The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On October 15, 1920, Rudolf Steiner had a conversation with Herbert Hahn. Among other things, as can be seen from the following notes, the conversation was about eurythmy. Hahn was to speak the introductory words for a few eurythmy performances in the Ruhr area in November 1920 – on November 27 in the hall of the Krupp brewery Kronenberg, on November 28 in the municipal lyceum Essen-Bredeney and on November 29, 1920 in the Red Hall of the Stadthalle Elberfeld. These performances were apparently intended to appeal primarily to working-class circles. Jan Stuten took on the recitation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Address on the Song of Initiation

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

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

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Program of the performance in Dornach, October 23 and 24, 1920

“The Fairy Tale of the Spring Miracle” from “The Testing of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner, with music by Leopold van der Pals
“The Treasure Digger“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Question – Answer” with a musical prelude by Max Schuurman
“Where Does Evil Come From” from ‘The Testing of the Soul’ by Rudolf Steiner
“Explanation of an antique gem” by J. W. v. Goethe
Three-part canon (children's group)
Children's song (children's group)
Scene with sylphs and gnomes from the 2nd picture of The Awakening of the Soul by R. Steiner
“Frohsinn” by Ferdinand Hiller (children's group) ‘An mein Kalb’ by Fercher von Steinwand
Satirical prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘Das Perlhuhn’; ‘Der Salm’; ‘Das Einhorn’; ‘Die Schuhe’

Eurythmy also has an educational value. The human being does not use language as he used to. Actually, the whole human being is involved in language. In the course of human development, the whole soul life, thinking, feeling and willing has concentrated on the speech organs. Gestures, feelings, body movements must come from the whole person. Basically, everything that is spoken comes from the whole person. Because it is concentrated on language, the human being forgets that he is involved in language. The will lives in every word. We have the feeling that when we speak a sentence of poetry, the whole person is present.

But language has become material, conventional; the participation in language itself ceases, the more civilized, the more conventional humanity becomes. In what he speaks, he can put everything into it. There would be much less temptation to tell untruths if the whole person were much more in the language. This will be seen more clearly later. The lie and untruth can come in that way. The less inclined a person would be to speak conventionally if he placed more value on it being the expression of his entire being.

In Waldorf schools, the best experiences have been made with eurythmy in education. It is different from ordinary gymnastics. Soul enters into every movement. People are inclined to develop untruthfulness in speech. Eurythmy is important for the initiative of the soul, of the will. The will becomes stronger. Speech flows out of the will. People feel the truth through the fact that it is a visible language. It is not so easy to lie with a gesture as it is with mere words. Thus eurythmy has become a means of education.

The phraseology that is now interspersed with the will will cease. People are happy to accompany speech with movement, but they hold it back because it is not considered “comme il faut”. You can't declaim in the way we do today, when we only speak in prose. Here eurythmy must be accompanied by declamation that emphasizes the formal aspects of the language as given to it by the poet. A true poet feels that all language is based on imagery. Goethe rehearsed his Iphigenia with a baton because he emphasized the flow of iambic verse. In eurythmic movement, one sees the soul directly. Besides being an art form, it is also a means of education; gymnastics only affects the body. Eurythmy focuses on the soul and spirit, the noblest part of a person.

Dear attendees:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear attendees,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Program for the performance in Dornach, December 5, 1920

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

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Program for the performance in Dornach, December 11 and 12, 1920

“Zum neuen Jahr” (On the New Year) by J. W. v. Goethe
“Der Spaziergang” (The Walk) by Martin Opitz
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (35.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Mächtiges Überraschen“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Waldkonzerte” by Christian Morgenstern with music by Max Schuurman
“The evening bells“ by Thomas Moore
“Morgenlied” by C. F. Meyer
Saying from the soul calendar (38.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Forest Song“ by Nikolaus Lenau with music by Walter Abendroth
“Evening Feeling” by Friedrich Hebbel
“Yes“ by C. F. Meyer
“To a Dead One” by Rudolf Steiner with music by Walter Abendroth
Scene with Sylphs and Gnomes from the 2nd picture of The Awakening of the Soul by R. Steiner

Dear attendees!

