The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees!

Allow me to say a few words about the presentation we would like to give you. We are attempting to search for a new art form, and a new art form it is, for the simple reason that we are striving to shape this art form out of a very specific source. It is given by people and shown to people on the stage. These movements are performed either by the limbs of the human body moving or by the whole person moving in space or by groups moving and bringing each other into position. All that is sought in this way is not just a collection of random gestures or gestures that are momentarily sought for some kind of emotional feelings or inner experiences of the soul, but everything that occurs in movements is, in the truest sense of the word, a mute language, but a language that is as arbitrary as the language of sound in the spoken or sung word.

First of all, it is important to note how this mute language comes about. I may use the expression that Goethe often used. What comes about is that what occurs in movements comes about through sensory-supersensory observation, through observation that enables the human being to recognize the supersensible in the sensory in terms of its meaning, in terms of its essence. When developing this eurythmic silent language, one must have a sensory-supersensory power of observation for what actually happens when the speech sound comes forth in speaking or singing. We know, of course, how movement comes about, how all the vocal organs are involved in a particular movement and how this movement is then transmitted to the external air. However, when we listen to someone speaking or singing, we pay attention to what we perceive through the sense of hearing, and what is present in terms of movement escapes our perception. If you study it, you would not get anywhere if you only took what is present in terms of movement phenomena, of real movement phenomena, during speaking or singing, but you have to take the movement tendencies. Because the fact that in the larynx and in the other speech organs that come into play when speaking, the vibrating of the sound is directly connected with the external air, means that movements are produced in the quickest way. But all these movements, which quickly represent a vibration, are based on movement tendencies. And these main directions of movement – when making a sound or otherwise when speaking – can now be transferred to the whole human being according to Goethe's principle of metamorphosis.

For Goethe, the whole plant is nothing more than a more intricately designed leaf. There is something in this principle at Goethe that will still have a great significance for the future view of the world, which is still not sufficiently appreciated even by those who deal with Goethe intimately. But what Goethe saw for the forms, that is, let us say, for the whole plant in relation to the whole plant organ, that can now be extended to the activity of the living being, especially of the most perfect living being, the human being.

What is present in the larynx and its neighboring organs in terms of movement impulses can be transferred to people or groups of people, so that when you see movements of individual people or groups of people here, you are really seeing a true reflection of the movement tendencies present in the human vocal organs when speaking or singing. So there is nothing arbitrary about this eurhythmy; on the contrary, everything in it is as little arbitrary as what comes about in harmony and melody in accordance with musical laws.

Just as two pianists playing the same piece only within very specific limits of their individual conception and the piece comes into its own, so too, through the various performances at different places with special persons or groups, only in individual conceptions, within very specific limits of conception, that which is essential comes to the performance, and that is the same. For there is a rhythmic, tactful, full connection also in the succession of movements, which comes about through the fact that the whole is developed regularly according to the principle indicated.

Now, of course, this eurythmic art is only at the beginning of its development, and that is why it is still difficult to find one's way into it today. But this beginning can already be described as a solution to much of what is currently being sought in art in a certain field of artistic work. We see how people who want to be artistically active today are looking for new ways, for example, the expressionist, the impressionist way, how they produce many caricatures in this way. One does not have to look at what can already be produced by us today, but one must look at what is wanted.

We can see, however, that when we are presented with these new artistic endeavors in the fields of painting or sculpture, for example, the artists are still struggling with the fact that the means still seem unusable today, or that the forms of expression cannot be created immediately. It is important to realize that in every such period, when a new direction is being sought in the field of art in particular, there is a tendency to fall back on what must underlie all art, all real art, but what is somewhat lost to artistic creation when the epigone-like, the imitation in art compared to the epochs of genius, comes to the fore too strongly. All real art-making is based on our relationship to the world – whether we are aesthetic connoisseurs or artistic creators – all art-making is based on our perception, on our entire imagination. The conceptual, the ideational actually snatches art away; the ideational actually has a killing, paralyzing effect on everything artistic. If we want to look at nature artistically or recreate nature, for example, we have to turn our attention to nature in such a way that we do not yet progress from contemplation to comprehension in our thinking, but that we remain with our whole devotion to nature in contemplation, but look at the sensual forms so purely, as if they themselves were already thoughts.

For a time, Impressionism tried to do this. In the field of painting, it was not at all able to achieve appropriate forms of artistic expression. As expressionism, it then tried to grasp the other side of avoiding the ideal by simply trying to bring soul experiences that come into their own in a kind of powerfully visionary form in man, but which do not come up to the clear thought that guides everything artistic, by trying to bring such visionary artistic experiences into forms and colors. Those who are easily inclined to philistinism cannot appreciate this beginning. They see only something in what is being attempted, to hold on to inner experiences through colors and forms, and then they say: We cannot distinguish whether it is a matter of hung-out laundry or a ship's sail or something of that sort. The philistine mind refuses to admit that this is not the point. The point is not that you simply hang something on the wall that reflects an inner experience; but as I said, artistic means of expression were not yet available. Therefore, even when one approaches these things with all good will, one is often compelled to say, especially in the face of these attempts at painting today: Yes, it is based on something visionary, it is an illusion, it is an expression, but it is not yet a healthy expression, it is not yet that which the healthy soul can truly experience.

In eurythmy, at least a path has been opened up, albeit in a very imperfect way even today. It involves a different means of expression, in order to become both impressionistic and expressionistic in a different way. We are dealing here with the human being, with the moving human being, and so with something that can be observed by the observer with the senses, something that can be presented in the medium of the senses. But what is being presented, these movements, are not something that merely needs to be looked at, but rather can be observed in a certain way, just as one can listen to speech or sound, to song, and discern something of the soul in it. What the expressionist wants, for example, that the soul he has painted into his forms and form structures is inside them – can easily be achieved when presented in eurythmy. Because this eurythmic art that I have presented is, like human language, the expression of the soul, of the spiritual, everywhere.

And what the Impressionists sought to achieve by capturing the external image directly, before they had arrived at the thought, can also be expressed in eurythmy, because it is not something that is merely formed artificially. Not even the gesture is formed artificially, but the human organism is studied in terms of how it emits something through the natural movement of its arms, through the natural movement of its whole environment, which corresponds to the movement tendencies that are as natural as in the larynx when we speak.

Of course, something like this must be sensed in the right way, as it is given in the eurythmic art form. We must go back to the truly artistic feeling, also, for example, in poetry, which eurythmy should be accompanied by. You will see how it is accompanied today, how poetry on the one hand and music on the other accompany artistic eurythmy performances.

We must also go back to the example of poetry in recitation to what is actually artistic in poetry. In our unartistic times, we have often strayed from an understanding of the artistic in poetry. This artistic quality is found in rhythm, in plasticity, in form. Today, however, we first consider the prosaic aspect and then attach great importance to the fact that the reciter brings out with great feeling precisely those aspects that are not rhythmic or artistic but are in keeping with the meaning. As a result, our present-day art of recitation is a prosaic and not a truly artistic one. What is understood by the art of recitation in the outer life today would not be at all suitable for recitation to eurythmy, to the silent language of eurythmy. Recitation must go back to the old forms of recitation.

We must see a beginning in all these fields, but a beginning that must lead to a certain perfection. We need only remember that the human being must be the most perfect work of art. Goethe says so beautifully: When the human being is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn produces a summit within himself, taking measure, harmony and meaning together and finally rising to the work of art.

Those who place their own human organism at the service of this art of silent speech, of eurythmy, are well aware that everything must be dropped that is expressed only by the individual human being in spoken language, and that they must give themselves over to that which, in essence, nature expresses through the particular human organization itself. So that one can say: When an individual speaks or sings, when an individual engages in mimicry or gestures, there is always something of the individual human subjectivity in it, of human egoism. Here in eurythmy, we are striving for what Goethe regards as the highest summit of artistic revelation, saying: When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when man in the world feels himself in the world as a great and dignified totality, when harmonious comfort gives him free delight, he will consider nature as having reached its goal and admire the summit of its becoming and being. This is the language of nature itself, not that of the individual human being. It is the language that reveals itself through the movements of eurythmy, the language of nature itself, which can emerge when the whole human being is used as its instrument.

And so, if you have a true artistic sensibility, what can come to light through the art of eurythmy can truly seem like an unraveling of the mysteries of the world. What can be expressed in the moving forms of eurythmy cannot be expressed in ordinary spoken language. What is expressed in the movements of the individual human being on stage, or in the movements of groups of people, or even in their relationship to one another on stage, is thoroughly inspired by the laws of nature.

We can hope that this eurythmic element will continue to develop in a thoroughly beneficial way for the further artistic education of man.

