The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The art of eurythmy, of which we would like to show you another example, is still in its infancy, and I would ask you to bear this in mind as we demonstrate it. It is the expression of the anthroposophical movement, born out of Goethe's world view. And so this narrow circle, for that is what it is in our overall work, has been brought out of the Goethean worldview and Goethean artistic ethos. This has made it possible to turn the human being himself, with his inner possibilities of movement, into a kind of artistic instrument. What you will see on stage is an attempt at a visible, seen language. The human limbs are used to express in the same way what is expressed by the human larynx in phonetic language, in the same way as a person otherwise expresses himself in his movements through gestures.

However, the fact that the human body produces these movements does not mean that they are in any arbitrary connection with what the human soul feels, or with what the human soul would otherwise express in words. Rather, that through a kind of sensory-supersensory seeing, the larynx and its neighboring organs have truly overheard the possibility of movement that becomes reality in them, revealing itself when they are spoken, when the sound is formed into speech. What we pay attention to when a person speaks is the audible. But the audible is based on an inner movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs, which is transmitted into the outer air, which we also set in vibrations, in wave-like movements. Those who, through a kind of seeing, are able to form an image of these movements that underlie spoken language can translate, in a lawful way, what would otherwise only express itself in audible sound, into the silent language that is eurythmy. This enables us to separate out everything in language that is based only on convention, only on the nature of human interaction, and which is therefore the inartistic part of language.

When we speak to one another as human beings, the formation of the sound and the content of the sound are based on the needs of human interaction. This is how prose enters our language. We must now study how language is actually based on two elements: soul and, as the soul expresses itself in the physical, body and physicality. When we speak, the expression of our thoughts, our ideas, first enters into speech. This expression connects with the expression of the will as we speak. The expression of the thought comes from the head, as we grasp the matter physically. But the expression of the will comes from the whole human being. When we speak, we actually draw out of our whole being that which then concentrates in the organs of will, which produce the audible sound.

Now this supersensible observation of the possibilities of movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs allows one to truly translate into that which is otherwise held back from the human being when speaking: the possibility of movement of the whole body, that which is otherwise heard. So for the eurythmic presentation, we start by leaving out what is the conceptual part of speech and only take up what comes from the human will element, but now take it up in the movements of the whole human being.

You see: in this way eurythmy, which is such a mute language, becomes the expression of something much more inward in the human being than can be revealed through speech. Through speech we transfer, as it were, what we experience inwardly more to the surface of the human body, indeed to the surface of the human being. Through the fact that we allow the whole human being to carry out the same movements, the same lawful movements that underlie spoken language, we involve the whole human being in what is otherwise the content of speech. And if you have a feeling for what is expressed and revealed through the inner possibilities of movement of the human body, you can truly present a silent but no less eloquent language as eurythmy.

This kind of soul science can certainly be derived from Goethe's world view. The whole human being becomes, as it were, a larynx and its neighboring organs on the stage in front of you. And what otherwise glows through speech as the soul's enthusiasm, as joy and suffering, as joy and pain, is expressed in the movement of the human being in space, in the movement of groups that relate to each other in such a way that the individual human being inner possibilities of movement, which are modeled on the movements of the larynx; while that which is presented to one in the group, or is revealed in the movements of the individual human being in space, expresses more the real soul content.

But nothing is a mere gesture or a mere pantomime. Anything that is mere pantomime, anything that is merely gestural is excluded. What you see is based on an inner, lawful sequence of movements. When two people or groups of people in different places express one and the same thing through the silent language of eurythmy, there is no more personality in it than there is in the personal interpretation when two pianists in two different places play one and the same Beethoven sonata. Just as in music the truly artistic element lies in the conformity to law of the succession of notes, so here the truly artistic element lies in the conformity to law of the eurythmic movements. It may be said that the artistic element always excludes the directly imaginative through ideas, which otherwise play their great part in knowledge. Where concepts are involved, there is no artistic element.

You see, here we consciously exclude the imagination and bring out what - like a secret of the human organs themselves - can be guessed in a mute language, I would say, directly in looking at it. To penetrate into the secrets of existence in direct observation without the mediation of concepts is a true art. That which can be expressed musically from the soul life of the human being on the one hand, and that which poetic speech brings forth artistically from speech sounds, is expressed in a different way through the mute speech of eurythmy, which has been developed into an art form. Therefore, on stage today you will see on the one hand the mute eurythmic language, or that which can be expressed musically; on the other hand you will hear certain contents recited, although you will have to bear in mind that with the emergence of a new art such as eurythmy, which is a different kind of language, it places demands that recitation should also be returned to the old, good way of reciting.

Today, in the art of recitation, more attention is paid to the prose element, to the purely content-related element of language; to bring out, by reciting, from the content of a poem that which corresponds more to the prose content of the poem. That is not the truly artistic element. What is truly artistic is the underlying meter, rhythm, rhyme, and so on. These, in turn, must be sought out and brought out. And so, the art of recitation must be led back to its good, old forms, away from the wrong path it has taken today. Goethe, who knew a great deal about these good old forms, took a conductor's baton and rehearsed his “Iphigenia” with the actors himself, in order to show how the real rhythm was at the core, not what is actually the prose in the artistic elements within.

Today we will present you with a piece from the first part of Goethe's “Faust”, the study scene. You may know how hard people have tried to bring Goethe's “Faust” to the stage, and what directing skills and the like have been used to create a worthy performance of Goethe's “Faust”. When one thinks of a stage production of Goethe's Faust, there are two things to be considered above all: first, that Goethe, in writing his Faust (he worked on the poem for sixty years), first wanted to express through this world poem the deepest things that can take place in the soul of a striving human being. Goethe wanted to express the experiences of the human breast, from the most oppressive, tied to ordinary life on earth, to the highest spiritual striving. All this, as Goethe felt it at times in his younger years – often still immaturely – he put into the first parts; what he felt later, he put into the later parts of the first part of “Faust”. He then put the most mature into the second part.

How little Goethe himself initially thought of presenting “Faust” as a stage play can be seen from the following. When at the end of the 1820s a deputation headed by the actor La Roche went to see Goethe after they had decided to stage the first part of “Faust” in its entirety - parts had, however, already been performed earlier - Goethe himself thought it was somewhat impossible. And yet, with a number of esteemed gentlemen standing before him, he leapt from his seat after the matter had been explained to him, shouting angrily: “You fools!” Thus he had spoken to those who wanted to undertake the first part of his “Faust” on the stage. He saw best the difficulties that arise when one wants to present on the stage not what is sensual, earthly-physical in nature, but what is spiritual in nature. But the presentation of Faust has been recognized, and rightly so, as something that, one might say, meets the deepest artistic needs. And so a wide variety of approaches have been used to bring Faust to the stage, from Devrient's mystery plays to Wilbrandt's charming direction. But certain parts, which rise directly from the earthly into the supernatural, can, in our opinion, only be presented if the silent language of eurythmy is used. And so, in this little piece of “Faust” that we are presenting to you, we have called upon the eurythmic art for those parts where the spiritual world enters into the human.

After the break, we will also present a number of Goethe's poems, and it will be shown that where Goethe, in his magnificent “Cloud Poems”, describes wonderful cloud formations with wonderful natural intimacy, following the instructions of Howard, can be perceived in nature itself in accordance with his artistic and ideological view, can also be poetically realized, so that one can naturally feel what is otherwise shown by the transformation of cloud forms in nature itself in the forms that are performed, which are very similar to those in the poem. This inner transformative power, which Goethe describes as the metamorphosis of natural phenomena, which he observed in all living things, was revealed to him by observing the formation of clouds. And in these transformations of cloud formations, he saw something artistic, something that works like the power that the ancient Indian worldview perceived in the cosmos and called Kama Rupa. That is what he wanted to express in his beautiful cloud poems, which can best be recreated in the silent language of eurythmy.

With this, I wanted to show you the sources from which the forms actually arise that you will see as eurythmy. Once again, I would like to emphasize that everything that is intended with eurythmy is actually only just beginning and that further development will take place, either through ourselves or through others, if it meets with the interest of our contemporaries. However, we are thoroughly convinced that if this art can continue to develop, it will one day be able to establish itself as a fully-fledged art form alongside other art forms.

Dear attendees!

We will attempt to give you a sample of our eurythmic art. Please allow me to precede this presentation with a few words about what our eurythmic art actually seeks to achieve. It is, after all, only at the beginning of its development, and we can only hope that, when what is inherent in this eurythmic art has been developed, it will be able to stand alongside the other art forms as something that is truly drawn from the highest artistic sources. But I would ask you always to bear in mind that we are only at the beginning of this artistic development.

Like everything that is done here as an anthroposophical movement, and of which this building, when it is finished, is intended to be the representative, the representation, so too, even if in a very limited area, this eurythmic art is drawn from a spiritual teaching based on Goethe's world view and his view of art. What Goethe's world view is, what Goethe's attitude towards art is, has not yet been sufficiently appreciated, and it will probably play a much greater role in the future spiritual development of humanity than today's humanity can even dream of.

What is being attempted here can invoke a beautiful saying of Goethe's, used by Goethe when he begins to glorify the great, art-loving Winckelmann, to bring him to full recognition. Goethe says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he feels himself in turn as a whole nature, and he brings together in his own soul life measure, harmony, meaning, in order to rise to the production of the work of art. - If one now tries to make the whole human being, with his inner possibilities of movement, into an instrument of the work of art, then something like a summary of the secrets of the world must indeed come out of such art. For in the human being himself, as in a great context, all the secrets of the world are expressed.

What we want to try through eurythmy, my dear audience, is to help the whole person to express a silent language, a language that arises from making the whole person a larynx, so to speak. You know that when we listen to a person speaking, we first of all exercise our sense of hearing. We turn our attention to what can be heard. But the one who – to use this Goethean expression – can see, sensually and super-sensually, what is hidden as the actual essential secrets behind the outer appearances of nature and the human being, knows that in the larynx and its neighboring organs, while the sound reaches our ear, movements are constantly taking place or at least movement systems are active.

We can also imagine the same thing physically by saying: when I speak here, for example, my speech organ sets the air in regular motion. These movements are basically the outward expression of the movement systems present in the larynx and its neighboring organs. If you observe this, learn to recognize it, in contrast to the way you tend to ignore it in your daily life, then you can transfer it to the movement of the arms and the movement of other limbs of the human organism, and then you can create a mute language in which the whole person brings to full expression, to full revelation, that which is otherwise hidden as movement patterns in the larynx and its neighboring organs.

The same thing can also be expressed differently. We can say: when we speak, two elements of the human being flow together. From the head, more visibly speaking, what we have in our thoughts flows into our speech. But combined with these thoughts is what comes from the human will. We can feel it if we have a predisposition for such feeling, that actually, when someone speaks, especially when we listen to artistic language, to poetry, our whole human being comes into a kind of inner resonance, a kind of inner coexistence, in a sense into a dancing movement. In ordinary life, we suppress this dancing movement. Only someone who is familiar with our speech organism knows that something is actually always resonating in our larynx and neighboring organs when we listen to another person.

