions of these individual organ groups the speech sounds actually arise. And then, based on Goethe's artistic attitude and view of art, one can build a mute language, construct a visible language, by having the whole human being or groups of people perform the movements that are actually present in the speech organs and are transformed into sound language.

In this way the whole human being – or groups of people – become the bearers of a silent language. Admittedly, at first one has the impression that this silent language cannot be readily and obviously understood. But, dear assembled, we must be clear about the fact that we do not immediately understand ordinary spoken language either, in any form; we have to learn it.

Now, one does not need to learn the eurythmic language in this way, but there are many preconceptions - if I may use the word in analogy to prejudices - against it, when one sees the individual moving in his limbs, and at first one has to overcome the unfamiliar a little. But then, once you have overcome this unfamiliarity a little, you will feel that the inner life of the soul can be revealed just as much through the movements and sequences of movements that are performed here as it is through the language of sound. And that what is expressed through the language of sound can be translated, I would like to say, my dear audience, into the visible, for this we have a very ordinary fact in our writing.

The writing that emerged from pictographic writing or from sign writing can no longer be understood today in such a way that one sees great similarities between it and language. But this is only the case with writing that has already been developed in more advanced civilizations, writing that has already completely transitioned into abstract signs. The original writings bear the character of how they emerged from a reproduction of speech.

But this development of writing, I would say, is at the opposite pole to eurythmy. When language develops into writing, it is allowed to penetrate into the conventional. In relation to writing, we are very dependent on the people, on the community of people, within which we stand. And we have to adapt to this human community, to the community of the people - you let it flow out completely in writing. There is nothing personal or at least very little personal in it. Man does not reveal himself in his soul life through writing, or at least only to a small extent. The writing is separated, carried out into the prosaic, and actually visualized. What is writing for if not a mute language? Writing is a mute language for that which lies in our language as thought-life. Thus writing becomes something inartistic. And something horribly inartistic becomes the trained writing that wants to adapt completely to the thought: the stenography, of course, which is somewhat outrageously inartistic, which strives to drive what is spoken into the inartfulness of language.

Thinking, then, is what kills all art. Art lives in the elements of feeling, will, and mind.

Eurythmy, on the other hand, develops speech in the opposite direction. It allows speech to radiate back out from the human being, to be taken back by the human being. Instead of speech being transformed into written characters, it is taken back by the human being. This means that the human being's will element, their personal element, is activated through the movements that are expressed in eurythmy. And in that we see the human being, or groups of people, as it were, as a moving larynx, in that this silent language of eurythmy reveals itself, we have something before us through which the human being's soul life can directly reveal itself in silent language through the instrument of the human organism.

And so, on the one hand, we can regard what appears before us in a musical form – what is accompanied on one side, what is presented on stage – as another expression of eurythmy, but what is still to be presented through eurythmy is that which emerges from language into the artistic realm. It can therefore be accompanied, and will be accompanied, by recitation or declamation. These bring out precisely how the artistic element of poetry comes into play as the conceptual element is stripped away in the eurythmic movement.

But you cannot, as is believed today, recite or declaim, you cannot accompany eurythmy with this purely prosaic, inartistic recitation, which, precisely because we live in an inartistic time, is not seen as inartistic at all. You could not accompany eurythmy with it. This is just one sign of the lack of artistry in our time, that there is no longer any inclination for the formal element to immediately come into its own at the moment when a poem is to be recited or declaimed.

In artistic declamation, the prose content of the poem does not have to be effective, which, after all, is only intended to serve as a point of reference, so to speak, through which rhythm, meter, the musicality and the imagery of the poem develop. That is why poetry today basically has a hard time rising from language to become real art. In civilized languages, in particular, on the one hand, the abstract expression of thought becomes predominant. This is inartistic. Or, on the other hand, they become the expression of conventional communication between people – again inartistic. Language is only artistic when it is the direct expression of the soul, the inwardly moved expression of the soul's feelings. Real poets, like Schiller, for example, have first of all had an indefinite melody in their soul for each of their poems. And in Schiller's case, the prose content of the poems only followed on from this melody.

