The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (3.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Antepirrhema“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (4.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (5.) by Rudolf Steiner
“To the New Year” by Eduard Mörike
Musical prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“The Journey through the Harz in Winter“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Music from the 4th symphony by Anton Bruckner
“Primeval Words, Orphic” by J. W. v. Goethe
Elegiac prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Flames“ silent prelude
“Napoleon in the Kremlin” by C. F. Meyer
“The Divine“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Mailied” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Like and Like“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Five Things” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Five Things“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Five Other Things” by J. W. v. Goethe
Humorous prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Problem”; “The Guineafowl”; “To the Originals”; “A Modern Fairy Tale”

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to say a few words today, as always, before these eurythmy performances. It is not done to explain the content of the performances themselves, because artistic work must of course be effective through direct impression and sending an explanation in advance would actually be somewhat inartistic. However, an attempt is being made with what we call eurythmy here to find new possibilities for artistic work, new possibilities for movements, [namely] that eurythmy strives for a kind of real mute language. On the stage you will see movements of the individual human being and of groups of people in relation to one another. What is expressed by the individual human being or by groups of people is not meant to be a play of gestures or pantomime or anything else of a mimic nature, which has been found by chance to express the poetry or music that is accompanying it. Rather, what is presented here as movement is derived from the whole organization of the human being as logically as speech sounds are derived. Just as the individual sound cannot be interpreted through mimicry, so too the individual gestures that appear in eurythmy cannot be interpreted through mimicry or dance. Rather, the aim is to use sensory-supersensory observation, to use a Goethean expression, to discover the laws of phonetic language, so to speak.

When I speak to you here, the movement is transmitted through the air. These movements are, however, initially small tremors. They are only the continuation of the movements that speech sounds produce in the larynx and the other speech organs. But these initial real movements of the larynx and the other speech organs are based on movement tendencies.

We can summarize, as it were, the movements that underlie phonetic language in terms of movement tendencies, in the same way that we can summarize the coils of a helix, by taking the axis of the helix as a movement tendency.

This is the unique feature of eurythmy: it has not grown out of some random flights of fancy, but out of a lawfulness that contains just as much inner necessity as the lawfulness of speech or song itself. So when we hear eurythmy accompanied by recitation and the spoken language expresses the recitation, the poem – or something musical is expressed through the instrument or also through singing, the eurythmic presentation is just another form, just another language. But it is a language that can be said to bring about, in many respects, those artistic aspirations that are sought by a large proportion of those who are artistically striving today.

Today, all kinds of artistic endeavors are being explored. Many of them are quite insignificant, because even today, as a painter or sculptor, one is not yet able to discover the forms from colors and shapes that can approach the elementary sources from which art flows for people in a new way.

In eurythmy, we have the strange fact that we use the human being himself as the tool through which it is expressed. And just as the human being appears to the world as a whole as a microcosm, as a small world, so when we use the limbs, which otherwise arise out of the satisfaction of the egoistic or social will, as a means of means of expression for what the human soul experiences, for example through poetry, through music, then the fact that the human being himself is a means of expression in this representation, in which one focuses one's gaze on the human being himself, one obtains a sensual image.

And this sensuous image is through and through, because it is formed by the human being himself, is inspired, spiritualized. Indeed, a sense-perceptible and supersensible reality appears immediately: a physical reality – the human being in motion – at the same time in such a way that we know that what is depicted in space is animated by soul and spirit. This makes it possible to unfold the sensual and the supersensible before us. And the sensual and the supersensible must indeed be the content of all true art. When art is saturated with ideas, with thoughts, it becomes inartistic. The more the element of thought is present in art, the less artistic the art is.

Therefore, language, spoken language, precisely because it is developing more and more, is becoming less and less suitable for poetry. And much of what one feels today about poetry is actually only the feeling of the literal content of prose. The time is already behind us when, in the early 19th century, in certain Romantic circles people found pleasure in listening to poetry that they did not understand literally, but only delighted in the rhythm and meter, in what is actually artistic in poetry.

We must even, by allowing the eurythmic to accompany the recitation, lead the recitation back to its good old forms. Today, people see perfection in recitation when the content is delivered in the right way, as they say, quite inwardly, from within the person. Goethe himself still rehearsed his “Iphigenia” with his actors with a baton like a conductor, placing much more emphasis on the iambic meter and verse than on the literal content. Today, we have more or less abandoned this purely artistic approach.

Now, you see, you feel this too if you want to let the individual human being work. You feel it in language when you are to pour that which is the content of the will into the word forms. Perhaps it seems paradoxical to many of the honored listeners, but it is nevertheless the case: for those who have a certain fine empathy for what one can feel today at an advanced stage of human development, what one can experience inwardly when one wants to express it in conventional language, then it is as if what one experiences more or less gets stuck in one's throat. Only people who have a certain talent for merging into the conventional, even if they are poets, find satisfaction in the phonetic language as a whole. One can say: this spoken language compels us to become inartistic everywhere, because it enters into the thought element, which becomes more and more conventional as civilization advances, because it favors the thought element. This conceptual element is only present in the accompanying recitation, but this must also go back to the artistic element, otherwise it would not be able to keep pace with the eurythmic performance. In contrast, in the eurythmic performance, we have the human will of a poem or a musical element, and we have the possibility to express the purely artistic.

Therefore, eurythmy, which is initially a mute language, has the very possibility of becoming artistic in the most direct of representations, in that what is represented is completely sensual and at the same time completely spiritual. This is the requirement for something that is to be truly artistic.

Thus we believe that our eurythmy is particularly helpful in an area that has been sought after in a wide variety of artistic fields for some time now. Through eurythmy, we can go back to the deepest human feelings, which cannot be expressed through language but can be expressed very individually through the silent language of eurythmy.

One might say: When a person dreams, they are, to a certain extent, in a sub-human consciousness. When a person dreams, they are at peace as a whole human being. They do not carry out movements. Only images fill the dream, and we only imagine movements in our dreams. Eurythmy play is the opposite pole to dreaming; it is a stronger awakening of the human being. Just as in dreams movements are suppressed and only the imagined shoots into the picture, so in eurythmy play the imagined recedes and the movement comes out. This is a stronger awakening, an elevation of consciousness. This is something our time must strive for. It is truly not right in a serious spiritual movement to lull people into a mystical dream. That is an aberration. All dream-like mysticism is an aberration from what must be willed today out of the true tasks of the time. And it is precisely out of the true tasks of the time that this art form of eurythmy has been brought forth. It is not a muffling, not a damping down of human consciousness into dreaming, it is an upward development of human consciousness into a strong waking. Therefore, it will have a significance for education.

This eurythmy, as children's eurythmy, of which you will also see samples today, has a direct educational effect on the initiative of the human will, which is not the case with ordinary, purely physiological gymnastics. And so, in the future, this didactic moment will be judged differently in relation to eurythmy than it is today.

But we are our own harshest critics, and today, as always, I ask for your forbearance. We are only at the beginning of a development and we know full well that there is still much to be done. Those of our esteemed listeners who were here months ago and saw our performances will be able to see how we have progressed, particularly in the development and artistic design of the forms. Little by little, all mimicry will disappear and the artistic will come to the fore. Nothing symbolic must remain, as it may have happened in the beginning and may not have disappeared completely even today. But we will find a way to eliminate symbolism and allegory altogether and to express the creative awareness that is the moving language of eurythmy artistically. Then it will be seen that, although this eurythmy is still in its infancy, as those in the audience who were there earlier will see, it has already progressed, and that we are convinced that what is still imperfect today is capable of greater perfection. So that eurythmy as an art will one day stand in such a way – perhaps it will no longer be developed by us, but by others in this way – that eurythmy will be able to present itself as a complete art alongside its older, fully-fledged sister arts.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

We are not attempting to provide an explanation of what is to be presented here in the form of eurythmy rehearsals. That would be unartistic. Art must work through itself in direct impression. It is much more a matter of pointing out the sources and means of expression from which this particular eurythmic art is created.

In fact, the attempt is made to open up the sources of artistic creation in a special way by applying the human being himself as an artistic tool, the sources of artistic creation in a special way through this. If we want an expression for what we should strive for as art, we can use the expression that Goethe himself coined: sensual-supersensible seeing. All artistic activity must be based on sensual-supersensible seeing. This already implies that abstract thought or idea, conception, must not play a significant role in the perception of art. But it would, of course, be completely wrong to believe that the spirit should not play a role in art for that reason, that the supersensible should not be the content of art. Art must simply work in such a way that everything in it arises out of the directly sensed vision. But the sensed vision itself must work as a spiritual reality without the mediation of the idea, without the mediation of the concept.

Now we have poetry, which makes use of the spoken word in order to have a means of expression in this spoken word. But precisely when language advances in the course of civilization, it becomes, I would say, more and more reflective and reflective, language. That which is the content of language becomes more and more dependent on the conventions of human intercourse or it becomes a means of expression for what we have to communicate to each other in science and in other human intercourse. But in this way the phonetic language is increasingly deprived of its possibility to be a real, direct revelation of what can arise artistically out of the human soul.

Now you will see movements, movements on the stage that are performed either by a single person, namely by human arms and hands, but also by the other human limbs. You will see the movements of groups of people, forms of groups of people, formed by their positions in relation to one another, and so on. These are not arbitrary gestures, but a silent, real language that has come about through movement. And it comes about through sensory-suprasensory seeing.

We can discover how the human speech organs, larynx, palate and so on, lips, have movement tendencies while we utter speech sounds. Then, through the sound they produce, through the tone, these movement tendencies, which only come to expression while we speak, can be transmitted to the whole human being. And this does not result in a collection of arbitrary gestures, but in a real language, the only language that - instead of adhering to the movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs - is transformed into small tremors that are transmitted to the air. This corresponds directly to the will's tendency to move, which a person releases into their limbs by making movements that make these movement tendencies immediately visible. Eurythmy is a visible language. And there is just as little arbitrariness in eurythmy as there is in language itself when two people or two groups of people in different places present poems or musical content in eurythmy. Just as there is no greater difference when two pianists play one and the same Beethoven sonata in two different places according to their subjective interpretation, so too what emerges in eurythmy lies not in the individual sequence of gestures, but in the succession of gestures.