In all this, however, I would ask you to bear in mind what I have said many times before: we ourselves are still thinking, with all modesty, about what we can offer today. We are at the beginning of this eurythmic art. But we also believe that, if time brings us its interest, what we want with this eurythmy will either be developed by ourselves, but probably by others in the course of time, into something that can be presented as a fully fledged, younger art form alongside its older, fully fledged sister arts.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

As always before these eurythmy performances, allow me to say a few words today as well. What we will present to you today in a rehearsal of eurythmy is an attempt at a new art form.

On the stage, you will see all kinds of movements that people perform on themselves through their limbs, or that are performed by people in space, by individual people in space, or also alternating movements, alternating positions of groups of people. These movements, which will be demonstrated, are intended to be the expression of poetry or even of music. Now, one could initially interpret these movements simply as gestures. But they are not. For everything in which you are to find the art of eurythmy is not arbitrary gestures associated with something poetic, but rather they are thoroughly lawful expressions of what is experienced by the soul — like language itself.

An attempt has been made to give a real mute language in this eurythmy, a language that consists of human movements. The way in which this is attempted is entirely in line with the spirit of Goethe's world view. However, one must not misunderstand the manifold aspects of this Goethean world view and also understand how to develop it further. Eurythmy is truly that which Goethe calls the expression of the sensual and the supersensible. For it is based on the study of the impulses and tendencies of movement that are set in motion in the human larynx and all those organs that connect to the larynx when speaking, for the language that is contained within.

Phonetic language is used as a means of poetic expression. However, it can be said that the more advanced a culture is, the more phonetic language approaches the prosaic as a means of expression. If we go back to the poetry of earlier times, we can see that in earlier times, poetry was still seen in what actually lies behind the actual prosaic nature of language, in the rhythms, in the rhythmic movement of language, and also in the plastic imagery that is expressed through language. This song-like and plastic character of language is increasingly being stripped away, the more language takes on the character given to it by the advance of spiritually inanimate movement. In particular, because speech is there for human understanding, for conversation, an unartistic element flows more and more into speech.

In this inartistic spoken language, however, one can seek out what lies at its artistic core. In it - in this phonetic language - two human revelations flow together, from two very different sides: on the one hand, the revelation of thoughts, everything that is thought and imagined, so to speak, everything that flows from the human head into the larynx, that is the one element of phonetic language. The other element is everything that comes from the whole human being: it is the will element in speech. One can say: the laws of the will, the inner soul life revealed in the will, flow together when one forms speech artistically, most especially.

But just as in every art there is less that is truly artistic the more that is ideational and mental that flows into it, so too in what is presented poetically there is less that is truly artistic as the thought - which is a prosaic element - flows into this artistic element. The actual poetry is given in the will element, which lives itself out in rhythm and beat, in the whole formation, and which also lives itself out in the images on which it is based.

Now, in eurythmy, it is precisely the task of stripping away that which is the thought element. This is then emphasized in the recitation that accompanies the eurythmy, but which must also be shaped in a special way for the eurythmy, as I will mention in a moment. In contrast, in the movements of the eurythmy itself, one will strip away everything that is conceptual. The whole human being is made the subject of expression: everything that is done in the way of movements as silent speech is now the expression not of thoughts but of the will element, which is expressed through the whole human being - namely through everything that is connected, that integrates into the rhythmic system, into the heart system and so on.

But in order to be able to do this, to really bring the element of will to manifestation through movements like a mute language, it is necessary to study the movement tendencies of the larynx and the other speech organs. When we speak, it is clear that our larynx and speech organs are in motion. One need only think of the fact that while I am speaking here, the air comes into certain lawful movements, which movement is simply a continuation of the movements initiated by the larynx and its neighboring organs. But it is not so much these movements that are of interest for eurythmy. Rather, it is the movements, seen supersensibly, that are the potential movements. And according to Goethe's law of metamorphosis, according to which the whole organism is only a more complicated form of a single organ, one can bring the whole person into such movement, as the larynx actually wants to develop in speech.

This is the study that must underlie this mute language, which comes to the fore in eurythmy. You see, as it were, the whole human being become the moving larynx. The movements are only different from those that function in phonetic language because in phonetic language the cartilages of the larynx collide directly with the outside air, while in euryth we let that which pours out of the will element strike together with the muscles, which offer a much stronger resistance to what is brought to the fore by the will. That is why these movements occur in a slowed-down form in eurythmy, which come to the fore in swinging oscillatory movements when speaking aloud, as it were, summing up the swinging movement into one main form. And that is expressed through the whole of the human personality, through the whole of the muscular organization. That is the mute language of eurythmy.

Therefore, in the succession of movements, it is something that represents a law as necessarily as the musical element itself represents a law in the succession of the melodious element or in the juxtaposition of what represents a law as does the harmonic element in music. And just as little as more than a certain degree of subjective interpretation comes into it when two pianists play the same sonata independently of each other, so it is also in eurythmy when the same thing, the same poem is presented by two personalities or by two groups. Thus, the individual element is no more distinct than the individual interpretation of two piano players of the same Beethoven sonata. There is nothing arbitrary in this artistic eurythmy, but everything is just as internally lawful as in music itself.

This makes eurythmy, this silent language, particularly suitable for serving Goethe's demand to bring a sensual and supersensory element into artistic representation, because it dissociates the prosaic, the thought element, from the poetry and translates into visible movement what is actually artistic in it. One could also say: sculpture in motion, gestures that take hold of the whole human being, understood as language, as real language, as unambiguous language. This is what should come to the fore in eurythmy.

Therefore, you will see that this silent language can be accompanied on the one hand by the musical element and on the other by the poetic element in the recitation, which, however, as such, as the art of recitation, must in turn return to the earlier good forms of reciting, where one recited according to measure and rhythm, not according to the prose content of the poem, after which one has just now especially formed the art of recitation and sees something perfect in this prosaic form of the art of recitation.

How great poets did not consider this prosaic element, to which so much importance is attached in today's unartistic age, to be the main thing, can be seen from the fact that Schiller, for example, never had the literal content of a poem in mind, at least not in his great poems. He always had something vague and melodious in his soul, and only then did he add the literal content. Goethe even rehearsed his Iphigenia with his actors like a conductor rehearsing a piece of music with a baton, not emphasizing the content of the prose during the recitation, but rather the artistic, rhythmic, and metrical form, the plastic, musical element in the poetic, which is, after all, what is truly artistic in the poetic.

Then we shall see how that which is already eurythmically shaped in the imagination, such as my [mystery drama] scenes, which are also being presented today, express the expressions of the laws of the human soul, and the paths that this soul life can take, as well as that which is already inwardly formed in the feeling, and how that can be expressed quite naturally in eurythmy. In scenes like these, we can see how we must develop towards an understanding of the life of nature and the world, so that we no longer base our understanding of the life of nature and the world merely on intellectual abstractions, but on imaginations — imaginations such as I have attempted in my mystery scenes, of which a rehearsal will also be given today. For the fact that human development must go in this direction is in line with a deep conviction that one gains when one has any insight at all into the workings of human and non-human nature. What use is it, dear attendees, to philosophize about the fact that real knowledge, real understanding, only exists in the rational, clearly analyzable, when nature does not give up its essence to the analyzable, the discursive, the rational alone. If nature works in images that only reveal the inner essence of nature as images, then it is necessary that we also penetrate into the inner essence of the existence of the world through images, through imagination.

The fact that people wanted to understand nature only with their minds actually led them to say, cowardly:

No created spirit penetrates into the depths of nature
Happy he to whom she shows only the outer shell.

Goethe, in his old age, when he was truly able to think more clearly about such things than many who philosophize rationally, said of these words of Haller's – “No created spirit penetrates into the innermost being of nature; blessed is he to whom it shows only the outer shell” – Goethe said:

“Into the innermost part of nature”
Oh, you philistines!
“No created spirit can penetrate."

May you not remind me and my brothers and sisters
of such a word:
We think: place by place
we are within.“
“Happy the man to whom she shows
Only the outer shell!”
That's what I've heard repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly;
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
She is everything at once;
She only tests you, most of all,
Whether you are core or shell.

So it is: the one who does not want to be shell with his soul, that is, a bundle of intellectual ideas, must move up to images. But then knowledge connects with art. And then one can say, say with understanding, what Goethe also demanded of true art: that it is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that could never come to revelation without it. And one understands Goethe's other feeling about nature and art: “When nature begins to reveal her manifest secret to someone, they long for her most worthy interpreter, art.”