This is something that science is now beginning to recognize: that more delicate vibrations and movements also take place in the speech organs of the person listening. There is something mysterious in the whole human being, especially when listening, but also when speaking. We only try to keep the human being himself calm and [gap in the text], that is, movements of the will and those organs that are connected with the larynx and its neighboring organs when we speak in ordinary life.

What is otherwise brought to rest by the will in ordinary life is particularly brought to expression in eurythmy. So that the whole human being expresses that which otherwise, I would say, is only expressed more on the surface of the body, at the larynx and its neighboring organs. In doing so, we suppress our thinking and imagining life of our own accord. We shut out ideas completely. So that a mute language is expressed through the whole human being, who, as it were, moves on the stage as an enlarged larynx,

If we create such a language, we must be clear about the fact that it must be different from what is otherwise effective as pantomime, as mimicry, as representations by any gestures. Everything that is arbitrary movement, mere facial expression, mere pantomime, must actually be excluded in this eurythmic art. Just as the actual artistic quality of musical art does not lie in tone painting, but in the lawful succession of melody [and other elements], so too in eurythmy everything rests on the lawful succession of those movements that the whole human being expresses. Everything arbitrary is eliminated. Everything that is based on the laws of eurythmy can be seen in the movements of the human speech organism itself.

Therefore, when two people or two groups of people in different places present the same thing, there is no greater scope for personal interpretation than when two pianists in different places play the same Beethoven sonata in their own way and with their own personal interpretation.

On one side you see the actors, and with them what is taking place on the stage, for certain parts of it the musical element – for the musical element is only another way of expressing what lives in the soul than eurythmy – and again other parts you will find accompanied by recitation, by the artistically formed language of poetry. What is expressed audibly in poetry and recitation is made visible in eurythmy, albeit silently. But the recitation must be taken back to its good old forms. Today recitation has gone astray. In modern life, it is actually the prosaic element that underlies poetry that is given special consideration, not the metrical, rhythmic, or artistic-formal element that underlies the actual poetry. It would not be possible to accompany eurythmy with today's art of recitation.

This is only possible if one goes back to the true art of recitation, as Goethe, for example, also had in mind when he did not rehearse his “Iphigenia” - that is, even a a dramatic work - with his actors: He rehearsed it with the baton in his hand like a conductor, in order to place the main emphasis on the rhythmic, on the actual artistic design. Today, we do not have a very clear idea of how Goethe actually wanted a drama to be staged. But if we look into the soul of the poet, then, ladies and gentlemen, we will also find that the actual artistry of the poetry does not lie in the literal content. Schiller did not initially have the literal content in mind for many of his best poems, but rather a melodious element. At first, the meaning of the poem was unimportant to him; the melodious content was what mattered to him, and only then did he seek out the literal content to go with it. As a companion to eurythmy, we too must lead the art of recitation back to the truly artistic.

In eurythmy itself, you will see everything that is otherwise expressed in spoken language through the laws of spoken language, in the silent language of eurythmy itself. But you will find everything that otherwise glows through speech with inner warmth of soul, with joy and suffering, with delight and pain, represented in the movements of the eurythmists in space, in the relative movements of the groups in relation to each other. Everything that can be represented by spoken language can also be represented by eurythmic silent language.

In the second part, after the break, we will now give a sample of how poetry can be presented through eurythmy. However, we are convinced, my dear attendees, that we can also bring spiritual sources of expression to the dramatic arts, especially to a dramatic art that rises from the merely realistic human, from the mere physical earthly existence to the supersensible spiritual existence, through eurythmy. This is particularly the case in Goethe's “Faust” poetry.

Goethe has his Faust, namely [in] the first part – you know, Goethe worked on his “Faust” for 60 years – he has secreted into this “Faust” all the inner experiences of a sensual and supersensory nature that he has experienced in his long life. In its first part, he did not even consider shaping the “Faust” poem in such a way that it should be staged. As he himself says, when he was a youth and was working on the first part of his Faust, Goethe had only the secret of what lived in his soul in mind when he was working on this great poem. It was far from his mind to think of any theatrical representation.

Individual parts were indeed soon presented, with or without music. But Goethe was never quite in agreement – my dear audience, you know that the second part, which he then conceived in a completely theatrical way, was only published after his death – Goethe was never in agreement when the first part was to be brought to the stage. And how little he was inclined to bring what he had only in his mind's eye to the stage, is evident from a fact that is truly characteristic of this matter.

One of the greatest German actors, Laroche, was a contemporary of Goethe and a friend of Goethe's in Weimar. I myself knew a good acquaintance of Laroche through my old teacher, Karl Julius Schröer. And Laroche told old Schröer how he, Laroche, as a respected actor, went with a deputation of respected gentlemen in Weimar to Goethe to present the plan of bringing “Faust” to the stage to Goethe - relatively late, at the end of the twenties. At that time, since only the first part was available, it could only be a matter of staging the first part. And Laroche described how he still had the old Goethe before him, as present, in his anger. Goethe's anger was so strong that they thought of staging the “Faust” play that was never intended for the stage, that in his anger, despite having a number of respected gentlemen in front of him, he hissed at them: “You fools!” This is how Goethe met the first deputation that wanted to stage his “Faust”.

Now, of course, no one would dream of excluding Faust from the stage. However, those who deal with such things know how difficult it is in the art of directing to really present this Faust in such a way that everything that lived in Goethe's soul comes out.

Now, with regard to those scenes in which, as is always the case in Goethe's “Faust”, supersensible processes intermingle with purely earthly processes – processes that reach into the spiritual world with regard to the life of the human soul – we have tried various things to make use of eurythmy. And so, in the first part before the break, we will show you the scene where Faust translates the Bible, sits in his study and meets Mephisto. We will show you this scene, where the supersensible world actually plays a part in Faust's life, where you have to look for ways to express in outwardly visible forms what plays a part there as the supersensible world.

This and other scenes have shown us how to present something that is not possible with other stage techniques with the help of eurythmy. So in the first part before the break, we will present you with a Goethean scene, a scene from Goethe's “Faust”, which will of course be presented in its other parts in the usual dramatic way. But where the plot takes a turn towards the supersensible, eurythmy is used to help with the presentation. We will therefore see a rehearsal of how eurythmy can be a great help in the theatrical presentation of poetry and dramatic poetry when they take on a supernatural element.

After the break, we will present poems that have been eurythmized from beginning to end. Before we begin with such performances, I would like to ask you to bear with us, as what I said at the beginning is meant seriously: we are only at the first attempt at this eurythmic art. We are, however, convinced that if our contemporaries show an interest in these attempts, eurythmy will develop to ever greater perfection, either through us or probably through others, the results of which will be presented today as a beginning, so that eurythmy can establish itself alongside other art forms as a fully-fledged new art form.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to say a few words in advance of the rehearsal of our eurythmic art that we will present to you.

Human speech, through which we communicate in life and which is used by poetry to express artistic things, is, as is well known, a product of the human larynx and its neighboring organs. Everything that we pay attention to in ordinary life with regard to human speech is the audible. In contrast to ordinary audible speech, eurythmy is conceived as a silent but visible language. But eurythmy is not conceived as a silent but visible language in the same way that ordinary human gestures or pantomime are conceived as a silent language. Rather, what is attempted in eurythmy is derived from the human being himself in a completely lawful way, derived from the human being himself in such a way that it is based on Goethe's world view and artistic attitude.

Just as Goethe tried to gain a lifelike understanding of nature by examining living beings to see how the individual organ expresses the whole organism, and how the whole organism is only a more complicated structure that represents a transformation of the individual organ , then we try to listen to an activity of the person that is produced by an organ system – in this case the larynx and its neighboring organs – in order to then apply it to the possibilities of movement of the whole person.

By means of a certain kind of – to use this Goethean expression – sensual-supersensible seeing, we can see what we do not see in ordinary life when we listen to the person speaking. You only need to remember how it is clear even from physics that, as I speak here, my speaking sets the air in motion, in wave-like motion, so you already have a concept of that movement, which is a concomitant of what we ourselves hear. But one can go further back, precisely through a kind of sensory-supersensory seeing. If one has this ability of sensory-supersensory seeing, one can convince oneself of the movements, and namely the movement structures, that are present in the human larynx and its neighboring organs when a person speaks.

These movement possibilities can then be transferred to the whole person. Just as, in Goethe's sense, the whole plant is only a more complicated leaf, so the whole person can move his limbs in the way that the larynx, tongue, palate and so on move when a person speaks. Visible language is therefore what is attempted through eurythmy.

But this is how you come particularly close to an artistic element. Isn't it true, my dear audience, that the artistic is based on our ability to delve into the essence of things, without abstract concepts and ideas. All that is mere knowledge, all that is developed imagination, disturbs what is actually artistic. We must delve into the riddles of existence, and you can take on the mediation of presentation and concept. It is precisely this that happens unconsciously through the eurythmy on the part of the spectator. It happens quite consciously on the part of those who are performing this eurythmy.

For in our ordinary language, two sides are confused: one is the element of thought that permeates our words from the soul. This is something that is lost from the artistic side of language; it is also something that is more closely aligned with the conventional way in which we communicate in life, and which is how the philistine, everyday, inartistic element of language comes about.

But the other aspect of the soul also works in language: the will element. In ordinary language, the thought element works together with the will element. Now, esteemed attendees, we omit precisely this thought element by bringing the will impulses out of the human being in the silent language of eurythmy. And we express these impulses of will through the entire world of the human limbs. So you see, as it were, the human being himself becoming a mute speech organ on the stage before you. And what he expresses through these movements of form, and also through his movements in space, is the same as what is otherwise expressed through audible speech.

By immersing ourselves in the human being itself, in order to allow ourselves to be revealed what is predisposed in the innermost part of the human being as possibilities of movement, we switch off the very element of language, and thus penetrate deeper into the essence of the human being without concepts and ideas, in direct contemplation. And in this way we achieve something that is fundamentally artistic. You can see that here we are attempting something that avoids mere gesture, pantomime, mimicry, and arbitrary connections – as is often the case in dance – between the content of the soul and the external impression.

In this way, eurythmy is something like the art of music itself. Just as musical art does not achieve its full value when it is merely tone painting, so eurythmic movements do not achieve what we are seeking artistically if they merely express in pantomime what is going on in the soul. They do not do this; but just as in music the essential lies in the lawful succession of the tones, in the melodious element, so here the essential lies not in the direct expression, but in the lawful sequence of the movements. Eurythmy is therefore music that is visible on the outside. And so it is that there is nothing arbitrary about two people or two groups of people in different places eurythmizing or performing the same thing, because the individual possibilities for expression are not allowed to differ any more than when two pianists play the same piece of music according to their personal interpretation.

And all the feelings that otherwise animate our speech, such as passion and sorrow, joy and enthusiasm, and so on, we can also express through the forms and especially through groups – whereby the individual personalities interact through the different movements of these groups. So it is a mute language of people in motion through which eurythmy seeks to work.