Those of our honored audience who have been here before will see that we are making progress. In our early attempts there was still a lot of pantomime, mimicry. These are the teething troubles, so to speak, of eurythmic performances. On the other hand, in the forms we are now developing, more and more of what the poet or composer brings into the artistic creation, into the rhythmic, rhyming creation of the poetic — that is, into the artistic aspect — or, for the musicians, into the succession of the melody and so on, will come to life in eurythmy.

The point is that we cannot get at the how, through which the poet artistically achieves what makes a prose content a poem, through the ordinary prose content of language, through eurythmy, to express it. In this way we have, firstly, the human being as the artistic tool instead of the violin, instead of the piano, instead of any form of instrument; we have the human being itself. But we have the ensouled human being. The human being in all his movements is directly sensual and descriptive; but no movement is without being ensouled and spiritualized, so to speak, in the greatest immediacy.

However, precisely because this eurythmic art, as I have described it, is being tried out, it will only gradually acquire a larger audience, perhaps very slowly, in our time. Why? Because our time actually loves to passively surrender to everything that is an enjoyment of art, and generally prefers to passively accept everything artistic.

You see, I was once invited to give a lecture on Goethe's “Faust” at a social gathering. People listened to these lectures on Goethe's “Faust” quite willingly. But afterwards some people - they believed themselves to be practical people because they belonged to a so-called practical profession - said: Yes, but Goethe's “Faust” is not actually a stage work! Because a stage work is a comedy, Blumenthal and so on. Or they said something like this: Goethe's “Faust” is a science, you have to think when you listen. You don't want that, you've been thinking all day at work. If you go to the theater in the evening, you don't want to think. You don't want to participate, you just want to enjoy yourself, even if you are already indulging in some intellectual pleasure in the evening. You don't want to be alert, you don't want to think, you just want to see. When you go to lectures, you prefer them to have slides, just don't think. You want to be able to passively watch everything, you don't want to participate inwardly.

However, those people whose ideal is to sit in their chair and passively absorb what is poured out over them from the stage will never be a true audience for eurythmy. This is because eurythmy is like language itself – you have to learn the language. You learn it as a child, and you are more willing to do so than later on. But it must also be clear that eurythmy is not something that can be accepted immediately, like some kind of pantomime. Rather, eurythmy is something that works like a real language. But precisely because it pushes back the element of the intellect, the element of ideas, and comes directly from the whole human being, bringing the whole human being into movement, it is also rooted in the individuality of the human being. And everything artistic comes from that. Through it we are able to bring forth the artistic content of a poem in a much higher sense today through the silent language of eurythmy than through speech.

We are even obliged — because it is still necessary today — to accompany what is presented on stage in eurythmy with recitation on the one hand and with music on the other. But in recitation we are urged to go back to the good old forms of recitation. We could not accompany our eurythmy art with recitation in the way we love to do it today, where the literal content, the prose content, is important. This is because eurythmy is concerned with the artistic content of poetry, with the rhythmic, the metrical, the musical, the plastic, that is found in poetry. This must also be taken into account in the accompanying recitation. One must really understand why Goethe, with the baton, rehearsed “Iphigenia” like a conductor with his actors, paying less attention to the literal content of the prose than to the momentum of the poetry, to the rhythm of the iambic pentameter, everything that makes poetry appear as poetry, as a work of art, by the words flowing or sweeping along on the wings of the beat or rhythm.

This is what should come out through eurythmy: a genuine, true artistic element, as it underlies all genuine artistry. All this, however, means that eurythmy will perhaps only slowly become established. But those who do not approach it with prejudice will realize that when we listen to a poem in spoken language, we can also have a work of art before us. For what kind of art is this language? What artistic configuration of the larynx and the other speech organs does it presuppose?

If we accept what eurythmy unfolds as a second such work of art - not only part of the speech organs, but the whole human being is called upon - if we accept that the whole human being is, in a sense, made into a larynx, into a speech organ, then, if we surrender to it in this way, we will see: what you see before you emerges from the whole human being – everything that lies in a poetry of deeper feelings, everything that today lies in language that has already become highly conventional.

But everything you will see today is basically still in its very early stages. We are our own harshest critics and we know that our performance still needs a lot of work. We have already tried to avoid pantomime in the humorous-satirical piece, for example, which you will see in the second part after the break. This is even more difficult in the humorous-satirical than in the serious. We will see how we try to express not the prose content but that which comes from what the poet does when he builds verses, when he creates symmetry and congruity of feelings and thoughts, [how we try to extract this] from the mere prosaic content of the thought, in eurythmy forms. But all this is in its infancy. And so I must always ask the honored listeners and audience to treat what they see as a first attempt and to be lenient. But at the same time, we are convinced that this eurythmic art, which draws on the most original sources of all art in human feeling and in human soul experience, and at the same time uses the most comprehensive, universal tool, the human being himself, we are convinced that this eurythmic art will gradually be able to establish itself as a new creative art alongside its older, fully-fledged sister arts.

Saying from the soul calendar (4.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Limits of Humanity“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Opening ‘Look around you’
“To the Moon” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the soul calendar (5.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the soul calendar (6.) by Rudolf Steiner
Prelude “We want to search”
“The resin journey in winter” by J. W. v. Goethe
Prelude ‘Fate question’ with music by Max Schuurman
Elegiac prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Silent prelude ‘Flames’
“Napoleon in the Kremlin“ by C. F. Meyer
“The Divine” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Mailied“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Häschen” by Christian Morgenstern
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Unicorn”; “The Skirt”; “The Guinea Fowl”; “Karl's Enchantment”; “Northward”; “West-East”
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals

Dear attendees!

Allow me, as always before these eurythmy attempts, to say a few words today as well. Not to explain what is to be presented – art must speak for itself, otherwise it would be an inartistic undertaking – but because our eurythmy is an attempt to at least try something new, allow me to say a few words about the sources and means of expression of this eurythmic art. There is an interesting verse by Ludwig Tieck, which goes:

Sweet love thinks in tones,
For thoughts are too far away.
Only in tones may it dwell
And beautify all it wills.

Ludwig Tieck thus wanted to assert that what a loving person experiences cannot be expressed in abstract thoughts, but rather in sounds. He did not mean that it should be given only musically, but that it should be given through the whole form of poetry, through the tone of the poetry. The great poet Ludwig Uhland, who, in addition to being a great poet, was also an extraordinarily great pedant, responded to these Tieckian verses with the following:

If you, proud beauties, did not love
to mock even logic,
I would dare to prove
that it is nonsense to say:
“Sweet love thinks in sounds."

And a logician, I might say, of course, a logician, has tried to prove in a treatise that I have here that there is much more nonsense in Tieck's saying than just the contradiction in Uhland's quote.

Now, I would like to say, eurythmy must also assert that it wants to express what is experienced inwardly by human beings, but not through spoken language, but through a kind of moving language, through a language that consists of movements, movements of the human limbs themselves, movements of groups of people, the interactions, positions, that are evoked in groups of people, and so on.

But all that will appear on the stage before you is by no means just a hodgepodge of random gestures invented to fit a content, I would like to say. Rather, there is a lawfulness underlying this silent, visible language, just as there is a lawfulness underlying spoken language itself. If you have to express something you have experienced inwardly through spoken language, you cannot just make up random sounds for anything, but you have to adhere to the laws of language. Thus, what is presented here as a single case is based on a complete conformity to law, a conformity to law in the movements of human limbs that is as internally necessary as the conformity to law of spoken language itself is necessary. Everything that is carried out in detail in these movements is gained through sensuous-supersensible observation in such a way that it was established which movement tendencies the human speech organs have when they produce a sound or a sound context. What is otherwise merely performed by the speech organs, but now in such a way that the speech organs convert their movement tendencies into small undulating movements, is taken directly as a movement tendency and is performed by the human limbs themselves, so that there is nothing arbitrary in what you see performed. Every single movement is carried out in the way that the speech organs want to carry out the movement, if I may say so. So that the individual person that you see here on the stage and the whole group of people is actually nothing more than a kind of larynx that has come to life, a larynx that has come to life and its neighboring organs.

This makes it possible, above all, to express directly what is artistically felt and willed. In our civilized languages, phonology has become conventional. On the one hand, it has become that which serves human intercourse, but then also that which serves the expression of thoughts. But in art, thoughts are actually what suppresses all art. Art is based precisely on the fact that one already has the impression from the sensual given, which one otherwise only receives in a roundabout way from thought, for example from nature: what is seen with the senses must have an immediate spiritual effect.

Never has this been stated more beautifully and meaningfully than in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, where it is pointed out that everything artistic is based on the fact that a sensual thing is viewed in such a way that it is otherwise only the case with a supernatural thing. Sensual things that appear to be supernatural. This is what various new artistic endeavors are trying to achieve today, in the fields of painting and sculpture. We have not yet reached the point where we really have a kind of formal language.

In this building, much has been attempted to arrive at such a formal language. In a sense, I would like to say that eurythmy can serve as a kind of model for acquiring such a formal language, because the artistic tool in eurythmy is the human being itself, and the human being is already, by nature, completely ensouled and spiritualized. If we allow what the human being accomplishes as a whole human being to be inspired in the way that only the sounds of spoken language are inspired, then we can most readily achieve a direct revelation of the soul and spirit through the sensory impression itself.

This eurythmy, which is only a beginning, is perhaps called upon to serve the path that many artists are seeking today: to express the supersensible in the directly sensual. This cannot be found in the impressionistic or expressionistic way that is being tried today, but only through the union of impressionism and expressionism that is achieved through eurythmy. In eurythmy we have the expression of what lives in the human being, the soul experience. But we also have it so that this soul experience is presented in a way that is otherwise only used to present something in natural forms, where we first have to feel our way into the soul. With human beings we do not need to feel our way into it, because it is quite natural when it is inside, that it can be seen in the movements of the human being.