This kind of world view, this Goetheanism, underlies what we want to present in eurythmy here. In the second part, after the break, you will see that our children's eurythmy demonstration – a presentation of eurythmic poems by children – shows the very strong hygienic and educational side of this eurythmy. Ordinary gymnastics, the one-sidedness of which is still not recognized by the public today, will have to be supplemented because it only takes into account the physiological aspects of the human being, the soul of the movements that the human being performs as a child. And only the art of movement imbued with soul, eurythmy, will truly make the human being strong-willed, while mere gymnastics may make the body strong, but not at the same time the soul, and in particular does not draw the initiative of the will from within. Eurythmy can bring the initiative of the will from within the human being.

But all in all, we must ask you to be patient, because what is being attempted as a new art form is still in its infancy. It is an attempt at the beginning of what I have presented to you more or less as the ideal of this art. But those who saw this eurythmy here months ago and will see it again now will see that we have worked on it, that we have achieved a great deal in the formation of the groups and also in the formation of the movements of the individual compared to before. We are the harshest critics of our performances and we know that the eurythmic art is in its infancy. But we also believe that, if it is further perfected either by us or probably by others, it will one day be able to take its place as a younger, fully-fledged art alongside other, older, fully-fledged art forms.

Dear attendees,

Allow me to say a few words before this eurythmic presentation today. In this eurythmic art, of which we want to show you a sample here today, the aim is to create something from certain new art sources and from certain means of expression, which in a sense can be called a new art form. And anyone who takes into account the striving for new art forms among today's artists will perhaps see it as a possible and necessary attempt when special artistic sources are opened up. The point is that through this opening up of special artistic sources in the human being in eurythmy, as it is meant here, a kind of silent language is presented through movements of the human limbs or also through movements of the human being in space, through alternating movements of people who belong to groups.

I would just like to point out how such movements, which are by no means arbitrary gestures in eurhythmy, and are by no means gestures invented in an instant, can come about as equally lawful forms of expression of the human soul experience, just as speech or song, the musical itself, creates means of expression for what can be experienced by human beings.

It can be said that the more artistic elements there are in a person's language, the more these elements express this language as a basis, as revelations of the poetic, the more one goes back in the development of language. It is indeed a peculiar fact that the more advanced the languages within human civilization become, the more they develop into a conventional means of expression for external human intercourse, and that to the same extent as the artistic perception of language loses its power for truly artistic, poetic expression. And we must arrive at the cause of this peculiar phenomenon, which can only be penetrated through the artistic. When searching for this cause, one will find that the further back one goes in the development of language, the more the language, by filling it, takes up the whole person, and the sound language takes up the whole person in such a way that one can say: in different ways, the sound language takes up the whole person.

The less prosaic spoken language has become as a mere language of communication, as a mere language of everyday life, the more, the further one goes back to even more primitive language elements, the more it engages the whole person, and the more it unites in the phonetic language, in its vocalic, in its self-sound element, a musical, and in its consonantal, in its consonantal element, a plastic, an image-forming capacity of the human being. So that in languages – it was clearly noticeable in the Central European languages, in German, until the 17th and 18th centuries – so that in the original languages there is a confluence of the musical and the pictorial-sculptural.

The musical element, which lies primarily in the vocalization of speech, is now intimately connected with the spiritual element in the human soul. When the human being, as it were, grows together with his spirit and experiences within himself that which can make an impression on him outside in nature, then in the vocal-musical expression, an inner experiencing of the human being with the outer process or the outer thing comes about. One need only recall how certain external experiences evoke the a through wonder, the o through admiration, and so on, in the soul, and one will feel the musical, vocalizing tendency of human speech. On the other hand, we have the consonantal element, that element

where the human being is less introspective and more immersed in and devoted to external processes and external things. This is the plastic, the inwardly pictorial element. In fact, two unconsciously creative artistic elements in the human being flow together in speech.

Eurythmy is the shaping of what is experienced by the human being through the image itself. Again, one can say, my dear audience, how writing originally emerged from the image. We have pictographic writing where writing still has an inner relationship with the things that the human being perceives; then writing becomes more abstract and intellectualized. It becomes a mere sign. And today's writing has little more in what it presents to the immediate view of the experience that one can have when one considers pictographic writing in its relationship to the environment.

Now, in terms of writing, we civilized people are actually at an impasse. We started from the experiential relationship of the human being to the external senses in picture writing and arrived at prosaic, inartistic, abstract writing, and there is something tortured and unnatural about wanting to go back – anyone who has tried it themselves can judge for themselves – about wanting to go back to some kind of artistry in today's form of writing.

But with regard to language, we are not at an impasse. We can grasp the word, the phoneme, the sentence, in short, everything that is expressed through spoken language, in such a way that what is otherwise expressed through phonetic language is silently expressed in the movement of the whole person. I would say that something flows into speech that is like subconscious movement, like subconscious feeling. But the more language is transformed by the era of civilization, by communication, the less one feels the whole person resonating and resonating with the things in language. And if we use what Goethe calls sensuous-supersensible observation to listen to the movements tendencies of the larynx and all the organs involved in the production of speech, we begin to understand what movements are contained in the larynx and its neighboring organs in the production of speech. And if we then transfer this to the human being as a whole, to his limbs, and to his outer spatial movements, then we arrive at the mute language of eurythmy, which is just as necessarily lawful as spoken language.

Therefore, on the one hand, the musical element that has been incorporated to some extent into the vocalizations - into the eurythmy and into the spoken language - can be brought out more fully through the accompaniment of the recitation, and on the other hand, through the accompaniment with the recitation, one can, we say, bring out more fully what is expressed in the silent language of the eurythmy. So you see on the stage the silent language of eurythmy, which, as I said, is not arbitrary, but a lawful expression of vocalization and consonantization, of sentence formation, of grammar. But it is the case that it does not arise through intellectual understanding, but comes forth from the impulsive will element of the human being, so that one asserts the I in the means of expression itself, one has an expression of the whole human being in eurythmy.

This becomes understandable – or at least one is helped in understanding by the musical accompaniment, the recitation. Recitation, however, must be practised somewhat differently today than usual. Today, recitation is actually prosaic; eurythmy, which goes back to what underlies the actual artistic, to rhythm, to the beat, to the emphasis of the actual artistic, beat, rhythm, in contrast to the mere prosaic expression in recitation, would not tolerate this.

In this way, eurythmy attempts to create a kind of language that is not abstract, that is, that does not contain the unartistic, but that can be shaped into artistic effects precisely because it does not yet contain thought, and thus contains only the artistic.

At the same time, this eurythmy has another side, an essential pedagogical-hygienic side for children. Ordinary gymnastics for children can be imbued with soul. Whereas gymnastics is simply derived from the laws of the human body, and is based on physiology, children's eurythmy — a sample of which you will see after the break in the second part of our program — is intended to create soul-inspired movement. This will be recognized one day, when we think about these things more objectively: that through this soul-filled exercise, which is also artistic, the will of the child is strengthened at the moment of life when it needs to be strengthened, if it is not to experience a weakening throughout its whole life.

Therefore, on the one hand, eurythmy is to be understood as an art, but on the other hand, its important educational and pedagogical-didactic side must be taken into account at the same time. This evening we would like to present something from this side, where poetry itself is felt and viewed in a eurythmic way, as in the piece that will be performed for you today, where we try to capture the processes of the world in images that are otherwise only grasped through abstract concepts. Here eurythmy shows itself to be a particularly useful instrument for artistic expression. And only then will we understand how necessary it will gradually become for the human understanding of the world to grasp the whole of nature and also the supersensible in images, not in abstract concepts. One can philosophize at length, saying that yes, the human being must think discursively, the human being must analyze, the human being must explore the laws of nature in logical abstract judgment. Nature eludes this kind of investigation! We cannot get close to nature. We only believe that we can get close to nature with today's knowledge of nature; in truth, the more we satisfy this modern abstract drive for knowledge, which has triumphed in natural science, the more we distance ourselves from nature. Nature can only be understood if we grasp it pictorially, as is generally the case with cosmic processes. But then we see how man is a true expression of such a pictorial grasp of nature and the supersensible.

This really helps us to understand Goetheanism again, which sometimes expresses itself in very short sentences in Goethe, as when Goethe says: “To whom nature reveals her secret, feels the deepest longing for her worthy interpreter, art.” And for Goethe, art was in a sense a means of knowledge, not a physical-prosaic one, but an artistic means of knowledge. In this way, Goetheanism will also take such things into account as we train eurythmy. But the way we can present it to you today is just a first attempt, a beginning.