Of course, everything aesthetic must have an immediate effect, and I am only saying these few words to you in advance so that you can see the artistic sources from which this eurythmy is drawn. Just as in music there is an inner lawfulness of tones in the sequence of tones, of melody and so on, here we come to the lawfulness of human movement itself.

You will hear the silent language of eurythmy performed before you accompanied, on the one hand, by music, which is essentially just another expression, an expression with different means. You will also hear the recitation on the other hand. What is heard in the recitation becomes visible on the stage through the movements of the people there. The two will run in parallel. A piece of poetry, for example, will be recited, and the art of poetry will be presented in eurythmy at the same time – one and the same.

However, it must be taken into account that the art of recitation, as it is practiced today, is not well suited for eurythmy. For today, in the art of recitation – and it is precisely in this that the greatness of the art of recitation is seen – the prose content of the poems is actually taken into account, not the rhythmic, the metrical, the rhyming that underlies them. But this must be taken into account precisely in the art of recitation that is intended to serve the rhythmic presentation. So we have to go back to the good old forms of recitation – and [in doing so] we want to develop a feeling for the artistic again, a better feeling than our current, somewhat inartistic times. In the artistic, our present humanity also often seeks the prose content of a poem, the literal content in a poem.

One need only recall how Schiller, for example, before he had the literal content of some of his poems in mind, had a melody in mind; and it was only for this melody, which now lived in his soul in a certain way, that he then sought the literal content. This is how the best of Schiller's poems came into being. The real poet needs the formal element that underlies the prose element of life.

Now we will first have to perform a scene from the first part of Goethe's “Faust” for you. There we will, of course, present what are, so to speak, everyday events, in a manner appropriate to the stage. However, anyone who has seen many of the attempts that the directorial art of modern theater has made to bring Goethe's “Faust” to the stage in a dignified manner knows how difficult it is to that Goethe has put into Faust, to really bring it out in the presentation, when Goethe, as is the case in so many places in Faust, allows the supersensible, the spiritual, to play into his poetry. In many places, as you know - also in the first part, but especially in the second part of Faust - the spiritual and the supersensible play a role. One can go through the various directorial skills that have been applied: a great deal was really achieved in the 1880s, even in the 1880s. I myself got to know Wilbrandt in the 1880s, with his amiable directorial skills, who tried to bring the whole of “Faust” to the stage. It was also a kind of deepening for the interpretation of the mystery play that Devrient brought to the stage and so on. Much has been tried; but something unsatisfactory always remains, especially in the scenes where the spiritual and supersensible play a role and should be presented.

So now, while we present the rest of the scenes in a purely theatrical way, we are trying to bring out the “ghost scene” through eurythmy. Before the break, we will present the first scene of the first part of “Faust” in a purely theatrical way, as far as this can be considered. So the scene in the study, the poodle scene, where the poodle disturbs Faust while he is translating the Bible; and then the ghosts enter, and through the silent language of eurythmy we try to bring out what is in this world poem with regard to the ghost scene.

Goethe was aware that he had put so much inwardly human into his “Faust” poetry that he had not actually thought of staging the first part of “Faust” until the 1820s. He was then aware that he had adapted “Faust II” for the stage; but it was not performed until after Goethe's death. But you see, Faust was such a huge piece of world literature that other people came up with the idea of staging Faust, of actually bringing it to the stage. Goethe hadn't thought of that; for him, Faust was simply something portrayed from within, from the human perspective.

My old friend and teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, was very friendly with Laroche, who was still a famous actor at the time of Goethe. Laroche came to Goethe at the head of a deputation with the proposal – it was only at the end of the 1790s – to bring Faust to the stage. Laroche reported to Schröer: “Yes, Goethe gave us a good telling off! He was furious when he heard that we wanted to stage Faust. He said to us, 'You fools!' You see, with Goethe, a good deal of anger was needed – and surprise. Goethe, who had really become a well-mannered gentleman by that time, the “fat privy councillor with the double chin”, was not easily so naughty to such excellent people as, for example, Laroche, when he called them “donkeys”. He must have really believed that it was not possible to stage “Faust”. He also spoke about it more often later on.

But attempts were repeatedly made to bring Faust to the stage, and rightly so. We now believe that for certain scenes, the mystery that Goethe has woven into his Faust can be brought out by means of eurythmy in certain places. Of course, you, esteemed attendees, should consider this as just an experiment; and I would ask you to consider what we are able to present to you today as just the beginning of the art of eurythmy, which will be perfected later.

So, before the intermission, we will present the first part of the first scene from the first part of Faust, and then after the intermission we will present poems, poetry, and music, where we will do everything entirely in eurythmy. In the presentation of the scene from Faust, only a few parts are in eurythmy. But in the second part of our program, we will then present everything to you in full eurythmy. And so I ask you to please take the whole performance as an exercise in forbearance; for we are actually only at the beginning with the eurythmic art that seeks to achieve what I have presented.

However, we believe that if our contemporaries show the right interest in this new art, it can be perfected, either by us or by others – probably the latter – and that the time will come will come when this art, which uses the whole person as an instrument, thus the highest thing we have in existence, will be able to establish itself as a fully-fledged art alongside other older fully-fledged arts.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Before we take the liberty of presenting a small sample of our eurythmic art, allow me to say a few words about the source of this eurythmic art. It is this small area from the spiritual current that we represent here and for which our building is the external representation. Like everything else, this small piece actually originated from the whole world view. This world view also encompasses, in the broadest sense, a certain artistic attitude towards the world.

Now, of course, it is not immediately apparent how exactly what we call eurythmy here flows out of the whole world view; but I will be able to make myself understood in the following way.

What we express through our human language – whether in ordinary life, when we simply communicate with words and sentences in human interaction, or when we express ourselves artistically in poetry or recitation – what we express in these two ways through language, that flows together in the human being from two currents: From a stream that could be called the stream of thought, the stream of imagination - in a sense, from everything that pours out of the organs of our head into the larynx, palate and so on - everything that belongs to language. Into this, now, mingles, interpenetrating with the element of imagination, that which comes from the whole human being – the element of will. In speech, the elements of perception and will truly flow together. And the two are only permeated by the element of feeling, by the feelings, by pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, which we pour into what comes about as a perceptual and volitional movement in speaking, also in artistic speaking.

By listening to this speech, we naturally turn our attention to what we hear. But while the human being makes himself audible through speech, his speech organs – larynx, tongue, palate and so on – are in motion. And what is even stronger than this movement is the disposition to move. Furthermore, everyone can understand the connection between the movement in the tone – even in ordinary speech outside of music – if they realize that when I speak here, I set the air in motion, in vibration. And hearing is based precisely on that.

And if, through what Goethe calls sensory-supersensory perception, you focus your attention on what underlies speaking in the larynx and in the other speech organs, you can see precisely that through a certain supersensory spiritual recognition, to which you do not pay attention when you simply listen to what you hear. What we hear in terms of the possible movements of the larynx, tongue, palate and so on can be applied to the limbs of the whole human being. And the people you see here on stage doing eurythmy will then perform movements with their arms, hands and so on. These movements are not arbitrary. It is not like ordinary dance or ordinary pantomime. These are not momentary gestures, but rather what is brought out of the human being in accordance with the laws of nature, which is also the basis of the laws of movement in the larynx and its neighboring organs when speaking.

So in our eurythmy there is nothing invented, but everything is drawn from the secrets of human existence, of nature. In a sense, the whole human being becomes a larynx; only, of course, a mute language is produced by this. This silent language is what we call eurythmy. But in this silent language, the element of imagination that we have when we understand what we are saying is absent, and it is taken over by the limbs. When they move, only the will element is expressed, which is otherwise more or less even stimulated when speaking.

If you now consider that everything truly artistic actually consists in this, that you recognize everything truly artistic by letting the secrets that are in things reveal themselves in direct contemplation, to the exclusion of representations, ideas and thoughts, you will admit that precisely by using the secrets of the human being, which you yourself use like a musical instrument for your inner movements, that precisely by doing so, the artistic is taken into account to the highest degree through eurythmy — precisely by excluding the conceptual and including the mysterious will, which we can only sense. By seeing the movement, that which is most eminently artistic for the beholder is generated.

And so in this silent language, which we call eurythmy, the possibility of working artistically comes about in a very special way. You see, our ordinary everyday language, which the poet must also use, has increasingly deviated from its original character. If we go back to the early days of humanity, we find that the original languages were much more poetic, much more artistically shaped in themselves. Our language has become very abstract, very prosaic. As a result, we no longer feel in all cases where people write poetry that language can produce something truly artistic. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that 99 percent of all poetry could just as well be left out of our intellectual culture. Perhaps only one percent of what is written today is truly worthy of being performed. For our language, and almost all European languages, with the exception of the eastern ones, is already beyond the stage where it can fully express the actual formal artistic aspect.

Therefore, it is precisely possible, through this silent language of eurythmy, to fulfill something that corresponds to Goethe's artistic ethos. Goethe said so beautifully in his book on Winckelmann: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn sees himself as a whole of nature, and once again brings forth the one natural summit within himself, by taking up the order, measure, harmony and meaning of things and rising to the production of the work of art. And if we use the whole human being as an instrument – this most perfect instrument of our earthly existence – then we can certainly find secrets of the universe within him that can be shaped artistically much more than what we can get out of our conventional language today.

And so we can say that this eurythmy is - only that it is for the eyes and not for the ears - permeated by an inner lawfulness, just like music. Just as the artistic element in music does not consist in tone painting but in the lawful succession of tones, so too in eurythmy everything is built on the lawful sequence of movements; nothing is arbitrary - everything must be so. Just as it must be in music, as it is always formed according to law, it is no more arbitrary that when two groups or two individuals perform the same eurythmic action in two different places, their subjective perception cannot be more different than, for example, the subjective perception of two pianists playing the same piece of music.

All pantomime and all arbitrariness has been removed; if something still occurs, it is only because we are only at the beginning of our eurythmic art and some things are not as perfect as we would like them to be in our eurythmic performances.

But in eurythmy language we can also express everything that gives life to language, everything that streams out of our soul through human speech as enthusiasm, as passion and suffering, as joy and pain. We express this through what the individual does in space, what is done through the relationships of the group movement to one another. So on the one hand, what moves the soul is presented on stage. You will hear it accompanied in part by music, which is just another expression, an audible expression of what is expressed in silent language through eurythmy.

On the other hand, you will also hear it accompanied by recitation. We are essentially presenting poetry, but precisely when recitation or declamation is used on stage as an accompaniment to the silent language of eurythmy, we have to go back to the good old forms of recitation and declamation. We must go back to the times when people were not yet as abstract as they are today. Today, great importance is attached to emphasizing the prosaic content of language in poetry in the art of recitation. This achieves a certain refinement. But that was never what really mattered to the poet.

We need only recall how Schiller, when he wrote his most important poems, did not first have the literal content in his soul, but something melodious that hummed in his soul. And only when he had this melodious, musical element within him, still entirely without words, did he then add words, which are, so to speak, only of secondary importance to the inner meter and rhythm. If we go back to certain stages [of recitation] that we can hardly see or hear today, we can see, I would say — how a certain primitive eurythmy was already present. The people, balladeers mostly, as one could still hear them in our youth in the countryside, sing, could hear, they walked reciting, gesticulating up and down, in which they often presented their quite inferior poems.