Allow me to say a few words in advance of our attempt at a eurythmic presentation – not to explain the content of the presentation (artistic work must speak for itself, and an explanation would naturally be out of place because it would be inartistic itself), but it is necessary to say a few words in advance because what we are calling eurythmic art here draws from previously unfamiliar artistic sources and also makes use of an artistic formal language that is also unfamiliar.

You will see a kind of spatial movement art: the individual human being moves on stage, moves in his limbs or also groups of people, groups of people in their mutual relationships, in reciprocal movement and so on. The movements involved are not gestures, they are not facial expressions, so what is presented here as the eurythmic art is not to be understood as anything like dance. And it is precisely a new art that uses the human being as an instrument, and the movements are entirely lawful movements.

This conformity to law has come about through the fact that the movements that a person makes in their larynx and other speech organs when they engage in spoken language have been studied through sensual and supersensible observation – to use this Goethean expression. Only: in spoken language, the movements that the larynx and the other speech organs want to carry out – the inner movements, or better said, the movement systems – are stopped in their development and transformed into smaller vibrational movements that carry the sound through the air so that it can be heard. That which still takes place inside the human speech organs is transferred to the whole person or to groups of people. The basis for this is what Goethe's metamorphosis is. Since everything that comes from this spiritual place is in the sense of Goetheanism, so too is this eurythmic art as a detail.

Goethe formed the doctrine of metamorphosis out of his universal world view. And if I want to characterize something abstractly – not to develop some kind of theory, but just to explain myself – the simple way in which Goethe applies this doctrine of plant metamorphosis, I would have to say the following: Goethe sees in each individual leaf, as he himself says, a whole plant, so that if everything that is ideally present in each individual leaf really grows out, the whole plant arises. The whole plant is thus a complex leaf, and each individual leaf is a primitive, elementary plant, in idea. What Goethe has expounded for the metamorphosis of organisms – for he extended this to all organisms – can also be applied to the functions and formations of the organism and then transferred to the artistic. If we take what is present in a single group of organs, in the larynx and the other speech organs, in terms of their structure and also in terms of their idea, and transform it into movements of the whole human being, thus making the whole human being or groups of people into a larynx that is vividly moved, we get a visible language. And this visible language is the basis of what our eurythmy art should be.

It is only natural that such an art, which makes use of unusual artistic means, will initially meet with resistance. All this resistance will fade away over time. What is being created here is not random gestures, in which, if they are supposed to be mimic gestures, random connections are sought between this or that arm movement and the like and some kind of emotional state. That is not being done here. Rather, just as a certain nuance of sound in spoken language corresponds to a certain process of the soul, as sequences of sounds correspond to processes of the soul, and so on, so it is here with the lawful sequence of movements. That which is otherwise expressed in spoken language, in song, in music in general, is simply represented by a different artistic means, by a different formal language, in eurythmy.

Therefore, as you will see at our performance, the very same thing that comes to light in eurythmy can be accompanied on the one hand by music. In this way, what is expressed through the sound is also expressed through human movement. But it can also be accompanied by visible speech, audible speech, recitation, declamation, so that on the one hand the poem is recited, and on the other hand the actual artistic content of the poem is translated into the visible language of eurythmy. This shows how, in our somewhat inartistic times, this eurythmy can in turn have an effect on how we develop artistic feelings, for example, in relation to recitation and declamation.

Today, what is considered particularly important in terms of recitation and declamation is the literal content of a poem. Actually, it is not the literal content that is important in a poem, but only that part of it that is either plastic-pictorial or musical. Therefore, the recitation and the declamation, in that they are to accompany the eurythmy, must take this into account, they must particularly emphasize the artistic, rhythm, beat, and inner shaping of the language, and one will again come back to the conception of the art of recitation as it existed in artistic epochs. I need only remind you that Goethe used the baton to rehearse his iambic dramas with his actors, just as one rehearses a piece of music, and thus also emphasized the iambic structure of the verse, not the literal content of the prose. It will also have an effect on the art of recitation, because this art of recitation must accompany the eurythmic, that which underlies the artistic aspect of eurythmy in the first place.