And on the other hand, on the prose side, today the emphasis is somehow created and so on. And so, from the outset, something that is popular with many people today in the art of recitation is something that has nothing to do with real recitation. Real recitation art must look at the rhythm, the beat, the musicality, or the poetic content of the poetry, not at the prosaic.

Real eurythmy shows that when in a poem that which is to be felt in terms of content or what is to be felt musically [gap in the text]. If, on the other hand, it is to be eurythmized that which, in a just civilized language, is basically unartistic in poetry, that is, mere prose content - however beautiful or witty the prose content may be - if that is to be eurythmized, it becomes extremely difficult. That is why such poems, as you will see in what you are about to see in my presentation of the spiritual realm to which the human being can rise with his feelings and thoughts, in what is written from the outset in a simple language or in a more complicated language only when one forms new word connections for what is thought eurythmically from the outset, is viewed eurythmically - it more or less eurythmizes itself. Whereas the eurythmic form is extremely difficult to find for what is carried out of a civilized language, as is usually the case with our art poets, where it depends on the witty content.

That is precisely the peculiar thing, that through the eurythmic art, poetry as the expression of the human soul can be taken back into the human being. Therefore, the artistic pole is developed in eurythmy in contrast to the spiritual, which, on the one hand, develops language into a mute language, and is brought to the human being in such a way that everything personal, everything conceptual, everything volitional is carried into movement. Therefore, in our time, which is so unartistic in many respects, one will be able to experience a genuine artistic feeling, a genuine feeling for the artistic, through eurythmy. On the one hand, this could be said about the artistic that is attempted with our eurythmy.

But eurythmy also has other sides. Just as it brings forth the mute language of eurythmy from the artistic, it has also brought forth a natural side of the human being, the therapeutic and hygienic side. I will not go into this today, as it would take us too far afield. But I would like to mention very briefly that this eurythmy also has a significant pedagogical-didactic side. We have therefore introduced it as a compulsory subject in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, and already in the first year it has become clear how this moving, soulful gymnastics - this is how it initially affects the child - has an extraordinarily beneficial influence alongside ordinary gymnastics. By performing the movements, the child finds that the body moves as if by itself. It perceives this as something quite different from the gymnastics that is taught to the child. I certainly do not want to go as far as a famous physiologist of the present day, who told me some time ago that gymnastics is not an educational tool at all, but a barbarism. Once we think more impartially and objectively than we do today, we will realize what a difference it makes to the child whether the movements used in gymnastics are devised purely on the basis of physiological observation or whether a soul-filled, spiritualized form of gymnastics is used, as eurythmy is for the child, where it feels soulfully and spiritually in the movements it performs, where it knows itself to be completely within, not, I would say, forcibly, through bodily movements that have been thought up, as it were, and which it must follow.

That is what I would have to say about eurythmy if it is introduced as a subject in schools. And it must be introduced because it will develop the will initiative in children in particular, because it will bring initiative into the human soul and because it will bring out another element, which can no longer emerge so strongly when adults learn eurythmy, but which will emerge to the greatest extent in children: that our language, especially when it is a civilized language, tends more and more to fantasy. We speak because we want to speak. And language becomes - as can be seen by anyone who can really study the soul in this respect - language gradually becomes more and more untrue, the more civilized it becomes.

By taking language back into the movements of his own body, the human being must be present for everything that the soul wants to express. When introduced at the right time, this has an effect on the child such that the sense of truth, the sense of the opposite of all phraseology, will emerge in the child at the same time. In the future, people will think much more freely about these things. These things are only just beginning.

For this reason, I always have to ask the esteemed audience for their forbearance when we present a eurythmy experiment here. We are our own harshest critics and know very well what we are only just able to do with our eurythmy art today. But we also know that what is just beginning to emerge today can be developed further and further by ourselves or, more likely, by others. Then the time will surely come when developed eurythmy, which uses the noblest tool, the microcosm itself, and which uses the human being as a tool and thus comes so close to Goethe's word so close: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn sees himself as a summit of nature, takes harmony, measure and meaning together and rises to the production of the work of art.