The actual artistic element of human life has indeed been greatly reduced, and few people today still have any idea that in relatively recent times - at least for certain areas of the world - work was strongly connected with rhythm. When one did this or that work, one moved rhythmically. This actual rhythmic element was then also applied to what is actually artistic about spoken language.

We must go back to this artistic, rhythmic element in spoken language, in the art of recitation and declamation, and emphasize it again. Therefore, you will notice how we emphasize the rhythmic, the element of meter in recitation, which accompanies the eurythmy here. Otherwise, it would not be possible to accompany eurythmy with today's art of recitation and recitation, because eurythmy, which is essentially born of the element of will, demands that prose recitation, the emphasis of the literal content, recedes and the direct perception of what lies in rhyme, rhythm and so on comes to the fore, that this is expressed precisely through recitation and declamation.

Now, before the break, we will present a dramatic scene from the first part of Goethe's “Faust”, in the study, where he [Faust] is translating the Bible and is disturbed by the poodle. What we are presenting here is not, of course, done in a very eurythmic way, but is done as it is usually done, for the stage. But in Goethe, especially in this world poem of his, in Faust, we come across elemental moments that enter into the supersensible, into the spiritual. The spiritual world continually intrudes into the human world.

It is extremely difficult to present. And in the second part of Faust, Goethe always thought in terms of the stage – by then he had already somewhat modified his own artistic vision – but in the first part of Faust, he did not think of a performance at all. He simply wanted to infuse these works of art, on which he had been working for decades, with the kind of human soul-life, pleasure and suffering, the kind of oppression and sublimity that could be brought to bear on them.

And as I said, he really did not think of the first part of his “Faust” as a stage performance. The result was that parts were performed – and especially the music relatively soon – but that there was never a complete performance of the first part of “Faust”, that – the second part was not published until after Goethe's death – no one even tried. But in the 1820s, a group of respected people in Weimar put together a troupe, putting the great actor La Roche at its head. This deputation then went to Goethe to propose that his “Faust”, which had been around for decades, should now be staged.

Goethe had been a Weimar courtier for decades, had already become the “fat privy councilor with the double chin,” a well-mannered gentleman – really a well-mannered gentleman who knew how to behave otherwise. And lo and behold: when the esteemed La Roche, at the head of a petition of otherwise also esteemed Weimarers, suggested staging Faust, Goethe had one of his outbursts and shouted at them, these people: “You fools!” The actor La Roche still knew my revered friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer, to whom he personally said: “Yes, yes, old Goethe, he still called us ‘donkeys’ back then!” He couldn't have imagined – not even himself – that “Faust” could be brought to the stage.

And we know how much effort has been made, how much effort people like the amiable director Adolf Wilbrandt or Devrient with his mystery-like structure of “Faust” or others have put into it. They have tried to bring “Faust I” to the stage. And of course it is fully justified to perform that which Goethe himself did not yet think of.

But we are convinced that one can only succeed if one uses eurythmy movements, because the supersensible element in 'Faust', which is expressed, for example, in the appearance of spirits and sprites of various kinds in this scene in the 'study', can only be properly portrayed with the help of eurythmy movements. Because something comes into play that ordinary language and ordinary directorial skills cannot actually achieve.

And in this respect, it seems to me – although what we are doing here can also be seen as an experiment – that a way can be found with the help of eurythmy, in which, of course, everything else that is purely earthly dialogue is presented in a purely earthly sense. Only where the supersensible world plays a part, I believe that a way can be found, with the help of eurythmy, to present these scenes on the stage, because of the strange interplay of the sensual and the supersensible in a dramatic poem such as Faust. At least I have the feeling that we have sometimes succeeded in doing this. And eight days ago today, when it seemed that there was a good mood here on stage, I had the feeling that what was played into the study of ghostly scenes, that it was something that could express what Goethe had secretly put into this ghost play. I hope that today, too, we will be able to let the mood come to the fore. This, ladies and gentlemen, indicates how the dramatic arts can also be enlivened by the silent language of eurythmy.

After the break, we will then perform individual poems, rehearsed by eurythmists, which are also partly by Goethe, from which you will then see how the poems can be presented through eurythmic performance. We hope that our contemporaries will take an interest in the art of eurythmy and that it will be supported by people paying attention to this art of eurythmy – even if we still have to ask for their forbearance today because it is only just beginning to emerge. We hope that one day, either through ourselves or more likely through others, this eurythmic art can be so perfected that it can stand alongside the other, older arts as a fully realized new art.

Public eurythmy performance in the presence of English friends

Dear attendees,

We would like to take the liberty of presenting a sample of what we call the eurythmic arts here. However, the art we are able to practice here is only just beginning. It is the attempt at the beginning of a new art. And so, just as everything that is striven for here in connection with this building, which is intended to represent our efforts in a certain sense, how everything here wants to tie in with what I would like to call Goetheanism, so this eurythmic art also wants to tie in with Goethe's artistic and world-view attitude. Just by saying this, I ask not to be misunderstood. It is not, so to speak, that which is to be linked to what has already emerged through Goethe, who died in 1832, but rather Goetheanism, which has been thrown into the evolution of humanity like a seed and which can produce the most diverse blossoms and fruits. We are not talking here about the Goethe of 1832, we are talking about the Goethe of 1919, about an evolved Goetheanism.

And an attempt has been made to educate this eurythmic art from the same meaningful, deep sources from which Goethe drew his worldview and his artistic endeavors, in line with the progress that the human spirit has made since then. And it is not to explain this art that I would like to speak these introductory words, because that which is art must explain itself, must reveal everything that is in it in the direct gaze for the aesthetic impression. But I would like to speak to you about the sources of what we call eurythmic art here. This eurythmic art makes use of the whole human being as a means of expression. It attempts to express all the possibilities of movement that are inherent in the human organism.

On the stage here before you, you will see people moving, groups of people moving. What is it that these people are meant to present? It is also a language, an inaudible, mute language. But it is not just a comparison that I use when I say that eurythmy should be a language, but it is the expression of a reality. When people speak in such a way that our spoken words become audible, then, spiritually speaking, two elements of the human being flow together in what we speak: from one side - I would say from the head side - the element of thought; and from the whole human being, the will element encounters this element of thought, which works through its organs – today this can also be proven physiologically. In every single word we speak, there is a revelation of the confluence of the element of thought with the element of will.

Now, when we listen to a spoken word, we first turn our attention through the ear to the tone, the sound, the sound context, and so on. But behind what reaches us as sound, as tone, as tone and sound relationships, in the vocal, in the musical and in the literal, lie the underlying possibilities of movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs, the tongue, the palate and so on. We do not pay attention to these movements. We simply hear the sound. Through a certain kind of looking – in the Goethean sense, one could speak of a sensual-supersensory looking – the one who enables himself to do so can perceive which movements, in particular which movement tendencies, underlie the spoken word. These movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs are to be grasped.

And from this knowledge of what really happens in the human being, through movements, when he speaks, the art of eurythmy has arisen from observation of this. In the training of this eurythmy, too, we have proceeded, if I may say so, in a Goethean way. You are familiar with – I do not want to theorize, but I just want to briefly mention an important principle of knowledge and art of Goethe – you are familiar with what is called the Goethean theory of metamorphosis. It has not yet been sufficiently appreciated today, because once its foundations are recognized, it will be the gateway to a meaningful world view that leads into the living. Goethe's view, if I am to express myself in popular terms, is that in every living thing, for example in plants, a single organ, the green leaf, is the simpler expression, the simpler revelation of the whole plant. And again, the whole plant is only the complicated expression of the individual leaf. And what Goethe applied only to form can be applied to the movements that find expression in an organism.

And it becomes particularly meaningful when this view is applied in such a way that one artistically brings out of the human being what is present in the whole human being in the way of movement. Something very interesting comes to light here. It turns out that the movements that can be perceived through the characterized sensory-supersensory vision as underlying our language can be transferred to the whole person. Just as the whole plant is morphologically, formally, a complicated development of the individual leaf, so can the whole person be moved in his limbs so that he becomes a living larynx. Then the whole human being performs that which otherwise remains invisible and unnoticed to us when we listen to speech.

On the one hand, you create a tool for an art. You create the whole human being as a tool for this eurythmic art. And since the same movements that the larynx and its neighboring organs make can be extracted from the whole human being, the whole human being becomes a visible expression of speech. When you consider that the human being, as he stands before us in his organization - in fact, you only have to look through him to see this - is a summary of all that is otherwise spread out in the whole universe that is accessible to us , then one recognizes that eurythmy uses as its instrument of expression the most complicated tool, the tool that contains the most secrets of the universe. By turning the whole human being into a larynx, one comes very close to what Goethe so beautifully characterized as his view of the relationship between man, nature and art, when he says: “When man is placed at the top of nature and feels himself to be this summit, he in turn produces a higher nature within himself, so that he finally elevates himself to the production of the work of art by combining measure, order, harmony and meaning.

But at the same time, something else is achieved. The essence of art lies in the fact that, by immersing ourselves in the work of art, we silence all understanding, all intellectual activity, everything that lives only in concepts and ideas. The more art contains ideas and concepts, the less it is art. If you bypass everything conceptual and imaginative and immerse the whole person in the revelation of nature's secrets, you come closer to excluding ideas, to the true weaving and reign of nature's secrets. Then this perception, this perception without ideas or concepts, and this immersion in things is precisely the artistic.

And working with such secrets of the universe, which cannot be grasped conceptually but only by immersing the whole human being in them, excluding the conceptual and the imaginative, can be achieved to the highest degree through eurythmy. For I have told you: in ordinary speech, two elements flow together, the thought element and the will element. By transferring the movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs to the whole human being, so that one creates a mute language through this whole human being, one excludes precisely the thought element and the will element, which is rooted in the whole human being. This is then expressed through the movements that you see on stage. And so, on the one hand, you will see in the individual representations something like the whole human being as a moving larynx; you will see groups of people; you will also see movements of the individual human being in space, and the relationships of movement between the individual members of the groups.

If we shape the art of eurythmy as I have described, it becomes quite natural for us to want to express the warmth of soul, the enthusiasm, the joy and suffering, the delight and pain, the uplift and so on that flows through our words. Everything that flows and permeates the speech element more from the heart, so to speak, is expressed through the movements of the individual in space and through the movements of the groups, through the relationships of the groups among themselves, while the actual speech element, that is, that which lies in the sound and in the sequence of sounds, is expressed by the whole human being moving his limbs.

But this is what distinguishes what we are attempting here with eurythmy from all neighboring arts. We certainly do not want to compete with these neighboring arts, with the various types of dance. We are well aware that they are, of course, more perfect in their way than our eurythmy, which is only at the beginning of its endeavors. But it is something completely different. These arts create a connection between the gesture of movement and the soul, which is, so to speak, an instantaneous connection. But everything that can be expressed in this way through pantomime, through momentary gestures, is not what we strive for in our eurythmy. Just as speech itself is thoroughly lawful, just as the musical is lawful, so there is also a strict inner lawfulness in what we strive for in eurythmy. If something pantomime-like or mimic-like still comes through, it is still an imperfection and will be discarded later when the eurythmic art becomes more and more perfect.