You will see, especially those of the honored audience who have seen these performances before, how we are even progressing from month to month. Earlier, we used this visible language of eurythmy to simultaneously present the poetic content during the recitation. Now we are trying to present the entire main content of a poem or the like through preparatory and concluding movements that are given purely through movements, so that the silent, visible language of eurythmy alone can also be shown to advantage now.

That, dear attendees, is the artistic element. It is one element of our eurythmy. The second element is what I would like to call the pedagogical-didactic element. This eurythmy is, in addition to being something artistic, also something that could be called soulful gymnastics. And as such it is effective in our Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and which I have established and continue to lead. We have introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject in all classes alongside gymnastics. It must be said that something like gymnastics will be judged differently by more artistically impartial ages than today's [people]. We really do not need to go as far as a famous contemporary physiologist who was here recently, who heard these introductory words and looked at eurythmy, as he said that from his physiological point of view gymnastics is not an educational tool at all, but a barbarism. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am not saying this, but a contemporary physiologist, whose name would certainly command great respect from people if they heard it.

But I do not want to go that far. I want to say that gymnastics is something that is carried out according to the laws of physics and is designed according to the physiological foundations of the human being. If a child is allowed to perform the same movements that are meaningfully revealed in eurythmy, then the body, soul and spirit, that is, the whole person, is engaged. And we have already seen, now that we have been at the Stuttgart Waldorf School for more than a school year, how the children feel their way with great love into what is offered to them as the eurythmic art. They simply feel that these movements are drawn from the human organization itself.

And just as it is natural for a child to feel an inner, organic joy when learning to speak, so children between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen experience learning these eurythmic movements as something that is rooted in the whole organization, finding their way into this eurythmic. They find their humanity guided in the right direction. And one can say that of the almost four hundred children we have in the Waldorf School, there were perhaps at most two or three who did not enjoy it as much as all the other schoolchildren. So those who, for whatever reason, have found it difficult to get into eurythmy for a short time are a very small number compared to the great majority who take part in these lessons with tremendous enthusiasm. I may also say that this teaching educates the children in such a way that we really need: soul and will initiative, which gymnastics as such cannot do.

We will first present individual pieces in the first part of our performance. In the second part - after a short break - we will try to present a scene from one of my “mystery dramas”. Everything that relates to the supersensible, that is, that which means the supersensible reaches into the sensory world, is presented in eurythmy, while that which, I would like to say, takes place entirely in the prose of the day, that is, that which takes place in the sensory world, while that must of course be presented in a naturalistic way in the drama, at least initially. However, I do intend to find a kind of eurythmy for drama as such. But that is still to be created. It will then become clear that the imbalance that still exists today between the eurythmic and the purely naturalistic in drama will be overcome. But these are works that still need to be done. It just so happens that it is precisely this that is being shown – we have also shown, by attempting to present Goethe's “Faust” in such a way that we eurythmized what relates to the supersensible within it – we have shown and it could be seen from this that precisely these supersensible elements of the drama come to full revelation when eurythmy is applied to them.

I would just like to say a few words about the second part, which is performed after the interval. It presents a stage in the development of a soul. The soul encounters its own youth, externalized, at a certain point in its development, and other soul forces encounter it. That which otherwise takes place in the human being, not tangibly, is exposed, presented not as a symbolic figure, not allegorically transferred, but actually in such a way that it is presented in direct, supersensible spiritual reality. And for that, because it cannot be thought of in any other way than eurythmically – one cannot think of it in any other way than eurythmically, feel it eurythmically – eurythmy is particularly suitable.

From all this, however, you will see that we still have a great need to ask the esteemed audience for indulgence, because we ourselves are the strictest critics of what we are not yet able to achieve today. Eurythmy is still at the very beginning of its development. But as well as we can know that we are only making an attempt at a beginning, we can also still claim, out of our connection with our cause, that as our cause develops, whether through us or probably through others, that eurythmy will become ever more perfect and that one day it will truly stand as a young sister art alongside the older, fully-fledged sister arts and be able to be seen as a fully-fledged young art.

Dear attendees!