So it is possible to really stimulate art anew from such sources, and that is what we have tried to do first. Those who were here as spectators months ago will realize, when they see us again today, that we have at least tried to move forward since then. They will see that we do not want to become naturalistic, even in the bizarre things we do, but that we want to present, in a thoroughly artistic way, what the poem gives us. Just as the poet himself seeks to go beyond the merely linguistic, the literal, we seek here in our eurythmic forms not what should be the expression of the prose content of the poem, but what should be the expression of what the poet has made of the poem, from which he has artistically shaped the prose content.

Therefore, anyone who asks, in our eurythmic presentation, “Yes, is that really expressed directly through this or that gesture?” will not get along. The aim is never to express something directly, but to artistically shape the content that is artistically shaped, also in movement.

This is because, on the one hand, there must be a parallel between the music and, on the other hand, the recitation – for eurythmy is just another form of expression for that which is given poetically, for example. Today, by performing the recitation in parallel with the eurythmy, we must try to take up the good old forms of recitation again. Today, of course, prose content is actually recited. We live in an entirely unartistic age. Today's world no longer has any real idea of the times in which Ludwig Tieck, for example, wrote, in which people, the Romantics for example, came together and particularly liked to listen to poems whose literal content they did not understand because it was in a language they did not understand. They were guided by the musical element, by what lay in the rhythm and beat and especially in the theme. This is what underlies the truly artistic element in poetry. The literal content is actually only, I might say, the ladder by which the truly artistic element moves in poetry. Either it is the musical element that underlies the poetry, or it is the plastic element, which contains the directly felt images. But this is also the only thing that can be brought out through eurythmy, because in eurythmy the conceptual content disappears and the whole being of the human being comes to the fore, namely the will in the human being.

So, if the recitation is taking place at the same time, I would say that the eurythmic element in the recitation should also be brought to the fore. And we must remember how Goethe, when he himself practised dramatic works, such as his “Iphigenia”, for example, with his actors, he did so with a baton like a conductor, paying attention to the iambic meter and so on, not to the literal content.

Today, it is necessary to reopen sources of art that have been almost completely buried in our prosaic age. That is the one thing I ask you to consider when looking at such a presentation. Because, of course, it is very easy to say today: Yes, at first I don't understand anything about the movements that are being made. Oh, we will gradually understand! Just as when we hear a language for the first time, we do not understand it right away, we will learn to understand it. But the point is that it is precisely through this visible language that something artistic can be brought out of people, which cannot really be brought out of the sources of human feeling through spoken language, which has become very prosaic today.

So, I would like to say, this eurythmy relies on saying: human soul life also thinks in movements. Because thoughts initially lead into an abstract area; and one must then leave it to the pedants and philistines to want to have them clarified again in a presentation, which is actually the most popular element today, but which must be overcome by that which, in turn, transforms our sense perception and our understanding into an understanding through all the powers of the human being, not just through the powers of the intellect or through the powers of sensory perception. The aim is to find the spirit in the sensual. And the art of eurythmy would like to contribute to this, even if only in a small way.

Nevertheless, I would ask you, dear assembled colleagues, to regard what we are able to offer today as a beginning. I am already very busy trying to reproduce the inner form of the dramatic through eurythmy. However, this is proving so very difficult that it cannot be said to be a problem that has not yet been solved, or even a problem that has only just been touched on. We must first overcome all the stages here with great effort. However, we have now reached the point where we can attempt to incorporate even these bizarre works, such as those by Christian Morgenstern, into a form without resorting to pantomime or facial expressions, which should gradually be excluded altogether from our eurythmic practice. Perhaps everything should be seen as just a beginning, but we remain convinced that this eurythmic art, if it is further developed, probably not by us but by others, will one day be able to stand as a fully valid art form alongside its older sister arts.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to introduce this eurythmy presentation with a few words, as I usually do. Perhaps this is permissible because this eurythmic art is concerned with the establishment of something truly new, which cannot be compared with all kinds of neighboring arts, dance or other movement arts, but which seeks to draw in a serious way from the most original, most elementary artistic sources and also to make use of a special artistic language of forms. However, it may perhaps be stated that it is precisely through this eurythmic attempt that many things, I would say, can be attempted on a trial basis, which lies in the will of contemporary artistic natures. It is well known that contemporary artists seek new paths in the most diverse ways, since there is a certain justified conviction that the traditional artistic language of form has died to a certain extent and can no longer produce anything new, and that new paths must be sought. Of course, some of the things being sought are grotesque, in the form of expressionism, futurism, impressionism and so on. But however much of this one rejects, and however much of it one approves of with extraordinary justification, the fact of this striving as such indicates that a sincere artistic mind is searching for new paths.

Now it must be said that all these attempts actually have in common the fact that the means - be it in the field of painting, the colors and forms that can be applied, or in the field of sculpture – everything that is tried suffers from the same deficiency, which can be characterized simply by saying that the correct way to use artistic means has not yet been found in a satisfactory way. In our culture, we have come to a point where a certain abstract, conceptual, ideal element is considered to be particularly decisive. But all that is conceptual, ideal is actually the death of every true artistic endeavor. Every artistic endeavor must, as Goethe said, proceed from sensuous-supersensuous contemplation. But sensuous-supersensuous contemplation can only be attained when that which makes the sensuous impression also works spiritually-supersensuously, without having to be translated into concepts first. Now, of course, poetry and music as such also strive for this; but especially in the field of poetry, the fact that in our time language is also permeated and interspersed with the abstract element is particularly true, and that one feels a certain longing to come to more original sources of artistic work than those that can be achieved with language today. And this is what we are attempting to do with our eurythmic art, at least in a limited way. This eurythmic art, which we will be presenting to you today, is a weak attempt. All attempts are still weak because the eurythmic art is at the beginning of its development. This eurythmic art will show you the movements of the individual human being, especially of the arms and hands, but also of the other limbs of the human organism. These are movements that are already present in the human organism itself, but then also movements of groups, positions of groups, and so on.

All this could initially be seen as arbitrary gestures. But anyone who has studied eurythmy will recognize that these are never arbitrary gestures, never something that could be mistaken for pantomime, facial expressions or random movements. Just as little can that which is conceived as movement in eurythmy be conceived as a random gesture, just as language itself cannot be conceived as a random sound or as a random combination of sounds. The point is that every time you try to use mere pantomime or facial expressions as a means of expression, you also need the subjective-personal aspect of the human being.

Now consider how the subjective-personal contains that which cannot make a real artistic impression, because the subjective-personal is precisely an arbitrary element. Language has only freed itself from the subjective-personal because we are forced to accept language as something given. Even if you have this or that experience that you want to express through poetry, you have to put yourself in a lawful linguistic context; you have to pour into the lawful linguistic context what you have as a poetic experience.

But our language has already become conventional. Our language has become very much the expression, the predestined expression for the prosaic, for the literal. But that is not the actual artistic element in poetry either. The actual artistic element is that which lives in the extra-intellectual and wells up directly from the extra-intellectual spiritual of the whole human being, from a certain element of will. In order to arrive at this eurythmy, an attempt was made to explore, through sensory-supersensory observation, the movement tendencies of the human speech organs, tongue, lips and larynx themselves, which movement tendencies then underlie the undulating movements in the tones, but are transformed. And these movement tendencies were now transferred to the movement of the whole human being in a completely lawful way, so that in a certain sense one can say: when you see the movements performed by people on stage, it is not the tremulous movements that underlie the tones, but movement tendencies, the directions of movement that are then assessed in the speech organs of the human being, that are applied to the whole human being. The whole human being and groups of people come to you as a kind of living larynx. Eurythmy is language made visible. But this means that by translating the lawful element that is present in the human organism into movement, one is able to overcome the personal and yet is an experience of the soul, to be drawn out of the whole human being, so that one has the human being before one as a sensual object, but at the same time every movement is imbued with soul; thus a supersensible element is present in every movement.

This eurythmy does indeed have a sensual and supersensible element, so that one can say: In a limited sphere, this eurhythmy fulfills a long artistic yearning. One need only recall how those who are more delicate and artistically sensitive have always felt the yearning to express that which is an inner experience in such a way that it is not poured into the conventionality of language. There is a beautiful verse by Tieck, which says that with regard to human feelings of love, one cannot actually express human feelings of love with the abstract elements of thought. The romantic Tieck expresses this very beautifully. He says very beautifully:

Sweet love thinks in sounds,
For thoughts are too distant,
Only in tones may she, Beautify everything she wills.

It is a verse that truly expresses the deepest human yearning, but which must naturally arouse the disgust of every philistine logician, every pedant. And Ludwig Uhland, who – and I do not underestimate him at all – was a great poet, but despite being a great poet was an even greater pedant, corrected Tieck by making the following verse:

Liebtet ihr nicht, stolze Schönen,
Selbst die Logik zu verhöhnen,
I would dare to prove
That it is nonsense to say:
“Sweet love thinks in sounds."

The pedant cannot imagine that something lives in the thinking element and is too original, too elementary, to be expressed in abstract language. This consideration – not of the poet Uhland, but of the pedant Uhland – was then taken further by a logician, of course a good one, who proved quite logically that it would be nonsense to think that something is thought in sounds.

Now, when it comes to making the demand to bring human experiences to revelation through such an art of movement as eurythmy, one must be prepared for the fact that, of course, pedantry and logic that walks on crooked paths will have all kinds of objections. On the other hand, however, it must be asserted that there are experiences of the soul that need something more original today than what can be given in literal language.

Today, eurythmy has simply responded to the longing for forms of expression that are so strictly and internally connected to the human being as the expression of the organized larynx and its neighboring organs. But while ordinary language has become more of an expression of thought, the point is that eurythmy becomes an expression of the will. Therefore, the recitation accompaniment must also return to the reality of the art of recitation.

Today, we live in an unartistic age, and so people feel that a recitation is particularly beautiful when the speakers draw from the content, as they say, and particularly internalize the content of the matter to be recited. But that means nothing other than bringing out the prose content. Then it is much more artistic in the sense that romantics some time ago found it particularly pleasing to even listen when they were presented with poems whose language they did not understand. They listened to the rhythm, to the musical element, to that which formed an image. That is the characteristic of an artistic age.