Man rises to the production of the work of art, not when he [gap in the text], but when he makes himself the tool of artistic revelation. For this reason, although we are only at the beginning of the eurythmic art today, I would like to emphasize that all of this is already possible in the development of the eurythmic art. Therefore, if you look at things impartially, you have to be convinced that eurythmy can continue to develop and will be able to stand alongside its older sister arts as a fully-fledged, youngest art in the future.

Public performance with presentations by children from the Waldorf School in Stuttgart at the Kasinosaal Freiburg.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Dear attendees!

Allow me to say a few words before our eurythmic presentation begins. This is not intended to explain the eurythmic presentation, which would be inartistic. Art must work through what it is able to reveal in direct contemplation and does not need any explanation. But what we are presenting here as the art of eurythmy is something that makes use of artistic means of expression and an artistic formal language that we have not been accustomed to much until now. I would like to say a few words about these artistic sources that we use in eurythmy and about the special artistic formal language.

Eurythmy as such has nothing to do with any seemingly related arts, such as dance or the like, or mimic arts, and it should not be confused with them. What is at the basis of eurythmy is that it seeks to create a kind of visible language, or I could also say: a kind of visible song. That which is otherwise expressed through the medium of speech in poetry or that which is expressed in song or music through sound, is to be expressed here in eurythmy through movements. Through movements that a person makes with their limbs as an individual, or also through movements of groups of people. These movements, however, are by no means merely mimic, nothing gestural.

Now, I will explain how it came about. Eurythmy was created, to use this Goethean expression, through the sensory and supersensory observation of the underlying movement tendencies of the larynx when singing or even when speaking. I am not saying that the movements that are the basis for eurythmy are those that are expressed in speech or in the sound of air and that convey hearing, but rather that they are the movements to which the larynx merely sets out, so to speak, which it does not actually carry out, which it wants to carry out, so to speak, which can be observed and which can then be transferred to the whole person.

What we do, dear attendees, whether in the field of spiritual science or in other fields, of which this eurythmy is also a single field, from which this eurythmy comes from, we also like to refer to it as 'Goetheanism' to suggest that everything that lives in this spiritual science is fundamentally linked to Goethe's spiritual attitude. And that which lives in eurythmy should be linked to Goethe's view of art and especially to Goethe's artistic attitude.

Perhaps I can best explain what I have to say by briefly recalling what Goethe presented to explain the essence of life. He was of the opinion – and this can be seen in his magnificent essay on the metamorphosis of plants, which he wrote in 1790 – that the idea of an individual organ or the organism of a living being actually contains the whole living being. And so he said: In the single leaf, basically, only in a simpler way, the whole plant is contained. In the whole plant, only in a more complicated way, a single leaf is given. What Goethe has incorporated into his view of science - it will only be fully appreciated in later times - can also be used artistically, and that is what will be done here.

It is not just the shaping in the Goethean sense that is to be utilized metamorphically, but rather what takes place in the human larynx, what leads to sound, to tone, that is to be transferred to the activity of the whole human being or groups of people. So that on the stage, with the eurythmy accompanied by recitation or music, we have a different revelation: that we are actually dealing with a moving larynx that is the whole human being. As paradoxical as this may still seem today, it is something that will gradually be recognized as artistic in the most eminent sense. For what is actually achieved by this? What is achieved is that the spiritual experience of the human being, which the musician as well as the poet wants to represent, comes to light through other means of expression – in such a way that the matter is not detached from the human being, but is still revealed in the human being itself.