Therefore, there is nothing arbitrary about it. If two people or two groups of people in different places were to present one and the same thing in eurythmy, no greater leeway would be allowed for individual interpretation than is allowed when two pianists present one and the same Beethoven sonata according to their own interpretation. Everything arbitrary is excluded. It is a lawful, silent language. Therefore, today, when of course not everyone can be present at the eurythmic as such, this eurythmic can be accompanied on the one hand by the musical, which is, after all, the expression of the same, but can also be accompanied by the recitation.

And it is precisely in recitation that it becomes clear how art finds its way to art when combined with eurythmy. You can't recite as it is popular to recite today. Today, when reciting, the unartistic element of poetry is particularly favored. Today, when reciting, a great deal of attention is paid to the fact that the content of the prose is expressed through the recitation. And that is also what one loves. This is the unartistic element. One feels this unartistic element when one remembers, firstly, how certain types, I would like to say of primitive recitation, have been emphasized in primitive cultures. Those of us who are older could still experience this in the countryside; we could see how the storytellers, as they traveled around, accompanied their tales with gestures that were very natural, not in the sense as one would call it today, but which were actually very similar to our eurythmic gestures, accompanied with such gestures, often with the whole body moving around, what they presented in the recitative.

And after all, it is not the content of prose that is the main basis of real poetry, but rather the rhythmic, the formal, the formal, the rhythmic, the lawful in the succession of the audible. When writing his most significant poems, Schiller did not begin with the literal content in mind, but rather had something vaguely melodious in his soul, and it was only later, when he added the literal content to this vaguely melodious quality, that the literal content was added. The formative process that underlies all real poetry should be felt everywhere. Most of the things we call poetry today are not really poetry. So much is written today that, in fact, ninety-nine percent too much is written. But eurythmy could not be used to accompany the art of recitation, which is so popular today and which pays particular attention to the literal content of prose.

So here we are trying to go back to the truly artistic in the art of recitation as well. Goethe, with the baton still in his hand like a conductor, rehearsed his “Iphigenia”, a dramatic poem, with his actors, looking at what lies at the heart of the truly artistic. The formal elements of the prose, the literal content, are not the basis for the truly artistic expression. And so it is particularly the case that what is otherwise expressed in poetry through the word, can be represented in its will element through the eurythmic art. You will therefore hear recitations of poems, and you will see these poems presented on stage in the silent eurythmic language.

I believe that Goethe's poems in particular demonstrate the validity of this eurythmic art. Today we will show you, for example, eurythmy performances for Goethe's cloud poems. Goethe also applied his metamorphic view - more externalizing it, but thereby precisely translating it into art - to the transforming cloud formations stratus, cumulus, cirrus, nimbus. Goethe has illustrated in beautiful verses how these cloud formations transform into one another, an insight that came to him when he read the cloud observer Howard. He wrote a very beautiful poem “To Howard's Honorary Memory”, which we will also present to you today in eurythmy. But especially when one has such poems by Goethe, in which it is so important to follow a process in nature in poetry with such forms that the process in nature wells up and surges in the rhythm and shaping of language, then one can also follow the poetry with the forms of eurythmy. And that is why I believe that Goethe's Cloud Poems are particularly suitable for beautifully expressing how eurythmy can be found to be completely adequate for expressing what can also be expressed poetically.

Now there is a poem by Goethe in which Goethe himself has expressed the whole nature of his metamorphic thought, his metamorphic feeling, in the poem “The Metamorphosis of Plants”. The whole poem lives in the presentation of form observation. From line to line, we actually have the feeling that we must not cling to the abstract idea, but that we must show ourselves obedient with our whole soul to the forms that surge and swell in the poet's imagination. And that is why the eurythmic presentation can be fully adapted to this particular poem of Goethe's about metamorphosis. And for today's performance, we have also tried to cast this poem by Goethe about the metamorphosis of plants in eurythmic forms. Especially where the poetry itself becomes like an imprint of the secrets of nature, directly created by the soul, the artistic development of human feeling reveals itself on the one hand, on the other hand, the possibility of presenting this artistic element in the way it can be presented when the whole human being is used, as I have indicated, as a kind of musical-linguistic instrument. Thus we can indeed penetrate deeply into the secrets of nature if we seek these secrets in this formal language, which we strive to reveal in eurythmy.

I only ask you to consider everything that we can present today, everything that we can currently offer as a sample of our eurythmic art, as a beginning, perhaps as an attempt at a beginning. We are our own harshest critics, even in relation to what we can already do today. However, we are also convinced that if what is alive in the attempt at a new art is further developed, either by ourselves or probably by others – and there are many, many possibilities for development in this – then this eurythmic art will certainly be able to present itself as a fully-fledged art form alongside other fully-fledged art forms. As I said, we are being modest in what we can offer today, and I therefore ask you to also accept what we will present to you with indulgence as the beginning of a new art form.

Dear attendees!

As always before these performances, I would like to take the liberty of saying a few words today, first about our eurythmic art, for those of the honored audience who were not present at earlier performances.

Goethe said of his artistic sensibilities: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he feels himself to be a whole nature, bringing forth a higher nature from within himself by extracting order, measure, harmony and meaning from all phenomena and ultimately rising to the production of the work of art. It is out of this spirit, out of true Goetheanism, that our eurythmic art was born. I do not wish to give you a theoretical discussion in these few words, for it is self-evident that something truly artistic needs no explanation but must commend itself and be understood directly in the act of presentation. But the way in which an attempt is being made here to create an art form must be discussed in order to be understood.

They will show all kinds of movements performed by people and groups of people. You will see the way individuals within the groups relate to one another. All the movements that appear are born out of the human organism and the interaction between people. They are not contrived or arbitrary in any way, but are a real, silent language.

The development of this art is based on a deeper - to use Goethe's expression - [sensual-transcendental insight into the human being and its connection with the world. With such a sensory-supersensory insight into the human being, one can recognize which lawful movements the human larynx and its neighboring organs carry out when a person reveals the sounding, audible language or singing of himself. It is precisely those things to which we do not pay attention when we listen to spoken language, the internal movement and especially the movement patterns, that have been studied here according to Goethe's principle of metamorphosis, according to which what is formed or takes place in one organ system can be transferred to other organ systems or to the whole organism. According to this deeply significant law of Goethe's metamorphosis, what otherwise underlies movements or the potential for movement is quite naturally transferred to human speech, [via] the movements of the limbs of the human being in the world. And this is precisely how the possibility arises that the sight of such a mute language must have an artistic effect. For what is the artistic in human beings actually based on? It is based on the fact that we receive impressions of the life of nature and of human beings without the abstract imagination, or imagination at all, mixing into these impressions.

In ordinary language – even when expressed poetically – two elements of the human organism are embodied: on the one hand, the element of thought, which in more advanced, civilized language has already taken on a strongly conventional character, and on the other hand, the more subconscious will element, the emotional element, is at the root of it. If one can eliminate the thought element from speech, which crystallizes into the tone of the heard language and thus does not allow the heard language to be completely artistic, then one achieves something that can be believed to be particularly artistic. And so all the movements of speech are transferred to the human limbs; but only the will element is incorporated. The human being as a whole expresses itself, not through sharp gestures as in other dance or similar arts, but the human being as a whole expresses itself in a lawful way.

Therefore, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing merely pantomime or mimic in this eurythmy. If two people or groups of people in completely different places express one and the same piece of poetry or one and the same piece of music through this formal language of eurythmy, there is no more individuality in the two different performances than there is in the performance of one and the same Beethoven sonata by two different pianists. All arbitrariness is avoided. There are inner laws in the sequence of movements that could not be otherwise, because they are derived from the essence of nature itself. Just as the harmony and melody of music have an inner lawfulness, so here everything that is revealed in the movements has an inner, musical lawfulness. We are dealing here with a visible musical art.

Thus you will find many things presented in two ways, either at the same time through music and eurythmy or through recitation and eurythmy. In this, recitation must return to its old, good element, where it is not cultivated only for its prosaic, literal content, as it is today, but for the rhythmic, the measured quality of the sound, which is what actually constitutes the artistry of the poem. For what is felt today as poetry is not, in the first instance, the actual artistry of the poetry, but the prose content of the poem. It is the formal, the rhythmic, the metrical that underlies it, and an inner lawfulness of the essence of the world is revealed.

In the second part, we will present Christmas plays today and tomorrow, today a Paradise Play.

We resumed these plays several years ago. I can say that I myself have a very close connection with the revival of the plays in our family. It is now almost forty years since I became acquainted with these plays through one of the men who has rendered the greatest service to their collection, through my revered friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer. Schröer was one of the first to collect these games together with Weinhold, Schröer in particular. While Weinhold collected them in Silesia, Karl Julius Schröer collected them in the Oberufer region near Pressburg [Bratislava], where Germans had advanced towards the parts of European territories where other languages were spoken as a result of emigration from more western European areas.

The Hungarian countryside is permeated by old German colonists: in Transylvania, where the Saxons settled, in the Banat, where the Swabians came from the areas around Lake Constance, in Alsace, in what is now southern Württemberg, in northern Switzerland – numerous colonists moved into the areas of northwestern Hungary. And they brought with them those Christmas plays, those Bible plays, which were performed in their original form in the German motherland until the 16th century, and later only remained in a few places, fairly unnoticed by the educated world. In the colonies, especially in the Oberufer region, near the island of Schütt, near Pressburg, the practice of playing these Christmas games in a dignified manner every year around Christmas time has become established and was preserved until the forties, fifties and even sixties of the last century. And when they began to disappear from the scene, Karl Julius Schröer collected these Christmas games in the Hungarian region of Oberufer.

It is extremely interesting to observe these Christmas plays. They provide cultural-historical evidence of the way in which Christianity was actually introduced in Europe in centuries past, and how it affected the entire spiritual life of the people. Schröer had still observed it himself, and we often talked about these things, and he told me with what dignity, with what inner participation the people celebrated these Christmas games. They were well preserved by particularly select farmers in the village concerned, by particularly respected people. They were passed down from father to son, from son to grandson, and were held sacred; they were not easily shared with outsiders. It took a great deal of effort for Karl Julius Schröer to get them out. But, as I said, it was already the dawn of this play for the German colonists in Hungary.

When October, the harvest season, approached, the person who was considered the master of the arts in these farming and working-class areas – these were mostly extremely poor communities even back then, these German communities in Hungary – he gathered the local boys he considered most worthy, and he rehearsed these Christmas plays with them. The dignity with which this was done may be gathered from the fact that, under strict disciplinary laws, those who were allowed to participate were not allowed to leave during the entire period of the play. This is expressly prescribed for those who were allowed to participate: that they are not allowed to go to the pub or indulge in any other debauchery during the entire time. During the whole time, that meant a lot: it was immediately after the grape harvest was over that one was not allowed to get drunk. Anyone who somehow violated these rules was immediately dismissed.