So too must recitation today – there is no other way to accompany eurythmy with recitation – return to rhythm, to meter, to what is musically and visually plastic at its core, to that which that is then needed, I would say as a ladder to hang the actual artistic element on, namely the literal content of a poem, which does not actually constitute the poem as a work of art, but constitutes its prose content. On the other hand, many elementary human elements can be traced back to eurythmy.

And finally, it is the case that if the feeling of the audience is intense enough, then - regardless of the language in which the recitation is performed - an international feeling is felt in eurythmy, a universal human language. This is also something that can occur with this eurythmy, a universal human language. Because what is actually spiritual in a poem, which does not lie in the literal content, which cannot be reduced to what lies in a national language, the truly artistic, that is something that, when it is particularly grasped in its inner mobility, can be felt as something completely international, I would even say precisely in mute language. And I believe that when the moment comes when people realize that what is actually artistic in a poem is not what its content resounds with, but rather what eurythmy can bring forth – apart from the literal content. Once we have realized this, we may yet see the importance of eurythmy for our whole development in a different light from the one we are looking at now.

Apart from the fact that there are many other sides to this eurythmy - including a hygienic side, it has a healing effect on the human body and it is particularly as children's eurythmy, of which we can only show you a small sample today , will acquire a certain significance in the pedagogical-didactic view, in that the purely physiological gymnastics, which starts from pure physicality, makes the human being strong in a certain way, but does not actually reach into his or her will initiative. On the other hand, soul-inspired gymnastics – and this is also what eurythmy is, in addition to being an art form – soul-inspired gymnastics, which we introduced as a compulsory subject for the youngest children at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, alongside ordinary gymnastics, will, at the right age, develop the right disposition for initiative of the will, for an inner soul activity. And this is certainly necessary for today's humanity, which tends to fall asleep so easily when the most important human matters are discussed.

In view of the fact that eurythmy has such lofty goals, we must always ask for forbearance with regard to what can be offered today, because we are still at the very beginning of the development of the eurythmic art. The honored audience who were here months ago may see how we are endeavoring to advance the matter, especially in the elementary artistic design, the form, in the emotional forms of movement. But much remains to be done. For example, I am trying, and will try harder in the near future, to somehow bring the course of dramatic art, the actual artistic aspect of drama, to eurythmic revelation, which is very difficult. But this eurythmic art will advance if contemporaries can show some interest in it. Of course, for what can be offered today, the forbearance of contemporaries must still be sought. Nevertheless, there is the conviction that something can be created with this eurythmy as a very young art, probably by others than us in later times, which will be able to present itself as a fully valid art alongside older sister arts.

Saying from the soul calendar (5.) by Rudolf Steiner Saying from the soul calendar (6.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Limits of Humanity” by J. W. v. Goethe
Opening “Look within” with music by Leopold van der Pals
“To the Moon” by J. W.v. Goethe
Opening “Look within” with music by Leopold van der Pals A saying from the Calendar of the Soul (7th) by Rudolf Steiner
Opening “We seek ourselves” with music by Leopold van der Pals
“My goddess” by J. W. v. Goethe
Elven opening with music by Jan Stuten
“Erlkönigs Tochter“ J. G. v. Herder
Elegischer Auftakt
Stummer Auftakt ‘Flammen’
”Napoleon im Kreml“ von C. F. Meyer
Stummer Auftakt ‘Flammen’
”Das Göttliche” von J. W. v. Goethe
Children's performances with and without singing
“Five Things” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Life is a Bad Joke” by J. W. v. Goethe
“On Seeing a Goose” by Fercher von Steinwand Children's performances
“The Waistcoat and the West” by Christian Morgenstern
From the Davidsbündlertänze by Robert Schumann
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Unicorn”; “The Magpie”; “Question”; “Answer”; “Draft for a Tragedy”
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

With the art of eurythmy, of which we are once again able to present a sample to you today, we would like to make a contribution to the spiritual development of humanity that can be judged from three points of view: firstly, from a purely artistic point of view; secondly, from a pedagogical-didactic point of view; and thirdly, from a hygienic point of view.

As art, eurythmy is something that represents a kind of silent, visible language. However, although it appears in the form of gestures, in the form of movements of the human organism in groups or in individual people, it must not be confused with facial expressions or something pantomime-like, nor with a mere art of dance. Rather, as a language, eurythmy uses the whole human being as its means of expression, and in such a way that this visible silent language has been acquired through the study of the laws of spoken language.

Speech is, first of all, a means of expressing what lies within the human being. It is true that Schiller said: “When the soul speaks, alas! the soul no longer speaks.” In a sense, this is true. Language, in addition to the fact that it carries the soul of the human being to the outside world, is at the same time a means of communication from person to person and thus something conventional, and thus also the carrier of the thoughts through which people are to communicate. Language is in a sense a social phenomenon. And the more language has to serve as a means of communication and as a means of expressing thoughts, the less language is actually a means of artistic expression. For the artistic must come from the human being, from the whole human being, must arise from it.

Language has two sides. Firstly, the social side: the human being must give himself to the social world by speaking. And only through this does language retain something that has an intimate, an inner relationship with the whole human being, that language is not learned by the adult, [but is learned] I would say from childhood dreams, from the time when the human being, with all that he is, wants to adapt to his surroundings. And through this self-evident adaptation to the environment, language is preserved from being a mere means of communication.

But when the poet, the artist, wants to express himself in words, then he needs [another] - I would like to say all that which is always floating behind the language: he needs the image and, above all, the musical element. It is not at all the actual poetic or artistic content of the poem that is literal, but rather the way in which the content is shaped that is the essence of the poem. More than with anything else, one must take into account what Goethe expressed in the beautiful “Faust” word: “Consider the what, more than the how.” The way in which the poet shapes the material is what matters most, especially in poetry.

This can be much more clearly perceived if one does not use the means of expression that must absorb the thought too strongly in order to reveal itself purely in an artistic way, but if one uses the whole human being, the whole human being as a means of expression. To this end, studies were carried out using sensory and supersensory observation to determine the movement tendencies of the human larynx, tongue and other speech organs when a person expresses themselves in spoken language. These movement tendencies, which are then transformed into sounds, vibrations and oscillations in the air when actually speaking, are studied. They are then transferred to other organs of the human being, especially to those organs of the human being that can best be compared with the primitive organs of movement of the speech organism: they are transferred to arms and hands.

Sometimes, when first encountering the art of eurythmy, it is surprising to see that the individual human being makes more use of the arms than of the other parts of the hands. One would understand that this is a matter of course if one considered that even in ordinary speech, when a person wants to give more than the conventional in language, when he wants to express his individuality, his feelings, his emotions at the same time as his words, he then already feels compelled to enter into these freely moving organs, into these more spiritual organs, I might say, so that the arms and hands - compared to the other organs they are more spiritual, they are the arms and hands of expression-movement possibilities. Now, of course, in eurythmy the whole human being is taken into account - not just arms and hands. Above all, movements of expression in space are drawn upon, especially in groups, but also in individuals.

But the essential thing here is that these movements in groups are not arbitrary, but rather the same movements in lines, which otherwise underlie what is produced by spoken language, are transferred to the whole human being. I must therefore say again and again: on the stage we see, in principle, an entire larynx, presented by the whole human being. This shapes order, rhythm, tact, the musical, but also the pictorial as well as the actual poetic, where the poetic is art. This is really brought out of the whole group of people.

We then accompany what is presented in eurythmy in silent and visible language through music or recitation. In doing so, we are obliged – music and speech are, after all, only means of expression for the human soul life other than eurythmy – we are obliged, especially in the art of recitation, to fall back on the good old recitation that Goethe had in had in mind when he not only rehearsed the literal content in the drama with his actors, but, like a conductor with a baton in his hand, rehearsed the rhythm of the iambs with them.

We are obliged to disregard what an unartistic age, such as our own, is accustomed to regarding as important in recitation, namely the emphasis on the literal content. We are obliged to go back to what is shown to be artistic even in primitive recitation. Today, this is hardly visible anymore, especially city dwellers hardly see it today – but there are still some living memories from people my age from their childhood years, of traveling reciters who could be seen reciting such “Moritaten”; they had them written on tablets, and then they spoke the text to them. But they never spoke it in any other way than by tapping the beat with their foot, marching back and forth in a spirited place, thus indicating that it was not just a matter of explaining the content to you, but that it was important to them to particularly focus on the step of the verse, the inner form.

You will see that we therefore try everywhere to emphasize this deeper artistic aspect. When we try to express the poetic in the humorous, the grotesque, the droll, through eurythmy, we do not, for example, use sign language or pantomime , but in the forms that are developed as musical forms - only in space, not in time. We do not give the content of the poem, but what the poet, the artist, has made of the content.

These are some of the ideas I would like to give about the artistic element in eurythmy. The fact that the human being is the tool – not the violin, not the piano, not colors and shapes and so on – makes this eurythmy particularly suitable for, I would say, shaping that out of the driving forces of the world that is present in the human being itself through these driving forces of the world, as in a small world.

The second side of eurythmy is the didactic-pedagogical side. It is my conviction that mere gymnastics, which has developed in a materialistic time, takes too much account of the mere anatomical-biological in man in terms of its laws. Later, when we have a more objective approach to these things, we will recognize that, in a certain way, the human being is strengthened by it, but that this strengthening is not at the same time a strengthening of the soul and will initiative.

In a didactic and pedagogical sense, eurythmy became a kind of soul-filled gymnastics, a soul-filled movement game. And in the small beginnings that we can show you with children today, you will see how each movement is then also carried out by the children in such a way that it is soul-filled. In this way, in addition to the physical training, what I would like to call initiative of the soul life, initiative of the will, that which we need so much and which mere gymnastics does not develop in the growing human being. — It is extremely important that this is recognized. We have conducted experiments at the Stuttgart Waldorf School: one hour of gymnastics - one hour of eurythmy. It is then entirely interwoven with gymnastics.