When we look at the musical, we find that this musical reveals spiritual experience. We can follow this soul experience particularly in song. But the means of expression are, as it were, detached from the human being. In music, the tone carries the soul life on its wings, one could say, but it is detached from the human being. It becomes detached in song. In spoken language, the thought is actually inserted as an inartistic element into the sound. In contrast to this, in eurythmy the human movement itself is used as a visible language, and to a certain extent also as a visible music. This means that the whole human being stands as a physical expression of the soul. By being a physical expression of the soul, it can be observed in artistic perception - and one has an immediate soul that comes to expression through the external senses.

But what is all art actually if not the sensory representation of something supersensible, something spiritual? When the human being becomes a tool, not a dead instrument, but the human being themselves becomes a tool of art, then the artistic is truly expressed in the highest, most beautiful sense.

In particular, one can notice how music can find its special expression again through eurythmy. I would just like to point out that if you let the movements in eurythmy work on your senses more closely, you will see that what is expressed in a major and what is expressed in a minor mood when musical eurythmy is presented. Then we have movements flowing directly from the human will in this eurythmy. They adhere closely to the human being, so to speak. Now we can always see how we have to present everything that is in a major key in the eurythmy through movements that come from the person, and everything that is in a minor key through movements that approach the person, articulating themselves in the appropriate way. So that what is artistically revealed in music on the wings of sound can become visible through the movements of the human limbs.

Likewise, when that which is presented in poetry through speech is presented eurythmically through movements that are more detached from the human form, these movements are more akin to the pictorial. But all this is, in the realm of the eurythmic presentation of the musical as well as the eurythmic presentation of the poetic, far removed from all facial expressions, far removed from all the art of dance, from all mere gesturing. It is that which is actually artistic. It is either a plastic, but moving plastic effect, or a musical effect.

Therefore, it is also necessary that the recitation, which occurs at the same time, is only a different expression of the same thing that one sees in the eurythmy, which itself already forms eurythmically. What is often seen today as the perfection of recitation or declamation, the prosaic element that should resonate in recitation, is basically not what can accompany eurythmy. For poetry is only truly artistic to the extent that it contains either sculpture or music. Therefore, we must always remember how a true poet – Schiller, for example – worked. Before he had the content in prose, an indeterminate melody lived in his soul. What is rhythmically, what is tactually, what is melodically behind the poetry – and not the prose content, the literal content – that is what is truly artistic about the poetry. And so, in this new means of expression of movements in the human body, we can create a visible language, a visible music, which we will demonstrate in a few examples today.

But this is only one side of eurythmy. The other side will be presented today by the fact that we were able to bring a number of children from our Stuttgart Waldorf School here. We have introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject at the Stuttgart Waldorf School. And for the children of this independent Waldorf School, which is based on anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, eurythmy is at the same time a form of gymnastics that is imbued with soul. I am not saying that I object to gymnastics as such, but it is only based on physiological and physical laws. I certainly do not want to go as far as a famous contemporary who recently said that gymnastics is not an educational tool, but a barbarism.

I will concede that gymnastics has its significance for the physical development of young people. But it is quite another thing when this inspired gymnastics, this eurythmy, is presented to children, which is an art in its own right. Children love to perform and express what arises artistically out of the whole human organization. When eurythmy is introduced to children, something very special comes about, which does not appear in the same way when older people do eurythmy. Children, in expressing the soul's content in visible language, cannot lapse into empty phrases. In our spoken language, especially in the languages of the more highly developed civilizations, empty phrases and conventionality play such a great role that truth can very gently become untruth. When a child is led back to the original, elementary expression of soul experience, to the movements of its own limbs, it cannot lie or fall into empty phrases. That is why this art of eurythmic education is at the same time something that brings up children in truthfulness, so that one has an important means of education in this eurythmy. The Waldorf school has only existed for a year. It has shown in other areas what the art of education applied there can achieve in all subjects. But it has also shown in particular how eurythmy can work with children as soulful gymnastics.

Today we are only able to show children's group eurythmy, where eurythmy is performed by groups of people, while we will have adults perform solos. Of course, because there are only a few people who can perform eurythmy, we were unable to bring together groups of adults for today's performance and therefore had to limit ourselves to solos. The Waldorf children, however, will perform groups, they will perform both musical and poetic pieces. And it will be shown, at least in a rehearsal, how this soulful gymnastics, this eurythmy, works through the child's organism.