But one can also be convinced that it is based on the genuine sources of the most artistic instrument, the human being itself, that it will either be further developed by us or by others in the future, and that then, in fact, the older art forms, which, if I may say so, are already running in well-worn tracks, will be joined by a fully-fledged new art in this eurythmy, which may still be met with suspicion today. We ourselves are our own harshest critics; we know that what we are able to give today is only a beginning, but we also know that it can be perfected and that one day it will be truly recognized as a fully-fledged art form that can stand alongside other, older art forms.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to begin today, as I always do before these eurythmy performances, with a few words about the significance of the eurythmic art. We have here an attempt at this eurythmic art, a beginning, one might say, of an attempt at a kind of silent language. You will see this silent language performed on stage in movements that are carried out by the human limbs - also through movements of the whole person in space - or through the alternating movements, through the alternating positions of personalities in groups and the like.

All of this could initially be seen as a mere art of gestures, where an attempt is made to express a poetic content, which is the underlying basis and is also recited during the performance, or to express a musical piece, which can also be the basis of the presentation and which is played or sung at the same time – it could look as if movement is used to add gestures or a certain facial expression to the poetic, literal or musical content that forms the leitmotif. It is not so, but with this eurythmic art, we are in fact trying to open up a new source of art and also to bring very special means of artistic expression. Here, the source is the human being itself. And the source opens up through a special training of what one can call in the sense of Goetheanism: the striving for the sensual-supernatural element in art.

We see, my dear attendees, today the most diverse efforts to get out of the old traditional art forms, to get out of the old artistic language, and to find something new as a means of artistic expression. We see this in the fields of sculpture, painting, and also in the field of poetry; in the field of music it has been noticeable for a long time and so on.

It is always the case, when a certain period of time has been fulfilled, that the forms for the art of this time become too intellectual. What is still intuitive and instinctive at the beginning of an artistic epoch, what arises from the most elementary emotions of the human being, is studied in the course of time, analyzed by the human intellect, and becomes artistic technique, but one that is imbued with intellect. And then it increasingly appears as imitation art, as something that a young generation will then use [reject].

Today, we see attempts to arrive at a new artistic formal language, particularly in Impressionism and Expressionism. However, despite the fact that nothing should be said against some extraordinarily significant beginnings in this direction, it must also be said that the most serious artists and connoisseurs in this field are somewhat dissatisfied. Take the field of painting, for example. It is not possible to merely conjure up certain elementary experiences - I would say half-servants of human nature, which are to be brought onto the canvas - and really express them properly in colors and lines. The special difficulty that exists in every art is that the intellectual element has a deadening, diluting effect on everything artistic to the extent that thoughts, ideas, and the intellectual in general enter into the artistic. The artistic is killed. This is why Goethe believed that the expression 'sensual-supersensory' is particularly appropriate for the artistic. There must be something immediate that can serve as a means of expression in the external world. But the moment any idea is impressed upon this means of expression, artistic enjoyment ceases. And I have the feeling that it is easiest to achieve something sensual and supersensual when one uses the human being himself as a tool for artistic expression.

But for this to happen, human speech must also be studied in a sensual and supersensible way. When a person makes himself audible, not only in poetry but also, for example, in song, through his vocal organs, through his speech organs, then the expression of these speech organs is always based on movements whose tendencies can be examined if one has the opportunity to rise above mere sensory observation through hearing and penetrate into that which is not directly heard but which underlies it as a movement, a movement of the larynx, a movement of the other organs involved in speaking or singing. The soul of human speech is based on the fact that the human being localizes his muscular system on the larynx and can use it to produce movements that then become speech simply through their peculiarity. These movements can be studied sensually and supersensibly. One must study the large course of what is organized by the larynx and the other speech organs into vibrations in the air, or, I should say, into the separation of many small vibrating movements. One must intuitively grasp the underlying tendencies of the movements.

Then what can be studied, what underlies speech in a completely lawful way, can be transferred to the whole human being, to the movement of all his limbs. So that in eurythmy, through such a transference, you can, as it were, make the whole human being function on the stage like a human larynx, I would say. One could say: if the movements that are performed for vowels, consonants, sentence contexts, for the inner character, for the structure of the sentence, to which these movements correspond, were not the whole human being, but if what one sees were to be placed directly into the larynx, then nothing else would be expressed in the larynx than what you hear as the accompanying recitation.

However, this does not make the art of eurythmy something arbitrary, but something as internally lawful as the melodic or harmonic element in music is internally lawful. If something is initially based on gestures or facial expressions, then it is something that has not yet been overcome, [because] something as lawful as in music itself lives in eurythmy. And in what is heard at the same time, there is something like a harmonic element in music. [But this is only possible if] one also goes back to what is actually poetic in poetry. Poetry is not an art through its literal content, in a sense through the prosaic that underlies it, but poetry is poetry through rhythm, through beat, through everything that is incorporated into the literal content as form.

This is what is expressed through eurythmy. But it must also be expressed in the recitation that accompanies the eurythmy. Therefore, in order to be able to accompany the eurythmy with recitation, we must go back to the good old forms of recitation, which are avoided today precisely where one believes one is reciting well: to the rhythmic, to the not on the emphasis of the prose content, on which so much emphasis is placed today in what, especially in our very unartistic time, is called good recitation. Here too, it must be borne in mind that this recourse to eurythmy for a new artistic element makes very special demands on the art of recitation. Through the fact that this eurythmy attempts to impress upon the human being himself that which is otherwise impressed upon him through hearing in speech, the human being himself becomes the means of sensory expression of art. And because the movements are not intellectually shaped into gestures, but because the movements unfold in such a way that they are natural to the human being, like the movements of the larynx itself, the mere abstract thought, the intellectual, is bypassed and one sees directly for the artistic impression on the stage in the silent language of eurythmy something sensual and supersensory: the soul-filled movements of the human being.

You will therefore see that this eurythmic art is particularly suitable for the experiment I have tried to carry out in my 'mystery dramas', where the spiritual itself is to be expressed in many places. What is actually meant here will, of course, be misunderstood for a long time yet, because people do not yet realize that nature and thus man, through his intellect, is being forced into abstract natural laws. We will just have to learn to understand nature in line with what Goethe means when he says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit. To do this, he rises to the challenge by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking number, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art. Thus man creates within himself a new, significant summit and then rises to produce the work of art.

What must this work of art be like? We can only imagine it as an ideal. Perhaps we may say that when the human being regards himself with his whole organism as a tool, as the instrument for producing this work of art, it is indeed the case that, through the fact that this eurythmy appears in this particular form, something is present that perhaps – I am not saying that it is already this ideal art – but that it provides something from which one can see how one must create forms in order to arrive at the sensual-supersensible.

That is the essential thing: neither the sensual nor the supersensible alone, but the sensual-supersensible – the sensual-supersensible that appears to us as if the forms of the idea or of the ideational had already lived in us, and that appears to us with such vividness that we find the idea itself as something taking place in the sensory world. To bring the idea to the sensual, or to present the sensual world in the form of the idea: this is what can be brought about most vividly, precisely through this particular art form of eurythmy.

But I also ask you today to be lenient with what we can bring to you today, because, as I said, we are only just beginning. Those of you who have attended our performances more often may have noticed how we have been trying to make progress recently, but it must continue to happen more and more. Either we or others will be able to develop what is in its infancy today to a greater perfection. Be assured, my dear audience, that with eurythmy a beginning has been made to something that will surely one day be able to stand alongside other, older art forms as a complete art.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

As usual, I would like to say a few words before the eurythmy performances today about the way in which we are trying, within this eurythmic art, to seek first of all a kind of new artistic form, to seek new means of expression, and then, in a certain way, to go back to the source of artistic activity in human nature itself.

On this stage you will see movements of the limbs and of the whole human being in space, changing movements and changing positions of people in groups. All of this is meant to be a kind of silent language. But not a mute language that consists of random gestures, so that one would have to search for gestures to accompany the poetry that is recited at the same time, or for the song-like, musical elements. Nor are random gestures sought here for what is to be expressed, just as the sound of speech itself or the word is something that is added “by chance” to the meaning, as it is something that connects itself through the human organization with the meaning that the sound is to express.

To create such art, it was truly necessary to make use of what, according to Goethe, can be called sensuous-suprasensuous intuition.

When we follow human speech, we first turn our attention to the spoken sound or the sequence of sounds. We do not become aware – this is inherent in the whole organization of language – of the fact that our organs, which have something to do with the production of speech, carry out movements. These movements are, of course, small rhythmic movements, but they are based on movement tendencies. Those who are able to follow speech in a certain sense can really see these movement tendencies. They can get a picture of the movement tendencies present in the larynx and its neighboring organs, while speech sounds phonetically to us.