We are obliged here when we show you children's exercises to say: the children are taught eurythmy in the few hours that remain to them during school hours – but that is not right at all. The education that underlies these efforts, which originate here in Dornach and have been realized to a certain extent in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, is precisely that they aim to introduce children to nothing outside of actual school hours. That is why it is so important that the significance of eurythmy is fully understood in terms of its pedagogical and didactic aspects, so that it can simply be woven into the school curriculum. Then it will be the case that children have everything that can serve normal spiritual, soul and physical development, especially from this eurythmic point of view.

And the third thing is a hygienic element. The human being is a small world, a microcosm. And basically, all unhealthiness is based on the fact that the human being tears himself away from the great laws of the universe. All unhealthiness — one would like to depict it pictorially by saying to oneself: If I take my finger away from my whole organism, it is no longer a finger. It withers; it has only its inner lawfulness in connection with the whole organism. In the same way, the human being has only attained his inner being in connection with the whole world. He is really connected with what happens in him with the whole world. If you just consider the very extreme, which shows how man is connected to the world, how he is not just this being enclosed within the boundaries of his skin, just consider: the same air that you now have directly within you was previously outside of you. But now, after you have inhaled it, it forms a part of your organism in its entirety. And what you have inside you will be exhaled again and will be outside again as soon as you have exhaled it. You cannot peel yourself out [...] as if we only lived within our skin, only had what was enclosed within our skin. We do not live in our environment with only the air, but we live with everything that fills the universe.

Now, all that is unhealthy in a person can be attributed to the fact that what is done by the person themselves, if it is not adapted, if it is not appropriate to the age or to the whole human being, cannot contribute to the harmony and complementarity that must prevail between the person and all other people and the whole rest of the world. But precisely because every movement in eurythmy is so naturally drawn from the whole human organism, like the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs for ordinary speaking, for phonetic speech, what is carried out in eurythmy is something that will and can bring the human being into harmony with the whole world, with the whole macrocosm.

It is therefore essentially a healing element, one can say that, which a person can have, which he can acquire as a child from the eurythmic movements, which may only be performed naturally and appropriately and not in a dilettantish way. This is something that can certainly be considered from such a point of view - from the point of view of mental, spiritual and physical health care.

These are the three aspects from which we can view eurythmy, and from which it will be honestly integrated into our spiritual movement. Nevertheless, it must always be said – even if there are spectators who have been there before and have seen how we have tried to make progress in recent times – that eurythmy must appeal to people's forbearance with regard to everything we can offer today.

Eurythmy is only just beginning, it is an attempt at a beginning, but it represents an attempt that, we are convinced, can be perfected more and more, even if others may have to come to further develop what we have taken up with our limited powers. Despite everything, however, we can already see today, from what is being shown in terms of intention, that this eurythmy, because it opens up artistic sources in their originality, because it uses the whole human being as a means of expression and because it works didactically and pedagogically for the development of the soul-spiritual-physical of the child, because it places the human being in a movement or in movement systems that are essentially healthy, that it will indeed be able to stand fully equal with the other, partly older sister arts, especially when contemporaries show an interest in eurythmy. Taking all this into account, it will be possible to see today how hard we are trying to move forward with this eurythmy, even if we still have to ask for the audience's forbearance for our performances.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me today, as I have always done before these eurythmy attempts, to send a few introductory words in advance. This is not done here to explain anything of what is presented, because of course the artistic must work through its immediate revelation itself, and it would be inartistic to base such an attempt on any theoretical or ideological explanation. But I may say that this eurythmic art is an attempt to descend to certain sources of art within the human being and to seek certain forms of artistic expression that are particularly well suited to revealing the demands of all art: to bring the artistic into the sensual-supersensible.

The expression 'sensuous-supersensuous vision' was coined by Goethe, drawing on the depths of his world view and artistic ethos. For example, this sensuous-supersensuous vision underlies the entire development of our eurythmic art.

On stage, you will see all kinds of movements performed by individuals and groups of people. And at first one might have the impression that the attempt is being made to express something poetic or musical, which must of course be accompanied by the eurythmic presentation, for which the eurythmic presentation is only another expression. One might have the impression that arbitrary gestures, invented gestures, facial expressions are added to the poetic, to the musical. This is not the case at all. Rather, it has been discerned – precisely through a careful sensual-supersensory study – in human speech the movement tendencies that underlie the speech organs themselves.

In ordinary speech, the movements, the sliding movements, the movement tendencies of the palate and so on, are transferred directly to the air, where they become fine tremors that underlie hearing. Of course, it is not these tremulous movements that are at issue, but rather that which, as it were, underlies an entire system of such tremulous movements as the resultant. This has been studied and transferred from the speech organs to the whole human being, in accordance with Goethe's principle of metamorphosis, according to which, for example, the whole plant is only a more intricately designed leaf.

So one could say: what you see on the stage are movements that are not at all arbitrary, but are movements that are strictly lawful, as lawful as the movements of the speech organs themselves when speaking – through tones, through sounds or when singing and the like. This makes this moving sculpture something that is indeed imbued with an inner necessity, just as the succession of tones in musical creation. And what is presented here is actually a visible language, a completely lawful visible language, which is presented as eurythmy.

However, the present age will first have to find its way into this visible language. For the present age really has so much that is inartistic in it. What was still common practice in the Romantic period, for example, of listening with great devotion to poems that one did not understand literally, but listening only to the rhythm, to the beat, to the inner structure of the spoken word, has declined considerably today.

Even in recitation, which, as is the case with music, and mainly so, has to be accompanied by eurythmy performances, we will emphasize this artistic eurythmy element in recitation because it could not be done any other way, since the actual artistic element is already in the poetry itself. For it is not the literal content of the prose that is the essence of the poetry, but rather the formal structure that the artist himself brings forth.

So you will see that wherever we try to a great extent to create forms, spatial forms through groups, something is expressed that is not a mimic expression of the content of the poem, but rather that which follows from the character of the treatment of the poem that the poet has given to the literal content. Even when it is grotesque and comical – as we will try to show in the second part today, after the intermission, towards the end – you will see that we are really not concerned with a naturalistic representation, not about imitating any content, but about creating the context, the harmonious context, so that the individual does not want to have an effect through its content, but that the whole wants to have an effect through the coherent form.

On the whole, it can be said that eurythmy is going back to the sources of the artistic because this artistic must be based on the fact that it is not thoughts that affect us. If we cultivate science in today's materialistic sense, then only thoughts affect us. But this means that we can only penetrate the sensory content of the world. Here, however, the artistic aspect of eurythmy is effective in that the whole person or groups of people are the tool for what is to be expressed, for example, as a sensual-supernatural character. So you can say: The human being, the inspired human being, the spiritualized human being, puts soul and spirit into every movement, such soul and spirit as we can still hear from the true sounding poetry.

All this shows us how the sensual - as we see the human being in his limbs - how the sensual at the same time carries the spiritual on its wings. It is therefore truly sensual and supersensory. And it is so beautifully expressed, what Goethe basically demands of all art, when he says: “When nature begins to reveal her secret to anyone, he feels a deep longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.

For Goethe, art is in a sense an emotional experience of nature. And what better way to correspond to this nature than to reveal the possibilities of movement that lie within the human being, to let the whole person move out of their will in such a way that a visible language is expressed through them. The intellectual, which art otherwise rejects, is excluded by precisely this: only the will is expressed in the movements. And because the human personality - but in an impersonal way - is incorporated into these movements, an eminently artistic, a sensual and supersensual quality is expressed in the performances in this very way.

Then our eurythmy also has a significant pedagogical-didactic effect, in that it is in fact an animated form of gymnastics. And if we think about these things more objectively, we will realize that what has been valued about gymnastics for a long time – and we certainly don't want to do without it – is given a special boost when we add something to it, as we do in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, when we add this soulful gymnastics for children to it. You will be able to see some of this eurythmy today in the second part of our program.

However, ordinary gymnastics also strengthens the body, so we don't want to do without it for that purpose. But what is special about eurythmy, which is not just for the body but for body, soul and spirit, is that it has a particularly educational effect on the will, on willpower. And will energy is something that future generations will truly need in their lives, which will become ever more difficult.

Then our eurythmy has an important hygienic side. The movements of the human being, as they are brought out of his or her range of movement, are at the same time those through which the human being best integrates into the whole rhythm, into the whole harmony of the world. All unhealthiness is fundamentally based on the fact that the human being breaks out of this rhythm. If we take our time, where we have so many reasons to do so – nothing reactionary is being done here, so I ask you not to take what I say as if I wanted to rebel against necessary cultural phenomena, because we have many things in our time that are of course necessary, that we need, and we certainly cannot eliminate it if we consider doing so. We have to say that there is much cause for people today to disengage from the necessary rhythm, from the necessary harmony of the world, basically every time we take the train or even sit in the car, not to mention other things that happen in our time, take us out of the rhythm of the world and gradually creep into people's health, undermining it in a way that goes unnoticed. Only someone who is familiar with the more intimate connection between the human being and the world can see this when considering all of this and recognize how the world is currently striving to give the human being something healing again.

Where do we often look for what is healthy? Yes, esteemed attendees, I know that I am contradicting a great deal with this. But these are things that people will think about more objectively. For example, people tried – and this did happen even before this terrible world catastrophe befell us – to stage 'Olympic Games' here and there. This is a terrible thought that is completely beyond the understanding of children. The Olympic Games belonged to the Greek body. In such matters, people do not consider that each age has its own particular requirements.

But that is what we are trying to do in our eurythmic art: not to take something old from abstract theory and present it to humanity or demand it for humanity, but to find out what the present age demands from human nature in order to find something for humanity that is suitable for the present organization of humanity. Of course, such things cannot be proven anatomically or physiologically, because today one cannot dissect ancient Greeks. But anyone who has spiritual scientific means to look into the development of time knows that today's human being, in terms of his physical and especially his soul-spiritual organization, demands something different. The beginnings of such demands, which the age itself makes, are to be found with eurythmy; they are to be met with eurythmy.