I could also mention a third element that is to be realized in eurythmy: the therapeutic and hygienic element. Because eurythmy is derived from the natural structure of the larynx, it is derived from the whole human being and nature and is therefore a healthy movement in the most eminent sense. It can be used for hygienic and therapeutic purposes, and over time it most certainly will be.

If Goethe – and, as I said, what we practise as eurythmy emerged from Goethe's artistic ethos – if Goethe says: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to someone, they feel a longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” It may be said: the secrets of nature are most fully revealed through the artistic means that appear in the human body itself, and so something of the highest must come about in art. And to those who ask: why do we actually need new artistic means when we have music and other arts? – [they can be told:] anyone who truly loves art understands that it strives for new means of expression, for means of expression that present the supersensible and spiritual, which is to be presented sensually through art, in ever new forms.

And when man himself is used as a tool, one may well recall the saying of Goethe, which arose from his artistic attitude: “By placing man at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit. To this end, he elevates himself by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art [...]. But in the most beautiful sense, man rises to the production of the work of art when he allows his own nature to become a work of art.

Let me finally mention that we ask for your forbearance for the reason that, despite striving for the highest art, we are still at the beginning and must absolutely rely on the fact that what is a shy beginning will reach perfection. But we are convinced that because this art draws its means of expression from the natural essence of man, this art will perhaps still be further perfected by us, probably by others, and that it will then be able to present itself as a fully fledged young art alongside the older arts.

Program for the performance in Dornach, December 5, 1920

The Fairy Tale of the Miracle of the Springs from The Testing of the Soul by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (33rd) by Rudolf Steiner
“To the Young Mineralogist” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (34th) by Rudolf Steiner
“Mächtiges Überraschen“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Wiegenlied” folk song (children's group)
“Those evening bells“ by Thomas Moore
Saying from the soul calendar (34.) by Rudolf Steiner
Folk song (children's group)
“Mailied” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Vöglein“ folk song (children's group)
“Hubâ” [?]
“Ein Rätsel - ein Männlein steht im Walde” (children's group)
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘Korfs Geruchssinn’; ‘Geruchsorgel’; ‘Der Aromat’

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to say a few words to introduce the eurythmy presentation that we will be treating you to. I do not do this in order to explain the content of the performance as such, because it goes without saying that everything artistic must speak for itself; explaining an artistic performance would itself be something inartistic. Rather, I do it because what we are doing here as a eurythmic art draws in a certain way on new artistic sources and a new artistic, at least a hitherto unfamiliar artistic, formal language. And I would like to say a few words about this.

You will see, first of all, the individual on the stage moving the limbs of this physical organization in a certain way. You will also see groups of people performing coordinated, lawful movements. These artistic achievements in movement will be accompanied, on the one hand, by music and, on the other, by recitation. It is exactly what we have here as eurythmy, conceived as a real visible language. Therefore, what is called eurythmy here should not be confused with anything mimic, pantomime or even dance-like.

Our eurythmy has nothing to do with any of this. Rather, it is about creating a real visible language that comes about through movements of one's own human body. If I may use Goethe's expression, this language is studied through sensual and supersensory observation of what takes place in the human larynx and the other speech organs in terms of their structure and movement tendencies, while the human being develops speech or song. And precisely for this reason, what is represented through eurythmy approaches the musical on the one hand, and thus comes close to the purely musical, the instrumental, while on the other hand it approaches the thinking, which is expressed through poetry.

But, as I said, it is not a matter of some random gesture, of something mimed, so that a single gesture might be sought for the stirring of the soul, for the feeling. Rather, it is a matter of seeking out that what the larynx and its neighboring organs want to do when a person forms this or that sound, when they form this or that sequence of sounds, when they bring language into those laws through which it can form the basis for the poetic arts and so on. So that one does not see the essence of eurythmy in the individual gestures – it is not about gestures at all – but in the sequence of gestures, just as one has to look for the essence in the sequence of notes in music and in the sequence of sounds in speech, which is what matters.