What we observe in speech, whether it is a single organ or a system of organs at work during speech, can be applied to the human organism as a whole. However, as I will explain in a moment, this is not as simple as it may seem, but requires a certain metamorphic transformation. Just as Goethe arrived at his view of metamorphosis as that which must underlie a true organicity, so too must we strive for such a view of human functions that allows us to recognize how a single group of functions — that is, underlying speech movement — can be connected to a possible movement of the whole person, just as Goethe saw the whole plant only as a more complicated, metamorphosed leaf or petal [or] also as stamens. This view, which Goethe applied only to the morphological, can be extended to the functional; it can be permeated artistically. But just as one can follow the larynx's main tendency, in that it comes into direct contact with the external air when speaking and is transformed into small rhythmic movements, , another element comes more to the fore in this transmission of the movement of the sounds to the whole person than it comes to the fore in the movement of the sounds, namely the element of will, also the element of willing feeling.

In our language, thought, imagination, and will, feeling, willing feeling, and feeling will all flow into each other. We do not need to distinguish these things, because in fact only the imagination and the will are actually juxtaposed. And in the artistic contemplation, we always have to fight, I would even say, against too much of what is the perception, what is the idea, flowing into the artwork in the direct perception of the image – but not in the image as we otherwise perceive it in nature, but rather in the spiritualized image. That is what should actually work in the perception and creation of art.

Now, when we look at nature in ordinary life or even in science, we transform the image through thought into what it then is as a spiritualized image. In this way, we lift it out of the sphere of the merely artistic. In the artistic, the image should have an immediate spiritual effect. In a sense, as an image it should already affect us in the same way that thought otherwise affects us. But as soon as thought affects us as thought, the artistic aspect ceases, the artistic is paralyzed, and in our language there is actually less and less possibility for artistic expression – even in poetry – as civilization advances. It becomes more and more conventional as a spoken language, it becomes a form of expression for that which we want to present in an abstract, intellectual way. As a result, our poetry actually becomes impoverished in terms of its means of expression. But basically, there is only so much that is truly artistic in poetry, as there is music on the one hand or imagery on the other.

Pictorial, plastic is meant here in such a way that, by listening to language, to poetically shaped language, one immediately perceives a kind of image in sound as well. We then rid the poem of everything that flows from the thought into the poem when we begin, as we usually begin, to transfer the tendencies of movement that the larynx and its neighboring organs carry out to the whole person. By undertaking this metamorphosis of the function of speech and now looking at the whole human being – of course it cannot come to phonation because we are considering the macrocosmic movements, the movement tendencies instead of the microcosm – that which we extract from the spoken word is the will element, that will element that is bound to the whole human being. Therefore, if the human being as a whole appears, so to speak, like a larynx in lively motion, we have expressed that, the form of expression given by the human being himself.

But at the same time, we also have the opportunity to perceive what confronts us in the human being as an image, without philosophizing about it, by first spiritualizing it. The spiritualized image arises from the fact that the human being, who is spiritualized in his movement, becomes this image, so that we can have the spiritualized image directly in our perception. Through this inspired image, which can become a means of expression in poetry in an equally natural way through a silent language, we have actually achieved much of what art must strive for: to create the inspired image without having to take the detour through the intellect, through thinking, which has a deadening effect on art.

Of course, the recitation that accompanies the eurythmy must then take care to extract precisely what is actually artistic, not the prose content of the poem. Today, because we live in an unartistic time, reciters actually attach the greatest importance to the prose content, to the convention of the literal. The artistic person does not feel the essence in this emphasis on the literal of the poetry, but in the emphasis on the rhythms, the cadences, the musical or even the pictorial-sculptural, formative. Therefore, recitation, in so far as it is to accompany eurythmy, must return to the good old forms of recitation, to which Goethe naturally felt himself bound. He, who felt artistically, rehearsed his 'Iphigenia' with his artistic personnel, like a conductor with the baton in his hand, with an eye to form rather than content. And Schiller always had, before he had the literal content in his soul – at least with many of his poems – an indeterminate melodious connection that hummed within him, and then he sought out the literal text, the content.

If you look at the one hand at what is brought forth from the human being as a mute language, just as arbitrarily as the spoken language, you will find it accompanied on the other hand by the music. It is only a different side of what appears in these two arts. Furthermore, I believe that one can only create something that actually presents itself as a kind of new art form alongside our older art forms in eurythmy.

When we turn to the visual arts, we need, as it were, to first calm the things that are moving within us. The musical and the poetic, which are indeed moving, must work at the same time with such a strong power of internalization that the external sensory impression often recedes. Even in purely musical, absolutely musical works, the external sensory impression is juxtaposed with an internalization. But it is precisely because music, when it appears as pure music, can still speak to the pure senses that it retains the purely artistic. By contrast, we do not find what I would call plastic movement in those areas of art that are considered traditional. Sculpture that is artistically formed and does not depend on standing simply in repose, in form, in calm shape-shaping, but sculpture that can take human movement as its starting point: this simultaneously becomes eurythmy, which is based on listening to the movement tendencies of the human speech organs and applying them to the whole human being.

You will see from the experiment that I have just carried out, with the presentation of what underlies the world spiritually, which is then connected with the essence of the human being - which is already conceived poetically in such a way that one counts on there being more in reality than is provided by the mere, abstract laws of nature formulated in intellectual form — that this can most easily be represented in eurythmy.

As with all eurythmy in the present day, one will probably have to encounter misunderstandings and hostility in our time because it is simply believed today that what essentially underlies things must be able to be grasped in an intellectual form. But nature creates in images, and therefore we can only approach nature in its actual creation and weaving of the world if we engage with images. And so what Goethe meant will come true when he said: “To whom nature reveals its secret, longs for its most worthy interpreter, art.

For Goethe, art was something that combined – I would say in continuous metamorphosis – with mere scientific knowledge. So that one might truly find the truest truth in the moment when the whole human being is set in motion, in lawful motion, which is at the same time the expression as is speech itself, that one might find the truest truth in the Goethean saying: in the artistic one has a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never be revealed without this artistic manifestation.

That is one side, the artistic side, which is initially more important for the outside world. However, it should be noted that, beyond the artistic aspect, there is also an important hygienic-therapeutic aspect to this eurythmy, the soul-inspired movement. And that this soul-inspired movement has also been added for children, in their education, so that this soul-inspired movement is added to gymnastics, which is actually based solely on the physiological view of the human being. When we are able to judge more impartially, we will recognize that gymnastics, while it makes the muscles strong, does not at the same time help to bring the initiative out of the soul and to shape the will. Therefore, I believe that once this eurythmy can be introduced into the teaching plans, as we have already done at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which is based on these important educational principles, it will turn out that the children will take with them into life a very essential, a certain culture of the will, the cultivation of which is so important in the present day: a soul-inspired culture of the will, a culture of the will that is not merely a child of the physiological view of the human being, but a child of the psychological view of the human being.

That is why we will also show you something done only by children after the break, so to speak also a sample of children's eurythmy. But please be aware that our performances must still be viewed with leniency. We are our own harshest critics in these early days, because it is only a beginning. It is an experiment. But just as those of our esteemed audience who have been here before will probably be able to see that we have tried hard and really improved from month to month, we will continue to try to turn this beginning into something more complete. And we can be convinced that although we are still at the very beginning of this eurythmic art, it is capable of such perfection that it will be able to present itself as a young art alongside the older arts - as a fully-fledged art alongside other fully-fledged art forms.

“However” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Epirrhema“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Antepirrhema” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (52.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (1.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Arielszene“ (Charming Area, ‘Faust II’) by J. W. v. Goethe with musical accompaniment by Jan Stuten
“The Swallows” by Christian Morgenstern
Saying from the soul calendar (2.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the soul calendar (3.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Hymn to Nature“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Narrative of an Antique Gem” by J. W. v. Goethe
“You revile my poetry“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“One thing after another” by J. W. v. Goethe
“To the originals” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Life is a game of tag“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Barker” by J. W. v. Goethe
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten

But now it can no longer be denied that all that appears in these fields today as a striving for a new artistic formal language, that most of it still leaves us unsatisfied, simply because, for example, what one wants to express in a new way cannot be achieved with a brush and paint today. Sculpture is equally unsuccessful in expressing what is intended through its forms. If I were to use a word for what many people today may be striving for more or less unconsciously, I would use Goethe's word for the sensual-supersensory. Because in art it is indeed the case that the means of expression must be used to bring the sensual to representation. For that which cannot be perceived by the senses, which can only be grasped in an idea, cannot be considered artistic in any way, not even in terms of an external sign. Therefore, everything symbolic is inartistic, and everything allegorical is inartistic. The artistic must present itself to people in a sensory way, but at the same time, the sensory must appear as supersensory. One must receive such an impression from the sensual as one otherwise only receives from the supersensible. Schiller, in a magnificent way that has not yet been appreciated, expressed this view, which is also that of Goetheanism, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of the Human Race.