You, esteemed attendees, know what we can offer: that this is only the beginning, that it is an attempt, perhaps only the beginning of an attempt. We are also convinced of this because we are honestly striving to work from the demands of the age, that if perhaps no longer we, but others, develop what today must be presented as an attempt, that a more perfect art direction will emerge that will be able to present itself worthily alongside the older sister arts.

For today, however, we must ask for forbearance, because, as already mentioned, it is a beginning, perhaps only an attempt at a beginning; but this beginning should also be developed. — With this in mind, I ask you to view our presentation with forbearance.

“Veni Creator Spiritus” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the soul calendar (7.) by Rudolf Steiner
“All” by C. F. Meyer
Saying from the soul calendar (8.) by Rudolf Steiner
From the 8th symphony by Anton Bruckner
“To the Moon“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Soul Calendar (9.) by Rudolf Steiner
”Forest Concerts“ by Christian Morgenstern
From the C major Symphony by Franz Schubert
”My Goddess” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Life is a Bad Joke“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Children's performances
”Little Dance“ by J. S. Bach (children's group with eurythmists)
”To my Calf” by Fercher von Steinwand
Children's performances (anapaests; ‘A Riddle’ by Rudolf Steiner)
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: 'Bildhauerisches'; 'Palma Kunkels'; 'Die Oste und die Weste'
Opening of the droplets with music by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: 'Elster'; 'Anfrage'; 'Antwort'; 'Entwurf zu einem Trauerspiel'
Drip opening with music by Leopold van der Pals

Program is for may 23 and 24

Dear attendees!

I take the liberty of saying these introductory words again today, as I usually do before these eurythmy performances. I do not do this in order to explain the performance itself; that would be an inartistic undertaking, for eurythmy should be a real art. It must have an effect through what it presents directly to the eye and should not need any explanation afterwards. But what is being attempted in eurythmy – although it is still in its infancy, at the beginning of its development – in terms of both the search for particular artistic sources and the particular artistic forms that are necessary and come into consideration, is something entirely new, and perhaps a few words may be said about this.

On the stage, you will see people and groups of people in motion. What is expressed through the movement of the limbs, especially the arms and hands of the people or the other limbs, and what is expressed through the particular position of people in groups, through the changing position, through the movement of groups, could initially be understood as a kind of gesticulation that arises out of the moment, that is, out of what is being done at the same time as the eurythmy, out of what is being recited at the same time, that is, the spoken poetry or the music that is being played. But it is not like that. These are not random gestures. It is not about mimicry or pantomime at all, but about a real visible language that is just as internally logical and as much a product of the human being as spoken language.

This can perhaps be seen by looking at the way in which this visible language of eurythmy is found. As I speak to you here with the help of spoken language, the movements that are evoked in the human larynx and the other speech organs are transmitted to the air, and the air carries the sounds to the human ear on the wings of its waves, so to speak. If one develops this special ability within oneself, one can perceive in this spoken language what one's attention is not drawn to in ordinary life: These are the movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs. Not the movements that the larynx itself naturally also stimulates, which are then transmitted to the air as vibrational movements, as trembling movements, but rather those movements that are present as movement tendencies that are much, much larger in scale, I would say. These can be studied so that one can say: Every formulation of spoken language, every sound, but also the particular nuances and accentuations and modulations of what is spoken, correspond to certain movement tendencies. These can be recognized through, if I may use the Goethean expression, sensual-supersensory observation, and can then be applied to the whole person. So that what might be called the application of Goethe's principle of metamorphosis to the activity of the whole human being occurs.

The Goethean principle of metamorphosis, which is still not sufficiently appreciated today, will certainly play a major role in the world view of the future. It is based on observing the transformation of the organic members of living beings. If I wanted to emphasize the main point here – but only the main point – I could say: Goethe regards the whole plant as a transformation of the individual leaf. The individual leaf is a primitive, whole plant; the whole plant is only a complicated leaf that has developed. In this way, one can also apply Goethe's principle of metamorphosis to the movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs that underlie spoken language. And if one then has it performed in a transformed way by the whole person, the whole person becomes, as it were, a visible larynx in front of you here on the stage.

You see before you as movements what otherwise takes place unnoticed as tendencies to move during speech. But in this way you can see, as it were, into the deeper structure of the human organization and draw from the sources that underlie the human form, human movement, and all of human life, this visible language of eurythmy. In this way the whole human being is used as an artistic tool.

As I said, all this should be understood in the most modest sense, because we are still at the very beginning of the development of the eurythmic art. But through this eurythmic art we achieve that we can truly express the human being, who is an image , a microcosm of the whole world, as even the driest philosophers have already conceded. [This is achieved by] making the human being himself, the whole human being, a means of expression through a limited link, the larynx and its neighboring organs, and visibly presenting this to the world, thus fulfilling, in a certain respect, what Goethe beautiful: the essence of man, which reveals itself in that, when man sees himself placed at the summit of nature, he in turn feels himself to be a whole nature, takes on order, measure, harmony and meaning, and finally rises to the production of the work of art. How could the human being rise to actual artistic expression more intensely than when he uses that which can be sought in himself as a language of forms with the help of his organization, when he uses himself as a means of artistic expression.

This is said with regard to the shaping of the sources. You will see from this that the aim is — at least as an ideal — to make our eurythmic art lose all that is mimic, all that is pantomime. If it still contains some of this here and there, it is only because it is still very much in the early stages of its development, and this will gradually disappear completely. But all naturalism should also disappear. For it is not a matter, for example, of reproducing in eurythmy, in a naturalistic way, the literal content of what is expressed in poetry, but of reproducing what the poet has made of his material in the poem.

In this, our present-day, unartistic age actually feels extraordinarily unartistic, which is why, when reciting, more and more emphasis is placed on the literal content, that is, on the prose content, and only this is taken into account - much more than the actual artistic element in the poetry. The artistic element of poetry never lies in the literal content. In his most important poems, before he began, Schiller always had something like an indefinite melody in his soul, nothing at all of the literal content, an indefinite melody, so that 'The Diver' or any other poem could become an indefinite melody. He only found the content for it afterwards. The actual artistic element of poetry is that which, as musicality in rhythm, meter, harmony and so on, underlies the melodious element in the thematic of poetry or also in that which underlies the plastic formation of poetry. This must also be brought out in eurythmy. Therefore, recitation and declamation must also return to the earlier artistic forms of recitation: namely, to emphasize the rhythmic, the metrical, and so on.

And this attempt at eurythmy will probably be understood one day, when people think about it more objectively, as a way back to the true artistic impulse, which is no longer fully expressed in our poetry because we are always seeking the literal element, the content of the thought, the prose. We must seek not the thought content, not the [what], but more the [how] must be sought. Through eurythmy, the way to get to the what through the how should be sought more; and this way will be found. The way from the thought to the will element of the human being will also be found.

A product is all the more inartistic the more the thought predominates. The thought in our written language has already taken on an abstract form in our civilized languages. It is either the expression of the human unformed, unimaginative inner being or it is there for human intercourse, it has been given a conventional form. By transferring that which is actually poetic about poetry into this visible, moving language, we lead the content of poetry back from the thought to the underlying, governing will element. And in the moved person we essentially have the will element.

The will element is now the one that is connected with the whole personality, not just with the abstract literalness of the words. We have the will element before us. And we can actually present much more from the whole human being when we give it in this visible language of eurythmy than when we give it in speech sounds, where the thought is supposed to convey everything.

Then I ask you to bear in mind that, despite our efforts to move forward in this eurythmy, it is still in the early stages of its development. Those of the honored audience who have been here often will see how we are now trying, especially in terms of form, to move beyond the naturalistic and the mimic more and more. We have made progress in terms of design in recent months. But with all this, we must ask for indulgence at the starting point of each such performance, for the reason that we are dealing with a beginning, perhaps even just an attempt at a beginning. But this is also based on the conviction that this beginning will be able to perfect itself and that in the future, perhaps no longer by us but by others, a great deal more will be added. So that in the future this eurythmy, this eurythmic art, will be able to stand alongside the other fully-fledged arts as something fully entitled in human cultural life.

[Before the break:]

After the break, we will present, among other things, something humorous and, above all, some children's eurythmy. Regarding this children's eurythmy, I would like to add that it should express a second aspect of our eurythmic art.

Of course, first and foremost, eurythmy should be an artistic expression, an artistic thing. But then it will also prove to have a pedagogical-didactic element, in that what can be achieved through gymnastics, where only the physiological aspects of the human being are actually taken into account, is significantly enriched by this soulful, spiritualized eurythmy gymnastics, which can also be eurythmy. These things will be thought about more objectively in the future. Then people will say: It is good for children to learn gymnastics, it will steel the body, it is something that makes the body stronger. But it is precisely that which ordinary gymnastics cannot develop and which is so lacking in our age that is developed in the human being through this soul-filled eurythmy gymnastics: what I would call will initiative. It develops will initiative in the soul.

In this respect, what is considered in children's eurythmy is a pedagogical-didactic element, something that is added to the artistic element of eurythmy.

“Veni Creator Spiritus” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (8th) by Rudolf Steiner
“All” by C. F. Meyer
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (9th) by Rudolf Steiner
Opening “Look within” with music by Leopold van der Pals
“To the Moon“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Opening ‘Look Within’ with music by Leopold van der Pals
”Joy“ by J. W. v. Goethe
”Melody“ by Ludwig Jacobowski with musical accompaniment by Leopold van der Pals
”Swallows” by Christian Morgenstern
A saying from the Calendar of the Soul (10) by Rudolf Steiner
“Forest Concerts” by Christian Morgenstern
Children's performances of all kinds, with music by Leopold van der Pals
“To my calf” by Fercher von Steinwand
Children's performances (anapaests with music by Max Schuurman; “A Riddle” by Rudolf Steiner;
“Lenz Triumphator“ by C.F. Meyer)
”Kleiner Tanz“ by J. S. Bach (children's group with eurythmists)
”Den Originalen” by Christian Morgenstern Children's performances with music by Max Schuurman
The ‘Elster’ series by Christian Morgenstern
Opening of the conference with music by Leopold van der Pals

Eurythmy performance for the members of the “Evangelischer Lehrerverein Baselland und Baselstadi”, who had previously been given a tour of the Goetheanum by Rudolf Steiner.