In this way the whole human being becomes, as it were, a visible speech organ. The whole human being becomes a larynx and presents speech or song and music on the stage. And the laws of this language are derived from the same foundations as human speech. The only difference is that in the latter case, it is only the larynx and the other speech organs that make the initial movement. Then the movement is held in while this movement tendency comes into contact with the external air. What is set in motion in the larynx is transformed into an outward movement of the air, and speech is created. What is present in the larynx or in the other speech organs before speech is formed is transferred to the whole person and expressed through the whole person.

It is based on both Goethe's view of nature and art, namely Goethe's artistic attitude. Goethe founded the theory of metamorphosis, that magnificent view of the inner lawfulness and essence of living things, which is still far from being appreciated and which will most certainly continue to play a major role in the future, scientifically. If we take just one aspect of Goethe's view of nature, not to present it as a theory but for a different purpose, which will be shown in a moment, if we take just one aspect, we have to say that in the individual plant leaf Goethe sees the whole plant in its potential; in the whole plant he sees a complex leaf. So that to him, life is a combination of details that are equal to the whole in idea, but which in turn are formed according to the same principle into a unity on a large scale. What Goethe has as an insight into form in his theory of metamorphosis should meet you artistically in eurythmy.

When a person formulates speech, one aspect of their organization, the speech organs, is activated. In a sense, the entire human organization is active, localized in the human speech organs, just as Goethe saw the whole plant localized in the plant leaf from the outset, so to speak. But what can be observed through sensory-supersensory vision in the larynx can be transferred to the whole human being in the same way that one can think of the organizing force of the [whole] plant being transferred to the [single] leaf. In this way one has a real, visible language, governed by natural laws, which can then be given artistic form. Of course, as a visible language it is not artistic at first; it must be given artistic form, and then it can be used to express the same things that the poet or the composer express through their artistic forms.

If we judge what eurythmy is meant to be by its gestural expression, then we will not be able to judge it at all. We will only be able to judge it if we see the laws of movement in eurythmy in the same way that we see the melodious element in the lawful progression of tones. In this, my dear audience, the human being is taken as an instrument for artistic expression, and in this way, too, we come close to the highest sense of Goethe's artistic spirit. Goethe spoke beautifully about the relationship between the human being and the rest of the world. He said: When the human being is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn feels himself to be all of nature, taking in order, harmony, measure and meaning and rising to the creation of the work of art.

The best way for a person to create a work of art is to see themselves as an instrument that combines order, harmony, measure and meaning. This is precisely what eurythmy does, not by using an external musical instrument but by using the human being themselves, the human organization, as a tool. But, my dear audience, one comes very close to the artistic through this eurythmy, closer than through many other artistic means and formal languages. For let us take the poetic language: Especially in the civilized languages, since language is on the one hand thoroughly permeated by a moving (?) Element that actually serves only human communication. What is originally a direct poetic, artistic element in language thus passes into prose. Likewise, the linguistic element in a civilized language passes into prose through the inclusion of the thought element. Thought as such is the inartistic element, and the more form something contains, the less it contains of artistic effects.

In our languages, it is therefore difficult to produce something truly artistic without resorting to new means of expression. After all, poetry is basically only as artistic as its musicality - rhythm, meter, and so on - and its pictorial-plasticity. The literal is not the essence of poetry. That is why I must always point out that true poets, who as poets are also artistic through and through – such as Schiller, for example – did not initially place the main emphasis on the literal content of a poem , but rather he had a certain indeterminate melody in his soul, and it was from this indeterminate melody that he first shaped that to which he, so to speak, gives the literal content. And Goethe placed so little value on the literal in poetry, even in drama, and much more on the rhythmic, the metrical, the musical and pictorial, that he himself studied his Iphigenia with his actors, conducting it with a baton like a piece of music.