Now, if we start from the language of man, then in language there flow together, firstly, the phonetic element, produced by a certain part of the human body organization, with the mental element, which in poetry is permeated by the phonetic element; in song less so, but still the human soul also strives for expression through song and music. And just as there is a sensual element here, so it is true that especially in poetry, by having to use language, the more advanced a language is, the more difficult it becomes to create poetic and artistic expressions , simply because the civilized languages gradually approach the conceptual element, also approach the conventional element – they become lingua franca, they serve human social coexistence and so on, and so on. The more language becomes a means of expression for social coexistence, the more it becomes a means of expression for thoughts, the less it is suitable for the revelation of the truly poetic.

The truly poetic is that which one experiences in one's soul either with the character of the musical, or with the character of the plastic-pictorial. When thought intrudes – as it always does in art – when thought intrudes, the rhythm, the meter, the form that is to be expressed in poetry becomes overgrown with thought. And then a piece of poetry will no longer have an effect through the purely artistic from the outset. As paradoxical as it sounds, ladies and gentlemen, it must be said that the essential artistic quality of a piece of poetry can actually be felt, felt quite artistically, when it is presented in a language that one does not understand literally, that one does not even master. Because the artistic element is not found in the literal content. Of course, you need it in the literal content to have a kind of ladder to climb up in a poetic way.

But it was not entirely foolish, even in the time when, about a century ago, people were really striving again, especially in Central Europe, to really feel the artistic in poetry, it was not at all foolish for people to sit down together and listen to beautiful poems in languages they did not know, just absorbing intonation, rhythm, meter and so on – in other words, the formative, pictorial, musical element of language. But it is precisely that which underlies the linguistic as the actual artistic that can be brought out of poetry through this silent language, which we are striving for here with eurythmy and which does not consist of arbitrary gestures invented to what is musically based, but is based on a careful study of what happens in the separate organs of the larynx, the palate, and so on when speaking. Of course, the small tremors that are transmitted to the air and then form the basis of tone hearing cannot be expressed in any other way than through speech itself; but the tendencies that lie within, the tendencies of movement, can be transferred to the whole person according to the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis.

You can let the person move in his arms or as a whole body or even groups of people in their mutual interrelations in such a way that the movements represent the movement tendencies that otherwise only come to expression in the speech organ. $o becomes on the stage here in front of you the whole human being to the larynx. Nothing is arbitrary. Just as one can hear oh or oh wherever speech is spoken, and as one can perform nothing but the lawful movements of the larynx instead of o or /h], one can essentially perform nothing but the lawful movements of the larynx here when performing something else – of course one can also shape the sound and so on individually with speech – but essentially, no other movements can be performed than those movements that are read from the speech sounds and transferred to the whole person, so that even if the same thing is represented eurythmically in two different places, the individual difference cannot be greater than if, for example, two different pianists perform the same sonata in their own individual way.

Now eurythmy is actually an art that uses the whole human being as a means of expression, that is, it creates through the formal language of the whole human organization and can thus advance to the very sources of the sensual and supersensible. For we have the human being before us as the most perfect sensual form, and we have speech in such a way before us that the soul is expressed everywhere. By taking the soul as our basis, you will see this person, or groups of people, on stage, accompanied by recitation or music, which are, after all, only a different expression of the same thing, an expression in a different form.

However, the art of recitation must return to what it actually was in more artistic times than our own. In our time, great importance is attached to emphasising the content and stressing the literal meaning when reciting. This is called “introspection” in recitation. This is a deviation from the actual artistry of recitation, which must be based on meter, on musicality, on pictorial imagery. We must return to this ancient art of recitation, which Goethe, for example, used when he rehearsed his “Iphigenia” like a conductor with a baton in his hand – focusing on intonation, iambs, and so on.

In the first part of today's program, you will see a performance of the first scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust” with the help of eurythmy. This first scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust” has been misunderstood many times. It was objected that Goethe had made the transition from the first part of Faust to the second part far too easy for himself. Faust has incurred a heavy guilt, has brought people into the deepest misfortune, must have infinitely heavy pangs of conscience. And so he leaves us, if I may say so, in the first part. Now he stands before us again. He is supposed to continue on his path through life. The way Goethe presents it, it is not actually meant symbolically, but rather, it is meant that, indeed, when a person finds himself in such a terrible situation as Faust in this case, he must heal from within. This healing from within cannot, of course, be presented in any other way than by referring to the relationship between the human being and the spiritual world. It is a complete misunderstanding when some people have said in response to this first scene in the second part of Goethe's Faust: Yes, Goethe made things easy for himself. All you have to do is take a refreshing morning walk towards the rising sun after you have incurred a serious guilt, and you are restored to humanity. This is not, however, what is meant by this first scene of the second part of Faust; rather, what is meant by this scene is that a person, when he has so thoroughly ruined his conscience, can actually only recover it through a special connection to the spiritual world.

Of course, this can only be portrayed by depicting the spiritual world itself and its effect on the human being. This is what Goethe tried to do. But something like the penetration of the spiritual world into the sensual world can be well portrayed in eurythmy. And wherever the supersensible world must enter into human life in the dramatic [poetry] — otherwise we present lyric poetry, and you will also see today how we will present lyric poetry — but in the dramatic world, the eurythmic art is particularly suitable. I have not yet succeeded in finding a corresponding eurythmic form for the rest of the drama, but I am working on it and it must be found. It must also be possible to present the dramatic process as the actual artistic element of the dramatic and the tragic in eurythmy.

Until now, when we have attempted such dramatic representations, we have always presented that which simply depicts human life in the physical world in the same way as it is otherwise presented on stage. We depict the intrusion of the supersensible by using eurythmy, as you will see today. But we will also succeed in achieving something for the inner structure of the drama, for the plasticity and musicality of the dramatic action itself, as the eurythmic art develops. For we are still in the early stages of this eurythmic art. I ask you to bear this in mind today. We certainly do not imagine that we are already offering something complete; but those honored spectators who may have been here before and saw something months ago will notice how we have tried in recent months — namely, by forms over larger sentence structures over the construction of a poem, to include the inner form of poetry in the spatial form of movement - how we have in turn made progress in this eurythmic art as a result.

We should always strive to move forward. But then it is our conviction, however strict critics we are in relation to it, what we can already offer, that either through us, probably through others, this eurythmic art, when it is further developed, will become something that can actually lead the way into the other arts, for example into painting: one tries to express the inner life of the human being with color. Here a path is opened up where the human being is used as a means of expression, as a tool. The human being is the most perfect tool that can be developed in art.

Therefore, this eurythmic art will come so far that it will be able to present itself as a fully-fledged art alongside its other, older sisters, who, after all, have the advantage of age over it. But it has, in my opinion, the advantage over the other, older arts that it can really make use of everything that is inherent in the human organization itself as a means of expression. And it is still true what Goethe said: that when “man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit. To do this, he rises to the challenge by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally

to the production of the work of art.” And how can order, measure, harmony and meaning not best be combined in rhythm and tact, to give, as it were, moving sculpture and silent music, silent poetry, when one uses man himself as a tool for artistic formation? From this point of view, I ask you to accept with indulgence what is, however, only in its infancy, but is heading towards perfection, even in its present form.

There will now be a short break. After the break, the program will include Goethe's “Hymn to Nature.” Goethe's prose hymn “To Nature” is like a prefiguration of his worldview. One could say that Goethe conceived of it around the beginning of the 1780s. And it came about in the following way – I tried to describe the entire genesis in the seventh volume of the journal of the Goethe Society many years ago – it came about in the following way: Goethe did not write it down immediately, but he had the thoughts in his soul and discussed them with the Swiss Tobler, who was then living in Weimar. Apparently, while walking with Tobler in the open air, Goethe spoke this prose hymn, and it can be found in Tobler's writing in the Tiefurter Journal in Weimar, which still exists today. Tobler then wrote it down directly from the conversation. I tried to prove that this is the genesis. As I said, you will find a discussion of it in the seventh volume of the writings of the Goethe Society. And I could not be shaken in this recognition of the genesis by anything, not even by what has been written here recently. Goethe himself acknowledged that he proceeded from what he wrote in this prose hymn by then developing everything that is contained in his metamorphosis and so on. And he called everything that came later a kind of comparative of his world view, in contrast to the positive. So we can say that this prose hymn contains everything that is then met by us in the most highly metamorphosed form as the Goethean world view.

In this second part, then, we shall have something else to present besides this prose hymn by Goethe, namely Goethe's – including some in which, as I believe, the truly magnificent humor of Goethe's world view, in which everything is truly experienced with the deepest soul, can reveal itself.