All the roles were played by young men. The old custom of not allowing women to participate in comedy plays, including sacred comedies, was still in place, although the educated world had long since abandoned it. However, it was still preserved and noticeable at these festival plays. And from this one can see how ancient and sacred customs have been preserved in the performance of these plays. So tomorrow, for example, we will perform a play for you, a pastoral play, in which the Rhine is mentioned, from which one can see how these plays were originally, at least as late as the sixteenth century, were performed near Lake Constance. These things take us back, I would say, to the sixth century, so that we have before us the living out of Christian life as if it were happening right in front of us.

To present something like this, I would say, as a directly revealing story to the contemporary world, that is what we would like to make our task. Now that everything that is cultural life has become so sober, so dry and so abstract, now is the time to go back to such things, which, in directly vivid imagery, by raising the old into the present, transport us back into the becoming, into the development of humanity.

Of course, since we are not dealing with trained actors, I would ask you to receive this performance, as well as the eurythmy performance itself, as one of our modest attempts. We ourselves believe that what our eurythmy art has become today is only a beginning. It is indeed a supreme artistic aspiration to apply the human being as an instrument in art, not the violin, not the piano, not the trumpet, but the human being. Especially when you consider how all the laws of nature are somehow in action in the speaking human being, then you will know how to appreciate the ideal on which eurythmy is based. But it is only just beginning. We are our own harshest critics, and so I ask you to please be very indulgent as you take it all in.

It should also be mentioned that the eurythmy performance will include not only individual pieces but also the Norwegian “Dream Song of Olaf Ästeson”. It comes from the oldest Nordic folk myth that can be expressed artistically; it was rediscovered when, alongside the Statsmäl [Riksmäl], the Landsmäl of the old Norwegian language, the popular Norwegian language, was cultivated. This dream song, this Traumlied, gave the impression of genuine Norwegian folklore, and with the help of friends in high places, I tried to express in our present language that which leads back to ancient European-Nordic times in this poem.

I would like to say that this “Dream Song” expresses a very popular worldview, a worldview that is particularly loved in those cultures that have developed on the one hand in the particularly shaped way of life in Norway and in the influence of the neighboring cultures. I would say that here, too, we can see into the depths of human feeling – especially in the way that the relationship between Nordic, clairvoyant paganism and the Christianity that was spreading there flows into one another here in the 'Dream Song'. What has emerged from the confluence of these two world currents, taken up as an elementary, original folklore and its worldviews, is actually enshrouded in mystery in this “Dream Song of Olaf Åsteson”.

Dear attendees!

In the first part of our presentation today, we will take the liberty of introducing you to eurythmy. And since I may well assume that not all of you have been to previous performances in which I have discussed the essence of our eurythmic art, I would like to take the liberty of at least saying a few words about the essence of our eurythmic art today.

It is not, in fact, something that could be compared with some other dance or the like that appears similar on the surface. Rather, with eurythmy, we are inaugurating a truly new art form. It is born out of what we here call the Goethean view of art, the feeling for art, which is, however, intimately connected with the whole of the Goethean world view. I do not want to be detailed today, but just hint at what it is about with a few sentences.

You will see movements performed by individuals; you will see groups of people in positions in relation to each other, performing group movements in relation to each other. What are these movements meant to achieve, whether they are performed purely by the human organism and its limbs or by groups of people? What are these movements meant to achieve? What do these movements mean?

They are not arbitrary gestures. Everything that is mere pantomime, that is facial expression, that is momentary gesture, is strictly forbidden in this eurythmic art. It is absolutely a matter of something that is internally lawful. Just as one has an inner lawfulness in music, in harmony and melody, and as it is actually unmusical to form something out of mere tone painting, so too in our eury thmy is not about creating random connections between a movement and soul content, but rather it is also about a kind of lawfulness in the sequence of these movements, about a musical element, about a linguistic element. It is about having a mute language in front of you in this eurythmic art. And this is how this mute language came about: by directing our attention, with the help of sensory-supersensory observation, to aspects of human, especially artistic, speech that we would otherwise not take into account when we simply listen to the spoken language. We focus our attention on the sound.

Now you only need to consider that, by speaking to you here, I am setting the air in motion. This movement is, of course, only a continuation of the movement that already exists in the larynx and its neighboring organs. This wonderful organization, which is the basis for speech, can be studied. And then what otherwise takes place as a hidden movement or half or fully executed movements in the larynx and its neighboring organs can be transferred to the whole person, so that the whole person becomes a moving larynx, that is, a means of expression for a mute language.

It is generally inadvisable to first explain what art is. I do not want to do that either. I want to point out that this eurythmic art must reveal itself through the direct impression that aesthetic enjoyment makes on aesthetic perception. But it can also do so because something is taken out of the linguistic element that has long since grown beyond the artistic and into the conventional in ordinary heard language, especially in our civilized language contexts.

In our sounding language, I would say, the thought from the head and the will from the whole person work together. Now, in art, it is precisely the essence that through this art, to the exclusion of imagination, we come to understand the thought, to move the will. In eurythmy, we switch off the ideas. We set in motion, through the human limbs, what is otherwise performed by the larynx and its neighboring organs, the human will. In a mute language, the whole person expresses himself as a being of will.

So you see this mute language on the stage as eurythmy, accompanied either by music – which then expresses the same thing through the musical tone, through the musical art – or accompanied by recitation, which in turn expresses in language (in audible language) what is revealed in mute language through eurythmy. In this case, the recitation must follow the eurythmy. And that is why it must go back to the older, better art forms of recitation, which took more account of the artistic aspect, of what is underlying in terms of meter, rhythm and, in general, the formal aspects of poetry. Today, recitation is more often based purely on the prosaic content. For some people, it is still somewhat strange that what is otherwise made visible in moving limbs through eurythmy can be heard in the recitation itself in the way that poetry is treated by the reciter when he accompanies eurythmy.

We will show you individual poems through the art of eurythmy, and then we will present a longer poem, a Norwegian dream song - “Olaf Åsteson”. This Norwegian dream play is in itself something extraordinarily interesting. It was rediscovered when special interest in Norway turned to the vernacular, which is called the “Landsmäl” in contrast to the language in Norwegian areas called “Statsmäl” [Riksmäl], which is now more cultivated. This Landsmäl is like an old folk book, and it contains something like this dream song of “Olaf Åsteson”. It evidently goes back to very early times, when the Norwegian spirit created that which moved its soul life, in which, on the one hand, old Nordic, clairvoyant paganism still existed, which was interspersed with Christianity, and how these old Nordic ideas merged with the deeply felt inner understanding of Christianity. This is what we encounter in this poem 'Olaf Åsteson', a truly wonderful folk poem. With the help of Norwegian friends who speak the Landsmäl, I then tried to render this dream song in our language, in the way in which it is to appear before you today as the basic text of a eurythmy performance.

And thirdly, we will present a Christmas play about shepherds, one of those Christmas plays that really take us back, I would say, to the Christian education of earlier centuries. The Christmas play presented here was discovered by my esteemed teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, with whom I discussed these matters a great deal at the time – it was almost 40 years ago – and so my love for these matters arose even then. Out of this love, we have been trying to renew these things again, especially within the anthroposophical movement, for several years and to present them to the public today.

This Christmas play was last performed among the German colonists of western Hungary, in the Pressburg area, in the Oberufer area, near Schütt Island. And the interesting thing is that this and similar Christmas plays – Schröer collected them for Hungary, Weinhold for Silesia, they were collected at the very time when they were already dying out – the interesting thing is that they were brought by the German colonists into the 16th century, who had advanced from more western regions into Slavic and Hungarian regions, that they were brought by them and that they survived among them in their original form.

Every time the corresponding times of the year came around, these plays were prepared and performed with great solemnity. There is something extremely touching about remembering how the people in the village, these devious poor Germans – that is how they could be described – in the 40s, 50s, 60s years, when Karl Julius Schröer collected the Christmas plays there, there was something touching about the way these people introduced the Christmas plays, these performances that took place every year around Christmas time. When the grape harvest was over, the person in charge of the matter in the village gathered the most well-behaved boys around him. These Christmas plays were only entrusted to the one - they were not printed at that time, but in manuscript from father to son and grandson they propagated -, so the one who was entitled to it in agreement with the priest of the respective place chose the worthy boys.

It is precisely in this respect that an old custom for theatrical performances has been preserved. These contained strict rules. This in particular shows the attitude from which something like this was presented. These boys were not allowed to stay in the inn all the time. These boys were obliged to lead a moral life throughout the whole time, they were not allowed to transgress the promise during the whole time in which the plays were rehearsed and performed, not to offend the authority of their teacher who rehearsed these plays for them, and so on and so on.

They started with a great solemnity. And then, by first making a procession in the village, in the place, and gathering in a tavern hall, these Christmas games were presented to the people. It shows us - as you will have the opportunity to hear shortly afterwards - how these Christmas games came from further west. You will hear about the sea and the Rhine in the introduction, in the so-called “Star Song”. Of course, these were not present in the Oberufer region, where these plays were last found. When the “sea” is mentioned, Lake Constance is meant; when the Rhine is mentioned, it is because these plays originally existed in a region along the Rhine. The people migrated eastward and took it with them, while education in western countries suppressed it, so that at most it was still maintained in secret by these German colonists until the mid-19th century, faithfully preserved, to perform these things in old piety. In this way we can see deeply into the way in which Christianity educated the people of Central Europe. We see it as our task not only to study external history in order to understand the development of humanity, but also to present history to contemporary humanity in such a way that it comes to life.

Furthermore, I ask you to bear in mind that we know full well that our eurythmic art is only in its infancy. It will be perfected and will then be able to stand alongside the other art forms. But today I ask you to take eurythmy with indulgence, it is a beginning. Likewise, I ask you to understand our performance of the Christmas play in such a way that we do not have fully trained actors, but that it is about capturing a cultural-historical phenomenon.

Please be content with what we are able to offer! We appeal to your forbearance. However, we believe that the goodwill shown towards eurythmy from many sides and the cultural-historical interest in this Christmas play justify the performance.

“May Song” by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Fairy Tale of Loving and Hating“ from
The Portal of Initiation by Rudolf Steiner
“Swallows” by Christian Morgenstern
“To the New Year” by Eduard Mörike with a musical prelude by Leopold van der Pals
“The Fairy Tale of Imagination“ by Rudolf Steiner
“The Plants are Sprouting” saying by Rudolf Steiner
“The Metamorphosis of Plants“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Forgotten Thunder” by Christian Morgenstern Wave opener with music by Leopold van der Pals
“The Lark” by Robert Hamerling
“Ecce Homo“ by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Soul Calendar (40.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Soul Calendar (41.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Schwellengang” Bertha von Polzer-Hoditz
“Hellas“ by Manfred Kyber
“Salome” by Manfred Kyber

Dear attendees!

Before we begin with this eurythmic presentation, please allow me, as always, to say a few words in advance, not so much to explain what you are about to be presented with as a eurythmic art form, but rather to point out the sources of this new eurythmic art.