You can see how eurythmy, by observing it, leads back that which becomes prosaic in thought, that which, in thought, leads away from art in poetry, how that which is prosaic in thought is led back into the will element, in which the whole human being becomes a means of expression. But because everything conventional and everything conceptual is gone from the language, because the language works as a visible means of expression through the whole human being, through this, especially in poetry, it is reduced to the actual artistic basis of it.

This can be seen from the fact that, for example, when recitation is done in parallel with the eurythmic presentation, it cannot be recited in the same way as an unartistic time like the present imagines recitation. One recites according to the literal content, that is, according to the prose. Today recitation is basically only done according to the prose. The literal content is taken as the basis and then articulated and so on. But the artistic basis of poetry must also be incorporated into the recitation and declamation as rhythm and meter. Today it is not loved. Eurythmy can only be accompanied by this artistic element of recitation and declamation. In this way, eurythmy can have a healing effect on the art of recitation and declamation. Therefore, recitation must be done somewhat differently than is popular today. This is something I wanted to note about the artistic element of eurythmy.

Now eurythmy also has other meanings for the whole culture of the present. First of all, it has an element - which I do not want to discuss here because it requires too much detail - a hygienic-therapeutic element, which is also a social element, so that eurythmy can also be used in therapy and hygiene. But the third element, and this I wish to emphasize here, is the didactic-pedagogical element. We have introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and is now under my direction. We have seen that in the one year since the school has had eurythmy, it has been able to achieve something very significant for children by including it.

What is eurythmy for the child? The child derives great joy from practising eurythmy simply because it can move in forms that are taken directly from the laws of its own physical organization. It feels at home in its element, so to speak, and feels that it can do what the body wants to do. We did not introduce eurythmy to replace gymnastics, but as a supplement to it. For the child, eurythmy is like soul-filled gymnastics. Gymnastics is - I do not want to go so far as I was recently told, even after I had spoken such words before a eurythmy performance, a famous contemporary physiologist who was here. He told me that from his physiological point of view, he saw no educational value at all in gymnastics, only barbarism. But I just want to say that gymnastics trains the physical side of the human being. This soul-filled gymnastics, eurythmy, trains the whole human being in body, soul and spirit. And so children benefit from it greatly, especially in terms of what is most urgently needed at the present time: we must have more inner willpower, more soul initiative, in the next generation than we have at the present time. And eurythmy, when introduced to the child at the right age and in the right pedagogical and didactic way, has an effect on the development of the soul and the will.

Furthermore, when children from the age of seven, eight, nine, when they have not yet reached sexual maturity – later this is no longer an issue, but at this time it is very much an issue – when children perform this, they have to devote themselves entirely to the expression with their whole organization, then it has an effect in the sense of truthfulness. And in our time – when language itself becomes a temptation to use empty phrases due to the conventionalization of our words and thus a temptation to untruthfulness – it must have a beneficial effect pedagogically when we eurythmy has something that draws us directly to truthfulness, because you cannot learn a lie or learn a phrase if you have to work with the whole human being as a tool for language.

And much more could be said. I just wanted to point in the direction of how eurythmy can become significant as a pedagogical-didactic tool. But all this, ladies and gentlemen, is in its infancy. Those who have been here often will see how we have tried to progress in the last few months. We have now also found forms for what was there before, which emphasized the means of expression, so that we can either introduce the poetry or let it fade away in forms that are intended to work without musical or declamatory accompaniment. This way, we can show how this art of movement is a real visible language that can also speak for itself. In general, we have made progress in terms of shaping the successive formations in recent times.

We will try to continue to make progress. But nevertheless, it must always be taken into account in such a performance that the audience is asked to be forgiving. We ourselves are our own harshest critics and know that we have not yet come very far. But we also know that this eurythmic art carries something within it that can be further developed, perhaps to some extent still by us, but probably by others. And then what is now present in the germ can be further developed. And all those who see through the nature of the eurythmic art are convinced that eurythmy will be able to position itself as a worthy younger art alongside its worthy older sister arts.