Dear attendees,
As always, I would like to take the liberty of saying a few introductory words about our eurythmic art before these rehearsals. We are not dealing here with something that is already complete, but with the beginning of a new kind of art, so to speak, with an attempt to work artistically with the most perfect tools that one can have for art in general – with the human being himself and the laws of his organization. It is a matter of going back to the artistic sources in a very special way in order to also take into account those aspirations that are so often encountered today, especially in artistic circles – the aspirations to take elements from old art forms, an old formal language in art, which has certainly been taken to the highest level. But it is also recognized by many that this formal language must be overcome today. We see, however, how attempts are being made, whether in painting, sculpture or music, to follow the most diverse artistic paths, but also how much of what is being attempted today out of completely honest intentions can be categorized under the name of expressionism, futurism, as it were, in broader circles. [Lückes]

Now, with eurythmy, something is to be created that - like everything here with us - is born out of a truly Goethean worldview and artistic attitude, out of real Goetheanism. I need only point to a single word used by Goethe, and it is the one word that, I would say, characterizes the whole essence of artistic creation and artistic urge. It is the concept, the word sensual-supersensible [contemplation]. Art must certainly strive to work through the sense image or through the audible sense, and not only must that which is directly sensuous work in art, but the supersensuous must one day speak through the sense, hence Goethe's word for everything artistic can be used: “sensual-supernatural”. The source of the sensual and the supersensible is what this eurythmic art seeks to rediscover in its originality, and in the following way: you will see on the stage how the individual performers express movements of their limbs, how movements are performed by the whole person, how movements are performed by groups of people. These movements could very easily be mistaken for arbitrary gestures, for an arbitrary mimicry that has been invented in addition to what is encountered musically on the one hand and rhetorically on the other. But there is nothing arbitrary in our eurythmic art. It has really come about through careful study of human speech and singing itself. To make it clear how people do this, I would like to refer to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, the principle by which Goethe dared to bring something into the science of the living, into the knowledge of the living, whereby one can really come closer to understanding it. Despite all efforts, Goethe's theory of metamorphosis is still far too little appreciated today, even in scholarly and artistic circles. It looks simple, but there is a lot in the impulse that Goethe describes, when he says: If I look at a plant, then every single leaf, whether it sits [in a simpler form] deep down on the stem or sits in a complicated way on a normal part of the stem, is thought to have emerged directly from the other through a metamorphosis. amorphous, to think that each individual leaf, whether it is [of a simpler form] and sits low down on the stem or is intricately arranged at a normal point on the stem, has emerged directly from the other, but also that the colored petal or even the stamen and pistil are only metamorphosed, transformed leaves and the whole plant is a complete [leaf], just as each individual leaf is a simplified whole plant.

But this is not the only way in which we can perceive the form of living things; we can also perceive the [movement] of living things in this way.

When a person speaks, their larynx and the neighboring organs of the larynx move.

Therefore, there is no arbitrariness to be found in such a representation, but rather, when two or three people at completely different times and in completely different places perform the same eurythmy, the different interpretations are unavoidable, just as when two pianists play the same sonata at two different places or at different times. In eurythmy, everything is built up in accordance with inner laws, like a series of successive movements of music in motion: just as the musical lives in the laws of melody and harmony, so this mute language expresses itself fully and lives in the moving forms. Of course, today we have to accompany what is being presented eurythmically – at least for a time – although we also present silent forms that one only has to feel. We have to do it accompanied by recitation and by the musical element. But these are only different expressive powers of one and the same thing. Therefore, you will particularly appreciate, when reciting, how we have to go back to the good old forms of recitation here, which have more or less already been lost to an unartistic world like ours. I would like to remind you of this, which is an indication of what is actually artistic in poetry. It is not what the literal text says. For example, Goethe himself rehearsed his “Iphigenia” with a baton, like a conductor.

Not on what one particularly looks for today when reciting, when /unleserliches Wort] declaiming, that the prose content comes out with the so-called correct internal emphasis, but that rhythm, tact, that the formal impression, that the, so the actual artistic, comes out in the correct manner. The age of romanticism, when, for example, Rückert and his friends devoted themselves to poetry, this time had much more artistic sensibility for [many] than today. People would sit together and also listen to poems in languages they didn't understand; even if it sounds paradoxical to people today, they actually took pleasure in the tone, the sound, the vivid imagery and the musicality – that is, in the actual artistic quality of the poetry. And Schiller always had a kind of general melody in his soul first, only then did he grasp the words, at least in the case of a large number of his important poems. Today, the literal, the prose content, is regarded as the most essential thing in poetry. In this case, we do not have to strive for the intellectual element to be expressed through our silent language of eurythmy; in the accompanying recitation, we listeners only have to grasp the rhythmic, the formative, the pictorial. Therefore, the art of recitation itself will have to undergo a reform by acting as a companion to the eurythmic.

You will see various units of eurhythmicized [illegible word]. I would like to draw particular attention to the fact that today's performance attempts to present a scene from Goethe, the first scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust”. While we have otherwise shown lyrical or epic representations, [...] [illegible word] we venture to present art dramatically. Now, I think that is something that I have not yet succeeded in doing, that eurythmic forms still arise that are suitable for the actual dramatic structure, for dramatic composition. The eurythmic art is just at the beginning - it will be perfected over time.

But we have repeatedly tried with Goethe's “Faust” to use what we already have in eurythmy in such a way that where the poetry touches on the inner law of development, where the spiritual-supersensory in a dramatic poetry, in any drama, appears, we call on eurythmy for help. All scenes that take place, I might say, in the physical world, we have them presented like other scenes in the theater, but what points to the supersensible world is particularly suited to eurythmic presentation. You will see this in this first picture from the second part of Goethe's “Faust”. It is the one scene in which Goethe wanted to express himself by leading from the sensual into the supersensual. Faust has already lived through his life to the point that is presented to us at the end of the first part as a person who has incurred the most serious guilt. [...] [unclear passage, see notes]

What must come to someone who is so burdened with guilt is the intrusion of the spiritual world and [a] healing from the spiritual world. This is what is needed, not a symbolic or allegorical representation, which would be inartistic. Goethe did not do that either, but he did depict what it is to have the supersensible world intrude in this Ariel scene with the elves, how the human being can strive for something new – even if they cannot thereby eradicate the guilt within them – when they come into right contact with the supersensible world. This is particularly suitable for eurythmic performances. Goethe wanted the second part of his “Faust” to be particularly suitable for the stage - and as far as the supersensory is concerned, if the eurythmic means of artistic expression had already existed in his time, he would undoubtedly have these [eurythmic means of artistic expression] /illegible passage] and would have presented that which otherwise, when the second part of “Faust” is presented on stage, always remains unsatisfactory.

Eurythmy really brings out the full inwardness of the [illegible word], while Goethe [gap:] meant: In something like? [illegible word] the second [part] of “Faust” I can with [illegible word] this first scene, which we are presenting here today in the first part before the break. So even the esteemed audience who have been here before will see how we are endeavoring to arrive at a [--] [unreadable passage] mode of presentation. We can say that we have made a great deal of progress in the last few months, particularly in the development of the forms of presentation. But we are well aware that the whole of eurythmic art is only at the beginning of its development and we are therefore convinced, although the strictest criticism comes from ourselves, that there is still room for improvement in this eurythmy. perfection [illegible word] [in] this eurythmy, that others or we ourselves, without [illegible word] [space], will still bring it to [a] higher form.

It is precisely this eurythmic art that shows how the human being, when used as a means of expression, can itself be the most perfect expression. It is Goethe again who says: “When nature begins to reveal its manifest secret to him, he feels an irresistible longing for its most worthy interpreter, art.” And art, when it uses man himself as an instrument, satisfies that which Goethe says so beautifully in his artist book about Winckelmann: By placing man [at the summit of nature, he in turn produces a summit within himself, taking measure, harmony and meaning together and finally elevating himself to a work of art].

[The rest of the speech is very fragmentary and difficult to decipher, see notes.]