Dear ladies and gentlemen!

First of all, allow me to express the deepest satisfaction - both for myself and for the Executive Council of our Goetheanum - that you have been able to honor us with your visit today. It is a special pleasure for us to find interest in your circle, in your association for our weak attempt to introduce you to modern spiritual development. We will now, since you have only a little time left, take the liberty of briefly demonstrating some of our eurythmy for you.

I will not say many words in advance, but just say that this eurythmic art has two sides. In particular, it has the artistic side, then the pedagogical-didactic side, which I do not want to touch on here in particular, and it also has a hygienic-therapeutic side. First, I would like to talk about the artistic side. Our eurythmic art is indeed a kind of artistic language, studied on the basis of Goethe's view and attitude towards art in the tone sequences and movements that underlie visible language. This eurythmic art, this silent visible language of eurythmy, I may well just briefly hint at today, is also something that will play an important role in the future. Likewise, the pedagogical-didactic direction will acquire a special significance. This art will, once people start thinking about these things a little more objectively, certainly find many friends and attract interest from onlookers.

With regard to the pedagogical-didactic part, we can say that we have already had the best experiences with it, since we have added eurythmy to the curriculum of the Stuttgart Waldorf School as a compulsory subject, as a kind of soul gymnastics. Not to replace gymnastics, but alongside ordinary gymnastics, this eurythmy class goes hand in hand with it, in a sense, a form of gymnastics for body, soul and spirit. While ordinary gymnastics is more of a physical education, this eurythmy as a spiritualized form of gymnastics has an effect particularly on the initiative of the will, on the shaping of that which is human soul initiative. I just wanted to say that in advance in relation to the presentation.

Due to the limited time that is left for you, I am unable to say anything specific about children's eurythmy. We can only give you a few examples. But I would ask you to consider what is coming in eurythmy and, in general, what can already be given today, as well as everything else here, as something that is only just beginning. Much is still in the process of development. We are our own harshest critics, but we know that this art can continue to perfect itself. And if it finds the interest of our contemporaries, then this eurythmic art will establish itself over time as a special art alongside the older sister arts. In the same way, the significant pedagogical and didactic side of educating young people will be able to play a major role in the future. I hope that you will be able to turn your interest to our events and that we will not have to disappoint you completely with our performances, which, due to the limited time, can only be a few.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, The art of eurythmy, of which we would like to give you a small sample here today, attempts to penetrate to the very sources of human artistic creation in a certain way, unlike certain other arts that can easily be confused with it - dance or other mimic arts. It seeks to achieve this through very special artistic means. And because it is necessary to say a few words about this so that the essence of this artistic direction can be grasped, I will send these words ahead – not to explain the performance itself, which would of course be an inartistic undertaking. For art must speak for itself in the immediate impression it makes.

What you will see on the stage resembles a kind of gesture performed by the whole human being. But it is not, and one would judge eurythmy quite wrongly if one thought that the movements that come about either through the individual human being or through human groups are mere gestures that are supposed to express what is to be presented either on the one hand musically or on the other hand poetically or recitatively. Eurythmy wants to be a real visible language, it wants to reveal in plastic movement exactly the same as the human larynx and its neighboring organs can reveal through sound.

If one wants to understand the essence of eurythmy, one must look at its sources. It is the observation, both sensory and supersensible, of the movement tendencies expressed by the human larynx and all that is connected with the speech organs when speech sounds are uttered. This does not refer to the movements that pass into the outer air as direct tremulous movements, as vibrations, but to the movements that underlie these tremulous movements as movement tendencies. Movements that, organically, want to do more than they actually do. But the sensory-supersensory gaze – to use this Goethean expression – can observe these movements and then transfer them to the whole person according to the principle of metamorphosis. Just as Goethe, when he named the whole plant in its complexity a leaf multiplied in its individual subdivisions, actually saw only a leaf that had become more complicated, so what you see on the stage as a whole human being, like a larynx on the stage is, in fact, a transformation of what is naturally ignored when we simply listen to human speech, but which can be observed through sensory-supersensory observation as movements, as an inner eurhythmy of the speech organs. This is transferred to the whole human being. The individual movements that a person performs or that groups of people perform are therefore to be judged in exactly the same way as human speech itself according to the inner laws.

Now, if you look at what is being presented superficially, you would think that you were dealing with pantomime or facial expressions. On the other hand, it can be said that when we speak, we sometimes feel compelled to support our speech with gestures. When do we do that? We only do that when we feel that we are subjectively pursuing something that is more or less fully expressed in speech. But what is present in actual eurythmy is just as objective as what is expressed in language; all gesturing is excluded from it, all mere pantomime and mime is excluded from it. This can now be considered in the same way as it is considered for ordinary language.

On the one hand, we can say that eurythmy is so much an inner, visible language with its own laws that when two people or two groups of people perform the same poem in completely different places, the individual differences are no greater than when two pianists play the same sonata. That is one way of looking at it. But you could also say: you can distinguish between two pianists playing the same piece based on their individual nuances – and the same will be true for individual eurythmists or groups of eurythmists. In this way, what is subjectively incorporated into the gesture will be connected in a nuanced way with what is an objective law.

So in this visible language of eurythmy, we have something before us, not in the individual gesture, not the expression of something that lives literally in the soul, but we have in the individual eurythmic movement in which the whole human being feels as he feels in a single sound or word or word context, as he feels in spoken language. And what is effective is not that it expresses something in the soul as an individual element, but that one movement is linked to the next, creating a sequence of movements, just as a sequence of sounds is created in speech. Exactly the same way as it is in music, where we also have an inner, lawful movement in the succession of tones, in eurythmy such an inner movement comes to light, so to speak, as inner plastic music.

This enables us to extract from a poem – and in addition to the musical aspect, there will also be poems that are recited to accompany the eurythmy – the eurythmy merely expresses in silent, moving language what is expressed in the recitation in spoken language. We have the opportunity to express what concerns the whole human being, what is not expressed in the conventional or in mere thought expression - the inartistic in poetry. We have the opportunity to express the whole feeling and will, the whole personality of the human being as if in a large, moving larynx.

To do this, however, it is necessary, and this must be mentioned again and again, that one must return to the actual artistic element of poetry. Our time is essentially unartistic, and it is therefore very common today to perceive what is literally the content as the essential thing about the poetic art. In contrast to this, it must be said again and again that Schiller, for example, had an indeterminate melody alive in his soul, and from this indeterminate melody anything could become, whether it was “The Diver” or “The Fight with the Dragon” or anything else - that only emerged later. The essential thing for Schiller was not the literal content, [gap in the text] not the prose that is in the poem, but the important thing was the rhythm, the beat, the musicality, the plasticity, the imagery.

Today, people love an art of recitation that actually no longer has much to do with artistry, but sometimes with human sentimentality, with human goodwill to express this or that inwardly – although it always remains a phrase or sentimentality. But what real recitation is, can still be found in older times. Goethe rehearsed his Iphigenia with his actors with a baton, not so much going into the content as into the way the iambic went. This literal recitation could not be juxtaposed with eurythmy as an accompanying art, but one must also go into the eurythmic aspect of speaking itself. And so here one must recite as the good old artists of yore recited.

All this shows that with this eurythmy something is being striven for that wants to establish itself as a new element in our whole spiritual movement, a piece of Goetheanism. Goethe characterized so beautifully what eurythmy can achieve, even if only in a very limited area. Goethe spoke of how man, when he sees himself at the summit of nature, in turn feels himself to be a whole nature and takes in harmony, measure and meaning, and finally rises to the production of a work of art.

This production of the work of art comes to life, I would say, most fully when the human being, in the realm in which he sees eurythmy, makes himself an artistic tool for what he has to represent. Then this microcosm, this small world, as the human being presents it, as he brings it before us, is really not conceived of as a collection of arbitrary elements for the expression of the subjective, which comes to expression in the gesture, in the facial expression. Rather, what is inherent in him from his entire integration into the world, that is to be said with regard to the artistic aspect of eurythmy. And first and foremost, eurythmy should be something artistic.

But alongside this – and you will see a small sample of this in the children's eurythmy that we will present to you in the second part, along with some humor – there is also the didactic-pedagogical significance of this eurythmic art. It is certainly something significant when one introduces children to this eurythmy, because one can understand this eurythmy in a pedagogical-didactic sense as a kind of soul gymnastics. There will come times when people will think more objectively about these things than we do.

In more recent times, gymnastics have been seen as a particular benefit for young people, and rightly so. However, this is not to be criticized. An important authority told me some time ago that he does not consider gymnastics to be an educational tool, but rather a barbarism. I do not wish to go that far. But it is clearly appropriate in our time and demanded by life that this soul-based gymnastics of eurythmy is of educational and didactic significance for children. The strength of the soul, willpower, is what can be developed through this soulful gymnastics, while ordinary gymnastics - only because it looks at the human being from the point of view of physiology, only for the body that performs certain movements - can provide some help for skill.

For example, this spiritualized gymnastics, eurythmy, is being introduced at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt. This provides an essential didactic and pedagogical element. And in many other respects, it will be seen that this eurythmy can perhaps give the people of the present age what cannot come from any other source. What people thought of before this war broke out! They thought of staging the Olympic Games. It is just as if, at a certain age, people were given not what is good for them, but something that is good for a completely different age. Today, everything is seen only in the abstract and intellectually, in terms of current affairs, and not in terms of effect. The Olympic Games were a natural thing for what people needed in that age. Today we need something quite different from the Olympic Games. Today we need something that also places the human being in the whole world context in a soul-spiritual way. And so the Olympic Games and all the ideas that aim at something similar are nothing more than a certain dilettantism in relation to human cultural development.