This eurythmic art has indeed been created out of different artistic sources than some of the neighboring arts, which could easily be confused with it. This eurythmic art is a kind of silent language. But this has nothing to do with a reproduction of random gestures or with any kind of ordinary pantomime or similar representation, let alone with a dance art. Rather, it is about tapping into special artistic sources by making particular use of the human being himself, with his inner possibilities of movement, as a means of artistic expression. The underlying view that is used here is based entirely on what I would like to call Goetheanism, on Goethe's view of art and Goethe's artistic attitude. Only one will have to admit more than is actually present, set, and existing, of which one would not like to admit such today.

So, my dear attendees, everything that is connected with the human vocal organs, the larynx and its neighboring organs, is basically a replica of the whole human being as a lawful organism in a remarkable way. One might say that all of the human organ systems are found in the larynx and its attachment organs, only in a cartilaginous form. The strange thing is that the organs of the larynx do not continue in muscle tissue like other human organs of movement, but that what arises from the human larynx in terms of movement possibilities, in terms of the beginnings of movement, passes directly into the surrounding air and thus produces sound and speech. But the person who has the opportunity to observe in a sensory and supersensory way, in which movements the human larynx produces that which becomes song for us, that which becomes language for us, becomes for us language, is able to transfer these movements, which are otherwise carried out by the larynx and its neighboring organs without our noticing them while we listen to speech, to the whole human being.

This transfer is interesting for the reason that it is clear to the sensory-supersensible observer to a certain extent how the entire relationship of a being to the surrounding nature and to its own form appears in the vocal cords of a being. Anyone with an intuitive mind will easily see in the roar of the predators a certain imitation of the shape of the predators and, in particular, of the movement of the predators, as this movement arises from the muscular system. And who would not see with a corresponding sensory-supernatural gift of observation how the song of birds, the sound change of the bird, is a wonderful expression of the movement of the bird on the waves of the air itself.

On the other hand, one can observe how certain bird species express their sound changes, their song structure, in accompanying movements. When one studies such things properly, one comes to be able to transfer what would otherwise remain invisible in the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs to visible movements of the whole human organism, so that one can indeed evoke a kind of mute language through it. Only the organ of expression for this mute language is the whole human being. And so, as you then see the moved person in front of you in human movements that are carried out by the limbs of the person themselves, movements that are carried out by the person in space, movements that come about because people in a group in certain spatial relationships and the like – all this is no more arbitrary than the succession of melodies or the harmony of chords in music is arbitrary. It is music that takes place in space through movement. And if two people or two groups of people in different places were to perform one and the same thing in eurythmy, there would be no more individuality in these different performances than there is between two pianists playing one and the same sonata in their own way. So any arbitrariness in the play of gestures and so on is completely excluded here. What you will still see of this can only be attributed to the imperfections that still cling to our eurythmic art.

When we consider how the human being – especially the speaking human being – is actually an expression of an entire universe, it must be said that the very fact that we use the whole human being here as we would any other musical instrument, that we use the whole moving human being here as a means of expression for an art, In this way, the Goethean sense of what Goethe so beautifully says about man becoming artistic is fulfilled: when man is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn feels like a whole nature and brings forth a new nature from within. He takes order, measure, harmony and meaning together and ultimately rises to the fullness of the work of art. In order to produce a work of art, he must rise to the level of significance when he uses his own organism as an instrument, as a means of artistic expression. We believe that, although this eurythmic art is only a beginning, it can provide a starting point for a meaningful art form. What has been attempted here will develop more and more.

Now, on the stage, you will see this silent language of eurythmy accompanied on the one hand by music and on the other by recitation. For that which our speech expresses through poetry can be expressed through eurythmy, albeit more through the rhythmic arts. We must only be clear about the fact that through the movements that are otherwise shaped for the air when the larynx performs them – that these movements, which otherwise take place with greater speed, take place with a certain slowness, because these movements are transferred to the muscles and the whole human organism is used as a movement apparatus. So that even in the speed of the movements, what naturally results from transferring what would otherwise be carried out in one organ in the larynx to the whole human being must be taken into account.

In the recitation that will follow, you will notice a somewhat different approach to the art of recitation than you are otherwise accustomed to – especially in the present day. What can be brought out of poetry through the art of eurythmy is, after all, what is truly artistic. We need only recall how Goethe, even when he rehearsed his dramas, his Iphigenia, with his actors, did so with the baton in his hand – not as one today believes that the main thing lies in reciting the prosaic, in bringing out the content in particular. Rather, these still very artistic natures of Goethe's time – we find something similar in Schiller, something similar in Herder – they knew that the rhythmic, the formal, which underlies the shaping of speech, is the actual element of poetry and that this must be taken into account first and foremost when reciting.

Thus, in our art of recitation, we try to practise an invisible eurythmy in the way we speak, I would say, to treat language in such a way that the lines are contained in the sounds, which you would otherwise see visibly as the moving human being on the stage. But you also see, my dear audience, that it is precisely through the eurythmic, which is to be practiced here in particular, that it is necessary to go back to the elements of the artistic, which today, more or less, are given less consideration, especially in the art of the time. Sometimes today we believe we are being very artistic, but we are not artistic at all if we do not really base art on the formal as the spatial-temporal, the movement-related, if we do not take into account what but] that which also underlies prose to the fore in poetry as well and actually sets up the art of recitation as if one wanted to communicate a content, not an inner movement.

We believe that it is precisely through such performances that the artistic can be particularly pointed out to our time. Otherwise, I ask you to take this performance with a grain of salt, because I keep emphasizing that this eurythmic art is still in the early stages of its development. But we are also convinced that it can be perfected and that if it is driven by us or probably by others from its beginning, in which it now stands, to ever greater and greater perfection - there are many possibilities for development in it - then it will be able to present itself as a fully fledged art alongside other arts that are older.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to say a few words about our eurythmic performance, not to explain what is to be presented, because an artistic work must evoke the direct impression for which it is intended through its own content. Of course, an art that requires explanation cannot be a true art. But here we are opening up a new source of art. And just as it would be ridiculous today to precede a concert with an introduction, it will also be ridiculous in the future when we are convinced from the corresponding cultural period, which is the source of this eurythmic art, to precede a eurythmic presentation with such an introduction. Today, however, the art of eurythmy is still in its infancy, and it is necessary to talk about the special nature and essence of the sources from which it draws.

Above all, what you will see on stage is a silent language, a language whose medium is the moving human being himself. You will see movements that are executed by the human limbs, that are executed by the fact that the human being executes movements in space, by the mutual positions of people in groups and so on and so forth. Now the question is how these movements can become a real language and then an artfully designed language.

You are able to do this, dear attendees, because the lawful connection that exists between what is revealed in audible speech and the whole being of the human being can indeed be found, but only if one delves deeper into what I would like to call here: Goethe's view of art, Goethe's artistic attitude. The person who, to use this Goethean expression, can use sensuous-supersensuous observation to place himself in the essence of the human form and the movements that are inherent in the human form as an organism, can know that the organization of the larynx, and how this organization is connected with neighboring organs, contains, so to speak, a repetition of everything that is present in the other organs of the whole human being, so that this organization tends towards the movements.

But also otherwise, when we study the nature of the sounds that you can make, we find a connection between the formation and especially between the way in which these sounds are placed in the world, and between the production and transformation of sounds. The one who truly possesses the gift of perceiving with both the senses and the supersenses will intuitively see a connection between the structure and, in particular, the movements as they reveal themselves from the entire muscle system, say, in the case of predators and their roar. Or one will intuitively discover an intimate connection between the way a bird sails on the waves of the air and the kind of intense inner movement that comes to expression in its tone production and tone transformation. If one studies this mysterious connection between movement and tone production in nature, one can also extend such a study to the human being. And then one penetrates ever further and further into that which really lives far below the threshold of ordinary consciousness: into the connection between human movement and audible speech. One can study the movement of the larynx, the tongue, the palate and so on and so on. You can study how these movements are transmitted to the vibrations of the air – as I speak here, the air is in motion. You can then study how everything else that a person can do can become an expression of a similar kind, just as sound becomes an expression of human soul experiences.

In our audible speech, two things flow together: thoughts, as it were, from the head, and will from the whole human being. The fact that thoughts come from the head makes our speech somewhat inartistic. For the artistic is all the more profound the less it has content of thought, the more we penetrate directly into the secrets of things, without the mediation of thought. But if we omit the element of thought from audible speech, we come more and more to understand how speech is based on the movement potentialities contained in the human vocal organ. Then we can transfer this to the mobility that exists in the whole human organism. In this way, when we bring movement and mobility into the human being to such an extent that these movements of the whole body reveal something similar to the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs, the whole human being, or a group of people, becomes a living, moving larynx.

You see, that is what is attempted in eurythmy: not inventing arbitrary gestures that are somehow assigned to some soul moods or soul feelings — that would only be an arbitrary , but inwardly lawful movements, which are expressed in a gesture-like way, but such gestures that do not depend on the individual human consciousness, but that come deeply from the subconscious, from what is universally human, not from the individual human being. Therefore, when two people or groups of people in two places perform the same thing in eurythmy, the individual interpretation can only be of significance to the extent that two pianists in different places play the same music. Anything arbitrary, anything pantomime-like or mimic-like is excluded here. Just as music is based on the inner progression of melody or harmony, so here everything is based on the inner laws of movement, which are drawn from human nature itself, in that the movement of one organ – the larynx or its neighboring organs – is transferred to the whole human being and a silent, lawful language takes the place of audible speech.

All this makes it possible for you to see here, on the one hand, a stage presentation in silent language, in eurythmy, poetry or music. The music will be performed alongside the eurythmy – or poetry in recitation. However, for this to happen, the recitation must be specially arranged. And that is why there will be just as much opposition today to the kind of accompanying recitation as there is to eurythmy itself.

For today one has a special preference, I would say for a kind of prosaic recitation, which one wants to shape into beautiful recitation, whereby one particularly emphasizes the inner literal meaning when reciting. This is not the actual artistic element, this prosaic quality of the content. The actual artistic element of the poetry is precisely the inner, intense movement that is depicted outwardly for the eye in eurythmy. But then the accompanying recitation in eurythmy must also particularly emphasize this element of the rhythmic. That this is justified in relation to poetry can be seen from the fact that, for example, a real poet like Schiller — today, of course, 99% of what poets write is not really poetry, as we shall see later. - a real poet like Schiller did not first have the literal content in his soul when his poems were created, but he had a kind of melodious experience in his soul, and the literal content only arose from it. Just because people today believe that they are being very artistic – although in truth this is not very much represented in our education of the mind today – the truly artistic feeling for poetry does not rest on the content of a poem, but on the rhythmic, on the formal, on what is behind it. Goethe rehearsed his Iphigenia with a baton, in the same way as an orchestra is rehearsed, although it was a play and not poetry.