Allow me to say a few words to introduce this eurythmy performance, as I usually do. Not to explain the matter, may I be allowed to speak to you about these words; rather, because what we are doing here is based on an artistic form that is still unfamiliar and also comes from artistic sources that are still unfamiliar. What you will see on the stage are movements of the individual human being through his limbs, and also movements of groups of people, spatial forms and the like. At first glance, all this could be seen as a kind of gestural art, as a kind of mimic or pantomime art, and could be confused with all kinds of neighboring arts, movement-like arts and the like. However, this is not what is meant here at all. What can be seen here as eurythmy would be misunderstood if lumped together with pantomime or gesticulation. This is a presentation of a visible language that is performed by the whole human being, as audible speech is otherwise performed by the larynx and other speech organs, that is, by a very specific, localized part of the human organism.

Just as everything else that comes from this place is called Goetheanism by us, so too can we, in a sense, describe this eurythmic art as a part of Goetheanism. I can best describe the underlying principles by saying a few words about them. It may sound somewhat abstract, but that is not what I mean at all. What Goethe meant in theory in his theory of metamorphosis is meant entirely artistically. This theory of metamorphosis will one day play a much greater role than it has already played, when it is realized that the organism, the human being, can actually be wonderfully explained by the theory of metamorphosis, be it in plants, animals or humans.

This theory of metamorphosis can be initially illustrated using the object with which Goethe himself first presented it: the plant. For Goethe sees in the individual plant leaf only a simpler version of the whole plant. So each individual leaf is the idea of a whole plant, and the whole plant in turn is only a more complicated leaf. But in this way, everything alive can be understood in the Goethean sense. A single organ or a group of organs always represents the whole in a certain way – according to its disposition. And the whole is basically only – only more complicatedly formed – some organ or a group of organs.

What Goethe applies to form can also be applied to the activity of the organism and then elevated to the artistic. So we can say: What a person develops as a certain inner tendency of movement when he speaks – in every sound, in every turn of phrase, in everything that becomes audible through speech – is based on an inner tendency of movement. This is precisely why the whole human being reveals himself in language.

What takes place in a particular group of organs when a person communicates through speech or, in particular, when he or she expresses it artistically in poetry or song, what is communicated through a single group of organs, can be seen just as as the individual leaf is taken by Goethe as the whole plant, so that which is revealed in a single organ group, once one has learned to observe it through sensory and supersensory vision and has applied this observation over the course of years, can be extended to the whole human being: And so a visible language comes into being that can be used, on the one hand, as a different form of expression for that which also resounds in music. In music, we have, on the one hand, what is to be revealed out of the nature of the soul in the beginning; in poetry, we have the other side. And since we are dealing here with movements in a visible language, in which the whole human being or groups of people become visible larynxes on the stage, what wants to reveal itself musically on the one hand and poetically in recitation or declamation on the other can be revealed through this eurythmic art. It is not about mimicry or pantomime.

One can see that this is still unusual today, because I am repeatedly confronted with an accusation that is often raised at eurythmy performances: that the movements might be quite nice, but that our eurythmy artists are missing something, namely a certain expression on their faces. People then miss that.

But in doing so, they show that they have not yet grasped what eurythmy is about. If the artists were to convey what can be expressed in facial expressions, pantomime, in the physiognomy, then this would appear as an appendage to the eurythmic art, in the same way as grimaces can appear when speaking. That is what is usually not understood: that it is a visible language. Once you grasp that, you also know that if what is expressed in the face, head and so on is to be developed, then it will also be used, but it must lie within the meaning of the eurythmic line of movement itself. In this sense, eurythmy is something, let us say, like the musical art itself, where it is not the individual note that matters, the individual movement, but the lawful sequence of movements in the melody and so on. That is what our eurythmy is based on. Everything is a real language. And just as a momentary gesture cannot be anything other than an aid to speech – for instance, for the speech of sounds, when particular passions or particular emotions are to be expressed through this speech of sounds – in this sense, something of ordinary gestures or ordinary facial expressions cannot accompany that which is eurythmy. But the eurythmic element is present in every single movement, even in the smallest, and is something that is based on sensual and supersensory observation and that is extracted from the whole human organization as an independent element, just as the physiognomy of the larynx and the other speech organs is otherwise brought about from the whole of the human being in the production of speech sounds.