What is attempted in eurythmy is, however, only a modest beginning, and I must keep pointing this out. But it is what is truly called for by the immediate present, by the demands of our time. And so it may be said that, on the one hand, the esteemed audience must be asked to regard what we are now able to present as really only an attempt at a beginning – all of it requires a great deal of refinement. Although those viewers who have been there before will see how we are currently striving to make progress from month to month in the development of the forms, the three-dimensionally moving forms of groups – we are also our own harshest critics and know exactly what perfection we still need.

It should also be noted that in the art of recitation, which has the particular artistic task of emphasizing the poetic, we do not achieve this by particularly emphasizing the prose content and , but that every effort must be made to apply a suitably artistic form of recitation to eurythmy, which is certainly still in its early days today, and that this will not be universally understood today. What is available as a beginning in the artistic field can, especially if our contemporaries are interested, perhaps be perfected by ourselves, but probably by others. And then something will develop out of this eurythmic art that will be able to stand as a fully-fledged sister art alongside the older fully-fledged sister arts of eurythmy.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Today, we will again take the liberty of presenting you with a few samples of the eurythmic art we have inaugurated. As usual before these performances, allow me to introduce them with a few words. I do this not because I intend to explain what you are about to see on stage, but because what you are about to see aspires to be real art. Real art, of course, needs no explanation, but must speak for itself, must immediately make the impression that is intended with it, must appear directly. But I must say a few words in advance about the sources and the whole way in which this art was found. For it is an art that is only just beginning, that will only come to the stage where the laws work as something self-evident - for example in music - through further development. We are under no illusion that what we can already try today is just the beginning.

If I am to express the essence of this art in a few words, I would say: it is a kind of language, but a language that does not come about in the usual way that a person speaks with his speech organs in the phonetic language , but rather it is a language that works through visible movement, which either one person performs on himself or groups of people perform together in space and the like, thus a kind of mute, visible language, performed by the whole person.

All this is fundamentally based on the development of a Goethean concept of art, like everything that is attempted here, or is attempted within the movement for which this Dornach building is intended to be the representative, the external representative. Like everything, this too is based on a further development of Goetheanism - whereby Goethe is not what he was when he died in 1832, but what he is in the living, spiritual movement to this day, in the artistic principles, in the cognitive and spiritual principles in general, which are in his sense.

It may look abstract, but I am being very specific and factual when I recall what Goethe actually meant by his theory of metamorphosis. This theory is still not sufficiently understood today. It will only be fully appreciated in its full scope and depth when our views on true science have changed from those of today, which are still rooted in materialism. It may sound simple when Goethe says: If I take a single plant leaf, then everything that makes up the whole plant is present in this single leaf, only various aspects — the ramification of the plant, the formation of the flowering part, the fruit part, and so on — are not visibly expressed in the leaf, but are, so to speak, within the leaf in thought. What is visible in the leaf is much less than what is present in the thought in each individual leaf, so that each individual plant leaf – simply formed – is the whole plant. And again, that the whole plant is nothing more than a complex leaf. As I said, once the full scope of what Goethe suggests for plant life, and what he has also developed in a certain sense for the animal kingdom, has been thought through and researched, it will make a significant impression on all spiritual life.

We are trying to implement here what Goethe merely applied to the form of organic growth, the growth of living beings; we are trying to apply it – albeit transformed into the artistic – in our eurythmic art by studying. All that is contained in the art of eurythmy is based on a deep spiritual study of the underlying movement tendencies of the larynx and all neighboring organs that come into play when speaking. Not the individual vibrations that then pass into the air and convey the sound that I am speaking to you now, for example, and that reaches your ear, but the large, comprehensive movements, which are clearly evident in the configuration of the vocal cords and the configuration of the other organs that come into play when speaking. All this had to be carefully studied. These movements, which one gets to know, if I may again make use of Goethe's expression, through sensual-supersensory observation, are then transferred to the whole person, so that the person expresses through his arm movements, through the movement of his whole body, what the larynx and its neighboring organs want to carry out.

Just as Goethe takes the whole plant, like a complicated designed leaf, so too is what a single person or groups of people present on the stage in front of you, it is a transformation of the larynx and other speech-organ movements. In the people and groups of people who appear before you, you see, I would say a moving larynx. The whole human being becomes a moving larynx. It is only natural that not everything is immediately comprehensible, since this art is in its infancy. But just think of when you hear a language you do not understand, it is also not immediately comprehensible to you. And if you are also to receive artistic and poetic elements in the language, it is not immediately comprehensible either. Eurythmy will only gradually develop into a self-evident impression. But those who have artistic feeling will already be able to see the movements that are performed as a kind of moving language or moving music. All it takes is a little artistic intuition.

However, as eurythmy is emerging, it must strive, I would say, in our truly art-poor time, in the time when there is so little real artistic sense, it must strive to deepen this artistic sense. If you listen to things today, it is really the case, ladies and gentlemen, that you have to say that ninety-nine percent of everything that is written today is written completely unnecessarily, and only one percent of it really arises from artistic inwardness. Because it is not the prosaic content, the literal content, that makes a poem artistic, but only the form, either the musical background or the plastic-pictorial background.

The times are actually over, but they must come again, when the romantics found it particularly satisfying to listen to poems in foreign languages, when they did not understand the content at all, but only the rhythm, only the musicality, in order to delve only into the musicality, into the formal of the artistic creation that underlies poetry. We must come back to this, to understanding correctly, in turn, what it actually means when one becomes aware that Schiller did not initially have the literal content of his most important poems at all – that was of no great importance to him at first. There was something vaguely melodious in his soul, and one poem or another could arise from it later. It was only later that the prose content was added – that is the unartistic aspect of the content. The actual artistic aspect, that is, the rhythmic, the metrical, the melodious, or even the plastic, is what is actually artistic about the poetry. So you will notice that when we perform poetic eurythmy, we do not strive for pantomime, for anything mimetic. If it still occurs today, it is only because we are just at the beginning of the eurythmic art and must strip away all physiognomic, mimetic and other aspects in eurythmy. That is another imperfection. Insofar as it occurs today, it will be discarded later.

What is important is that what the poet himself does artistically in the formation of the verses, in the rhythm and so on, is also grasped in the flowing out of the eurythmic. So that it is not a matter of asking: how does a eurythmic movement express this or that? but rather: how does the eurythmic movement properly follow the preceding movement, how does the third follow the other two and so on, so that one really has a musical art unfolding in space. Therefore, on the one hand, you will see that what is to be eurythmized is recited, and on the other hand, you will hear something musical. And on stage you will see only human movements, in which either the musical or the poetic is realized.

I would like to point out that in this way, the art of recitation must in turn be pushed out of the non-art in which it is actually included today. This art of recitation is, of course, regarded as particularly perfect today when the reciter pays particular attention to the literal content, to the prose, to that which is expressed through poetry. And one is particularly satisfied when the reciter, the declaimer, as one says, expresses the prose content quite inwardly. It cannot be expressed in the same way as it is striven for in today's inartistic culture. If you want to practise eurythmy after reciting, the reciter must also respond to the rhythmic, the musical or the plastic-picturesque aspects of the poetry. So that precisely what is neglected today must also come to the fore in recitation.

During the course of this evening, you will also see children perform. I would like to draw particular attention to the fact that these children's performances already play a major role in the curriculum of our Stuttgart Waldorf School – as a supplement to purely mechanical gymnastics through the art of eurythmy for children. I would like to say that what otherwise appears as art is inspired gymnastics. A later time, which thinks more impartially than today about spiritual progress, spiritual human needs and so on, will think quite differently about these things than we do today. Today, of course, children do gymnastics as the physiological, the purely mechanical laws require. But no consideration is given to the human being as a whole; only the human being as a physical being is taken into account. When our children perform movements that are also movements of the eurythmic art, the whole human being is set in motion in body, soul and spirit. And the effect of this is that - if it is introduced to children at the right age in a fully curriculum-based way, as we do in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart - then not only what gymnastics brings about is brought about, but much more. Today, this is not believed because the whole spirit of thinking is materialistic. Gymnastics certainly has many good things. But what eurythmy can bring out in children and what gymnastics cannot do is develop initiative of the will, independence of the soul life. This comes from the soulfulness of the movements, which is not present in mere gymnastics.

So what we do as eurythmy has, firstly, an essentially artistic significance, but secondly, it also has a pedagogical-didactic significance. And I could talk about a third significance, a hygienic one, but I do not want to today. Because what is done in eurythmy has something essentially healing about it, this hygienic aspect can provide essential practical support in cases of illness. Unfortunately, the time available to me here is not enough to go into more detail.

In any case, what might be called the following should come to light in eurythmy: The human being attempts to express through outward movement what lies within him in the way of movement possibilities. In this way we have something truly spiritualized and ensouled, something that can be directly perceived by the senses in its spiritualized and ensouled form. We have nature, for the whole human being stands before us as nature. But we have ensouled nature, for it is the human being who performs these natural movements. We have, in the most eminent sense, the human mystery expressed in the movements of the will, so that when the human being is the instrument in the art of eurythmy, Goethe's beautiful saying is truly fulfilled: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he brings forth a whole nature within himself, takes order, harmony, measure and meaning together and rises to the production of the work of art. And in eurythmy, he takes his own movement possibilities, his form, everything available to him, and brings order, harmony, measure and meaning together to express what is in his soul.

I believe that what Goethe longed for so much in art, namely that it is at the same time an unraveling of the great secrets of nature, comes to expression in a eurythmic performance, because Goethe says: “When nature begins to reveal its manifest secret to someone, that person feels a deep longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. Art is something that Goethe, like every true human being, thinks of in intimate connection with the secrets of the world.

But I ask you to bear with me on this, as far as we can demonstrate it in rehearsals today, for we ourselves know very well that everything is still in its infancy, and perhaps only the attempt at a beginning. But anyone who looks at the essence of this eurythmic art and is active in it must be convinced that what it is at the beginning is capable of being perfected, which will one day – perhaps through our own efforts, but more likely through those of others – enable this youngest of the arts to stand fully equal with the older, more established ones.