In this way, eurythmy will in turn have a fruitful effect on artistic perception in other fields as well. Today we will attempt to show you a series of poems in a eurythmic presentation, which perhaps particularly lend themselves to this eurythmic presentation because they have already been felt to such an extent that that inner eurhythmy is already in them, or because they are so faithfully modeled on nature, as for example Goethe's 'Metamorphosis of Plants' is, that eurhythmy arises of its own accord. That is the peculiar thing: With poor poetry, eurythmy will not easily follow; but with poetry that is artistically felt from the outset – for which, however, our time has very little feeling – eurythmy will be able to follow. In particular, if they are what I would like to call nature impressions, which in creation presupposes a real going along of the human soul with nature.

And so I have tried to show you the sources of our eurythmy. What I have set out will make it clear how the actual instrument of representation in the eurythmic art is the human being itself, a musical, linguistic instrument of an extraordinary kind. For in this way we achieve what Goethe so beautifully expressed as a fundamental artistic sentiment in his observations to Winckelmann: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself as a whole nature that has to produce a summit within itself again. To do this, he rises to the challenge 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.

How can a person rise to the production of a work of art when he regards his own organism as an artistic instrument! But all that is intended by this is only just beginning. And as much as we are convinced that this beginning will experience a significant perfection more and more, we are still the strictest judges today and know that we are at the very beginning. And so I would ask you to be indulgent in your judgment of what we are able to present to you today, even though we are convinced that eurythmy, once it has been perfected by us or by others, will be able to stand as a fully-fledged art form alongside other, older art forms.

Das Märchen vom Quellenwunder by R. Steiner with music by Leopold van der Pals
“The Fisherman“ by J. W. v. Goethe, followed by ‘Poissons d'or’ by C. Debussy
“The Forgotten Thunder” by Christian Morgenstern
“Swallows” by Christian Morgenstern
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (41st) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (42nd) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (43rd) by Rudolf Steiner
“Mahomet's Song“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“World Soul” by J. W. v. Goethe with music by Max Schuurman Prelude “Planetary Dance”

Dear ladies and gentlemen.

Allow me to say a few words today, as always, before these eurythmy performances. There are two reasons for this: Firstly, because a new art form that is really only at the beginning of its work needs a certain justification, and secondly, because it is necessary to say something about the sources of artistic creation that underlie this completely new art form. I will not use the words that I want to say beforehand in the sense that they should be an explanation of what is to be presented. That would not be appropriate for artistic matters, because artistic matters should not require any explanation but should work through direct vision and direct impression. These words are only prefaced in order to speak about the sources of what appears here as the eurythmic art.

Like everything we want to do here at the Goetheanum to incorporate it into modern spiritual life, we can also call what we are trying to do with the art of eurythmy Goetheanism, in the sense that it is drawn from a truly Goethean conception and ethos of art. What is being attempted could be described, if one wanted to characterize it in general terms, as a kind of silent language. It is a language that is not produced by the larynx and its neighboring organs, as is the case with ordinary, heard language, but rather by the whole human organism, by the movement systems present in the human being, which are simply brought out of the organism. But this does not happen in an arbitrary way, not in the way that those random gestures and facial expressions that human beings so often reveal are used. Rather, an attempt is made to draw a new kind of language from the being of the human being himself – indeed, from the being of the whole human being – a language that can be elevated by its special nature to the artistic.

We know, of course, that in poetry, language, the heard language, initially serves as a means of expression. However, if our present age did not feel so unartistic, one would feel that, with all the magnificent things that poetry can create through language, language as such – which has completely different tasks in life than realizing artistic things – language as such actually impairs the directly artistic.

Languages, especially our cultured, literary languages, are often riddled with conventional elements; they are also riddled with expressions that stem purely from human selfishness. That which we want to convey to others or receive from others, and which is always at the same time a means of expression for an egoistic, for an immediately egoistic, human impulse, is just as much of the artistic essence that is taken away from the actual motif that the poet wants to express through language. Those who feel directly artistically can actually say the following. He can say to himself: In all poetry there is really only as much that is truly artistic as on the one hand resonates through the language in a musical way and on the other hand is shaped and plastic and thus also resonates through the language. For the artistic is never actually to be found in the realm where thoughts operate, and our conventional language is basically an expression of thoughts. Therefore, the more the poetic element leans towards the musical pole, the more the musical, rhythmic, melodious resonates through the language, so that the actual content of the language actually demands less interest than what pulses through the content of the language as a musical wave. On the other hand, in the case of poetically gifted individuals such as Goethe, the plastic element of language is more strongly expressed: that which gives form, that which we seek to bring out in eurythmy.

All artistic activity, ladies and gentlemen, goes fundamentally beyond the ordinary experience of the soul. One might say that there is a layer above the usual soul experience or a layer below the usual soul experience. What is expressed in the art of eurythmy relates to the usual, everyday soul experience – if I may use a comparison – in roughly the opposite way that a dream relates to this usual soul experience.

Take the dream, I mean the healthy dream, where you do not rage, where you do not move your limbs, but where you live in the ideas, in the images. Everything that moves in a dream is only an appearance, is only pictorial, is not there in reality. The person is at complete rest, and only the moving life is imagined. I would like to say: everything is filtered out of ordinary life in dreams and transferred into the realm of imagination, into the pictorial. Thus, the dream life lies beneath the higher soul life as if in an underlayer. Man is not completely at his human height when he dreams. He is least at his human height when he daydreams in the waking life. But the more egotistical he becomes, the more of a dreamer he becomes – as paradoxical as that may sound. Certain sophisticated egotisms in human nature, in particular, delight in transforming life into a kind of dream, in dreaming through life. And false mystical directions see something special in being able to introduce the dream into life. They have no idea that in so doing they are pushing the human being down into the subhuman: the dream, and also dreaming in ordinary waking life, is a down-tuning of life.

The opposite takes place in eurythmy: Instead of falling asleep and dreaming, a stronger waking up takes place. There, precisely that which reaches its highest flowering in dreams, the naming of sounds, is suppressed and the awakening movement, through which the human being, without asserting his subjectivity, without his egoism, places himself in life and participates in that which holds one together with all of this. In this awakening movement, which in dreams is only an image, it is precisely the eurythmic that is sought. Therefore, one can say that while the dream life and everything dream-like is a lowering of life into the subhuman, the human being is raised up into a more living, more vital element: he is brought together with the whole weaving and driving of the cosmos when he lives into the eurythmic.

This is why the art of eurythmy has yet another side: first of all, it has a significant hygienic-therapeutic side. The eurythmic movements are such that they can be directly read from the harmony of the human being with the universe. They therefore place the human being harmoniously in the universe and are therefore healing movements, provided they are not exaggerated. But they also have the effect of directing and orienting the whole human being. This does not mean that ordinary gymnastics – and this is the pedagogical side of eurythmy – should be suppressed by eurythmy. Rather, it is hoped that eurythmy will prove a fruitful addition to ordinary gymnastics. In ordinary gymnastics, we are concerned only with the physiology of human nature. The main focus is on what can be done physiologically from the physical. In eurythmy, the aim is to bring the human organism, which is used as an artistic instrument, into movement in such a way that the whole human being is in harmony with the physical in mind and soul.

All that I have said now is expressed precisely in the practice of the eurythmic art. For those who want to develop the eurythmic art themselves, everything that is asleep in the human being must always be overcome, everything that is selfish in the human being must be brought out of life. And those who want to do eurythmy must awaken their life force, they must work to overcome selfishness and harmonize themselves with the whole universe. Thus eurythmy is something that can be hoped for. As I said, we think very modestly about what we can achieve today, but we can hope that it will develop into something ever higher and higher, because it regards the human being, the most perfect means of expression in the whole universe, as its instrument.

And so you will see how that which otherwise can only be expressed through audible language – but which can only rise to the artistic level when it becomes musical or plastic – how that which otherwise comes to expression through audible language is expressed here on the stage before you by the whole human being, who has become the larynx, in a mute language. On the one hand, this will be accompanied by music, which is, after all, only another form of artistry. The peculiarity of music is that it suppresses everything that is formative and brings it to expression in the internalization of the sound. The peculiarity of eurythmy is that it suppresses the sound and allows everything to be absorbed in the form.

On the other hand, you will find support in the form of recitation of what is being newly presented in eurythmy. But recitation will also be obliged to fall back on the earlier good art forms of recitation. Today, in an unartistic period, the special value of recitation lies in emphasizing what the prose content of the poem is. Here, where poetry must be recited to accompany eurythmy, it is necessary to develop the art of recitation in a special way, so that the musical and plastic, the rhythmic, the metrical, and the melodious are emphasized above all else. As a result, our art of recitation, as it appears here as a companion to eurythmy, is of course still subject to misunderstandings.

But people will come to see, firstly, the artistic side, secondly the hygienic-therapeutic side, and thirdly the educational side of what is presented here as the eurythmic art. And then we will see that a kind of artistic summit and educational summit can really be achieved through what is only just beginning here today, but which can be developed to ever greater perfection. It is the Goethean attitude to art that really inspires you when you are developing this eurythmy.

Those who place their own human organism at the service of this art will notice how everything that is expressed by the individual human being in spoken language must fall away, and how they must give themselves over to that which, in essence, nature expresses through the particular human organization itself. So that one can say: When an individual speaks or sings phonetically, when an individual moves to mimic and gesture, there is always something of the individual human subjectivity in it, of human egoism. Here in eurythmy, we are really striving for what Goethe considers to be the highest summit of artistic revelation, when he says: When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when man feels himself in the world as a great and dignified totality, when harmonious pleasure gives him free delight, he will regard nature as having reached its goal and admire the summit of its becoming and being. This is not the language of the individual human being, revealed through the movements of eurythmy; it is the language of nature itself, which can emerge when we use the human being as its instrument.

And so, for those with artistic sensitivity, what emerges through eurythmy can truly seem like an unravelling of the mysteries of the world. This cannot be expressed at all in our spoken language. What can be expressed in the moving forms of eurythmy, what the individual human being performs by moving his limbs, by setting them in motion or bringing them into relation to one another, is something that has been clearly discerned from the laws of nature.

If one and the same group or two people were to perform the same thing in eurythmy in two different places, there would be no more arbitrariness in it than there is in the individual arbitrariness of two pianists in two different places playing one and the same sonata differently, reproducing it according to their own interpretation. The eurythmic is based on the law, just as the melodic element of music is based on it. And mere gesturing and mimicry are just as much banished from it as the corresponding musical language or the like is banished from the musical element. Thus one can hope that something thoroughly beneficial can also develop for further artistic education through this eurythmic element. However, I would ask that we be allowed to offer you what we can. Today, we mainly have some nature imaginations, some of which are designed in such a way, namely the 'miracle of the springs', that the poetry itself is already felt in eurythmy. For if the poetry is not based on the literal content but on what lies in the eurythmic itself, then the eurythmy appears as a natural expression of what the poetry gives.

But in all this, I ask you to please take into account what I have said many times: we ourselves are still thinking, with all modesty, about what we can offer today. We are at the beginning; but we also believe that if time is kind to us, what we want to achieve with the eurythmic art – either through ourselves or probably through others – will be developed over time. This eurythmic art will become something that can stand alongside the other, older art forms as a fully-fledged art form in its own right.