The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. Eurythmy in the Dramatic Performing Arts

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! I took the liberty of saying a few words about the educational and artistic aspects of eurythmy in my introductory remarks for the last and second-to-last performances here. If I now take the liberty of prefacing today’s performance with a few words, it is for a special reason. In today’s performance, we will not only have presented lyrical and similar works through eurythmy, but also dramatic scenes—specifically, dramatic scenes from my Mystery Dramas. This involves the use of eurythmy in the stage presentation of the dramatic. Now, the distinctive feature of eurythmy is that it moves away from the treatment of language and sound—as practiced by the poet and the composer—toward that visible language which, through the movements of individuals or groups of people, expresses what is otherwise conveyed through music or speech.

[ 2 ] However, in order for poetry—the art of sound—to be true art, one must move beyond the mere content of what is heard and return to the deeper treatment of tone, sound, words, the relationships between words, and so on. One must go back to what rhythm and meter are, what the treatment of rhyme entails, what the musical or imaginative theme is, and so on. For what reason must one move from the literal content—or from the musical content, which is, after all, essentially just an invisible form of eurythmy—back to this eurythmic element? Because all art, my dear friends, must elevate that which can be experienced into the realm of the supersensible, the spiritual. And it is precisely by incorporating these formal elements—the rhythmic and so on—into the treatment of language that one is able, for example, to elevate the linguistic into the spiritual.

[ 3 ] Since eurythmy is specifically aimed at bringing this imperceptible—or rather, only indirectly perceptible—realm into direct sensory perception, it is particularly well-suited to depicting dramatic scenes—especially when those scenes elevate the actions that otherwise take place on Earth in the sensory-physical realm up into the supersensory spiritual realm; when something is to be presented on stage that connects the human being, in the innermost essence of his soul, with the world soul and the world spirit—indeed, with the supersensible in general.

[ 4 ] We first gained this insight, in particular, through performances of individual scenes from Goethe’s Faust—where Goethe, throughout the entire Faust narrative, is compelled to elevate the individual actions into a supernatural realm—in order to reveal that which cannot be portrayed through ordinary gestures in the sensory-physical realm. The prologue in heaven, the Ariel scene at the beginning of the second part, the scenes set on the classical or romantic Walpurgis Night—much of what is found particularly in the second part—is already treated in Goethe’s language in such a way that one sees the poet, as an artist, has the sense that in this case he must depart from the more or less naturalistic stage representation in gesture — and move toward something that, in a stylized manner, elevates even what the human being portrays through his own actions on stage into a stylized realm, thereby revealing the supernatural in a manner appropriate for the stage. Such scenes, in which the supersensible plays a role, do not tolerate the ordinary gestures that must be used in the portrayal of actions taking place in the physical-sensory realm. And in particular, it may be said that this becomes evident in my Mystery Dramas, which in so many cases must elevate the developmental impulses at work in these mysteries into the supersensory realm. And here one can say: they can easily be carried upward. For, you see, my esteemed audience, these mysteries are slandered when people believe that something in them is conceived abstractly in terms of concepts and ideas and then rendered in a poetic and pictorial form. I may well say this without being presumptuous: these Mysteries, just as they appear before our eyes today in their sequence of images, were originally also beheld in the spirit as images; right down to their spatial and temporal dimensions, everything contained in these Mysteries was conceived in images, and I actually always feel annoyed when people come along who interpret these Mysteries in some symbolic way, for I had nothing symbolic in mind. I also envisioned the supersensible scenes in my imagination, in images—as precisely as they stand there, right down to the hearing, the inner hearing of the sound of the words. They were conceived literally and are merely transcribed from what was beheld.

[ 5 ] Therefore, the scenes that venture into the supernatural realm must, from the very outset of their conception, possess a certain eurythmic quality, and this, I would say, finds its fullest expression in a particularly elemental way in the art of eurythmy. Thus, one may believe that precisely where drama must rise into the supernatural, eurythmy will also be able to render great service to drama.

[ 6 ] I do, however, hope that even conventional stage naturalism—where gestures are used to imitate natural gestures—will one day be treated in a eurythmically inspired way, if not in terms of the gestural and mimetic expression of individual actions, but at least with regard to the stylization of the overall tone that runs through the entire drama. It is possible that a eurythmic style will be found for more naturalistic dramas. So far, I have not succeeded in this, but I harbor the hope that, just as lyric, epic, and other genres have done, the dramatic genre will one day be able to make use of eurythmy on a larger scale, even where it does not rise to the supernatural.

[ 7 ] But precisely because of what can perhaps be achieved today in the realm of drama—with the aid of eurythmy—in a way that is convincing to the audience, one might also say, from a different perspective than before, that eurythmy can become something—even if it is still very much in its infancy today, and even if, strictly speaking, what we can do today are merely experiments—that eurythmy will be able to become something that will one day stand as a fully-fledged art alongside the other fully-fledged arts in all its individual branches.