Therefore, what asserts itself as a eurythmic movement cannot be compared to any other naturalistic movement. Above all, it would be a dilettantish misunderstanding of eurythmy to believe that what comes about through distortions or through the facial expressions that are already formed, that this is somehow something like language; but something cannot be there because it does not belong to the thing.

On the one hand, you will see how that which is to be revealed spiritually in song and music is expressed through the visible, musical-linguistic expressive movement that lies in eurythmy. And on the other hand, you will hear poems recited in an artistic way, through recitation and declamation, which on the other hand will be performed in front of you in the movements of individuals or whole groups of people. This shows how the art of declamation and recitation is not really understood in its true artistic element today. Today, people think that recitation should be done in such a way that the prose content of the poetry is expressed. Somehow – with particular intensity, as one might think – this or that element of the prose content is emphasized, while something else is dropped or the like.

In this way, one would never be able to accompany eurythmy declamatory or recitative, but because in eurythmy the main thing is inner movement, what forms are, what is truly artistic, must also be emphasized in the poems that are recited to the accompaniment of eurythmy. Great poets like Goethe have always placed the greatest value on this form and design of language. It must be emphasized again and again how Goethe himself rehearsed “Iphigenia” - that is, iambs - with a baton in order to place the main emphasis on the melodious flow of speech, on rhythm and on the beat, and not on the prose content. And with Schiller it was always the case that before he developed any kind of poetry, he had a kind of melodious element in his soul. And this musical, melodious element dominated him; at first it was completely wordless, the words only came later.

So what is musical or plastic in language, which is not the prose content, is what comes to the fore through eurythmy. This is why, when eurythmy is accompanied by declamation and recitation, it must also come into its own in this art. And so the unartistic element, which is even admired in much of our declaiming and reciting today because our time is somewhat unartistic, will in turn lead us back to an artistic element. I just wanted to mention this in relation to the artistic element of our eurythmy.

Today, however, you will also see performances by children, in addition to the artistic eurythmy performances. And I would like to point out another element here. There is also a third element, the therapeutic and hygienic element. It does not belong here to discuss that, but the second. I would like to point out: In the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt and directed by me, we have something like an animated gymnastics, [we have] introduced eurythmy as a compulsory teaching subject into the classroom. And we can truly say – the lessons have been going on for a little longer than a year now – that it is really as one might expect: this subject is perceived by the children as something that they feel and experience quite emotionally as emerging from human nature. So that the children feel: the body wants to move in the way that is performed in eurythmy.

You don't have to go as far as – as I have repeatedly stated – a very famous contemporary physiologist, who was present here recently. And when I spoke to him about it, he told me from his physiological point of view that gymnastics is not an appropriate subject for teaching at all, but is something barbaric. As I said, I do not want to go that far, it is not necessary, but I do want to admit, contrary to this physiologist: gymnastics is of great value for physical education, and we certainly do not want to ban it from the classroom. But we place at its side a spiritualized gymnastics that truly not only trains the body but also trains the will and soul. It will be seen that the next generation will already have a great need for what eurythmy can give - this applies less to adults, but more to children. It must be emphasized that in the civilised languages, where much has become conventional, this conventionality, which often leads to phrase-mongering and then to lies, takes hold of the soul so easily. If we introduce eurythmy into the school, it is a language that comes from the whole human being. In this language, the child cannot learn to lie. That is why it is so extremely important that eurythmy is also used as a form of soul training in schools, alongside the usual physical education. As a teaching subject, it is then also a school of truthfulness, of breaking the habit of using empty phrases, of merely outward convention and the like.

Dear audience, although these intentions are all connected with eurythmy, I have to emphasize again and again before each performance that we have to ask for a great deal of forbearance, and that is because it is all only just beginning. We are our own harshest critics, and those who have been here often, especially months ago, will have noticed that we have recently put a lot of effort into the musical aspects, especially in the design of the forms on which the poems are based, and that progress can certainly be seen. But we are just at the beginning. If, on the one hand, we are to some extent our own harshest critics, we know from the sources, from the formal language of this art, about its developmental possibilities. And we know that when this eurythmy is fully developed - perhaps we will be able to develop it further, but in any case it has potential for development that requires a long period of training - and when it is developed, perhaps by others, it will in any case, according to its potential, one day be a fully fledged art alongside its older sister arts.