This performance was specially organized for visitors to the Swiss Trade Fair in Basel. Pastor H. Nidecker-Roos reported on it in the Christlicher Volksbote für Basel (No. 23/1920) on June 9, 1920: “On large posters, visitors to the Mustermesse in Basel were invited to visit the sanctuary of the so-called Anthroposophists, which was nearing completion, and to attend the subsequent ‘Eurhythmic Games’. [...] In front of the large main entrance, the approximately 300 visitors gathered around the striking figure of Dr. Steiner, who vividly resembled a priest. He had not only designed the building down to the last detail, but, to use his own words, had also “felt” it. The explanation of the building was at the same time an introduction to the main ideas of anthroposophy. [...] This was followed by the 'Eurhythmic Games' ('eurhythmic' can be translated as 'in well-measured time'). The idea is as follows: when speaking, the human larynx performs certain movements in which the will that is expressed in language is revealed. These movements are to be transferred to the whole body through a more serious form of individual dance, and so the whole person is to be a single expression of the spoken word. About thirty daughters, dressed in white and wearing colored veils, danced in this way, among other things, the first scene of the second part of Goethe's Faust, recited by Mrs. Steiner, as well as various poems by Goethe, Morgenstern and Steiner. The attempt was very successful in several numbers. There is nothing theatrical about the dances. They are serious attempts to express speech and soul processes through the movements of the body. The impression of the plays is one of seriousness, of a thoroughly spiritual nature.

Dear guests!

As I always do before these eurythmy performances, I would like to say a few words by way of introduction. These introductory words should never be used to comment on or explain the art of eurythmy in any real sense; that would be unartistic from the outset. For everything that is truly artistic must justify itself through itself before the act of beholding it, before the direct impression. But with eurythmy, as it is cultivated here, something new is being attempted, both in terms of artistic sources and in terms of artistic formal language, which cannot be directly compared with any neighboring arts, dance arts and the like. And so it is necessary to say something in advance about the sources and the particular way of expression of this eurythmic artistic experiment.

You will see, ladies and gentlemen, all kinds of movements performed on stage by individual people through their limbs – mainly through arms and hands, but also with the other physical limbs – and you will see movements of the individual human being in space, movements and mutual positioning of groups of people, and so on. These are not arbitrary gestures, invented in the moment out of some random fantasy. What underlies the eurythmic presentation always includes something poetic or musical, especially in what you encounter as eurythmy, where you are really dealing with a silent language, a language that uses only different means than our ordinary spoken language. Nothing arbitrary is expressed in it.

If I wish to characterize what has been attempted here, I may truly speak of Goetheanism, for everything that is connected with the spiritual current that is renewed by this structure is Goetheanism in its further development. For I need only recall a word that Goethe often used and that is particularly apt for the kind of artistic nature that underlies eurythmy: I would like to recall Goethe's words about sensuous-supernatural vision. It is through this sensuous-supernatural vision that the forms of movement of the mute language of eurythmy are gained.

You know that in our ordinary lives, even when enjoying poetry or song, we turn our attention to the tone and the sound of speech or song, and that we naturally have no idea of the movements that the larynx and the other speech organs carry out in order to produce speech. Now, the first thing to be considered is that, through sensory-supersensory observation, one can indeed obtain clear images of what takes place as movement while we turn our attention to the sound. But that is not what underlies eurythmy directly. Instead, all these movements, which are small vibrational movements that are transmitted through the special arrangement of the larynx and the other speech organs to the air, all these small vibrational movements are based on movement tendencies, and these movement tendencies can be observed. These tendencies, which are by no means arbitrary but are connected with our organism in a lawful way, in that it is a speech organism, these lawful movements can be transferred from the localized speech organ to the whole human being.

Goethe's principle of metamorphosis – although individual thinkers as early as the 19th century were trying to get to the bottom of this idea of metamorphosis, it is still not sufficiently incorporated into our intellectual life. For it will be seen that while it is still more or less accepted today as a formalistic principle, it will be seen how a true realization of the principle of metamorphosis opens up an understanding of the living world and how one can then transfer directly into the artistic that which underlies the principle of metamorphosis underlies the metamorphosis principle, which Goethe expressed not as a mere image but as a profound natural principle of formation, that the whole plant is an intricate leaf, that each plant is a transformed, a metamorphosed form of another form, the leaf form.

Transposing these forms into art shows that the whole person carries out movements that are otherwise movement tendencies in the individual organs of the larynx and its neighboring organs; in a sense, what you see on the stage would be the whole person as a moving larynx, I would say. Nothing arbitrary, nothing pantomimic, nothing mimetic - just as little as language itself is mimetic or pantomimic. Of course, in detail it passes over into one or other; but just as little as it is mimetic or pantomimic as a whole, so little is that which presents itself here as eurythmy something pantomimic or mimetic or consists in random gestures. Just as music, even in its melodious element, is a lawful succession of sounds and sound images, so here everything consists in the lawful succession of movements.

However, one must look a little into the artistic striving of the present, into the strange artistic search, if one wants to find what is being striven for with this eurythmy. In a sense, it goes back to the very origins of artistic creation, in that the human being himself - but the whole human being - is called upon as a means of artistic expression, a truly artistic means of expression. The human being himself becomes the artistic tool, and the movement possibilities inherent in him become the artistic language of form.

Today, because much that is artistic has become conventional, people are seeking to return to the original, elementary artistic sources. In poetry, there is a tendency – very, very much so, actually, can be felt already (?), and especially the civilized languages have to transfer the linguistic element more and more into the prosaic, we need the conventionality of language as a lingua franca, we need our other insights and so on – [there is a tendency] to express the forms of our technology. We need the conceptual and the ideational in language – precisely because language continues to develop, it becomes more and more the vehicle of ideas, thoughts, and conceptions, and in so doing, it distances itself from the artistic. For the death of everything artistic is the ideational, the conceptual. The artistic must be felt directly – admittedly as something profound, but not as something conceptual – from the image in human language. As it emerges from the larynx, the thought element and the will element unite out of the human being, but now, if I may use the trivial but apt expression, what shoots out of the whole human being is what the larynx accomplishes, there united as a will element with the thought element.

When we now turn to eurythmy, we leave the conceptual element, even of poetry, only as a companion. And in what is presented on stage, only the movements of the individual and the groups of people express the will element. The whole human being is transformed into movement. Anyone who has a sense of how our individuality must develop in language – I would say it becomes something rigid. We all feel, when we speak, if we have a sense for it, we all feel, when we speak, that we have to speak ourselves into a language that does not just come from our individuality. What arises individually from us must travel on the waves of the vernacular and so on. You feel that. You feel how the individual does not always want to be included. And anyone who does not feel that is not a whole person, at least not an artistic nature; because the artistic nature wants to shape the individual.

In a sense, by reproducing in eurythmy what is to be presented artistically, we stop what lives in the human being earlier than phonetic language can stop it. For example, Schiller always had a melody or an indefinite, nebulous sequence of melodies in mind first when writing his most significant poems, and only then did he add the actual words. This shows how he perceived the musical element, which is actually the artistic element of language. Or you could say: the plastic quality that lies behind speech is what is artistic.

Today, in an unartistic age, we actually place a great deal of value on the literal, including in poetry. In the age of German Romanticism, people liked to sit down together and listen to poems that had very precisely formed verses in languages that they did not understand, or at least found it difficult to understand, because in those days, in a more artistic age, people were more sensitive to rhythm, meter, to everything that is actually artistic in language. And Goethe was still there with the baton like a conductor when he rehearsed his “Iphigenia”, placing much more value on the correct speaking of the iambs and so on than on the literal content. These things are lost on us today.

In eurythmy, one seeks precisely this plastic and musical element behind the spoken word and thereby arrives precisely at the artistic element, thus going back, as it were, to the source of artistic creation, seeking particularly not into the abstract, into the abstract, watered-down, tonal, but seeks to enter into the rhythmic-tactile, into a way of speaking that we find more and more the more we penetrate to the original epochs of any language.

There is, of course, a great deal to be said about this. I will just add that, on the one hand, our eurythmy performances are accompanied by the musical element or, on the other hand, by the recitation element. And in the art of recitation, in particular, we are in the process – as you will hear – of once again moving away from what is cultivated in the art of recitation in today's unartistic age: the literal, the prosaic content. We are compelled to go back from the prosaic content and the literal to the rhythmic, the one that is actually artistic in poetry. And so it may well be said: there is so little arbitrariness in this eurythmic art that when two people or two groups of people present one and the same thing, the individual expression will not be more different than when a Beethoven sonata or something else is presented by two different performers.

You will see, dear attendees, that even drama can be supported by eurythmy today. You will find lyricism and epic, humor, satire and so on presented; everywhere, excluding pantomime, an attempt is made to recreate the content through artistic expression. Those who have visited us often will see how hard we have worked, especially in the last few months, to anticipate something in the formation of form.

Although we are our own harshest critics and we know that we may not even be at the beginning of an attempt today, but only at the beginning of an attempt, we still think that one day it will be possible - I have not yet been able to do so, but it is something we should work on. We should also be able to conquer the dramatic in an artistic eurythmic way, so that the dramatic forms themselves can one day be transformed into eurythmic forms. Until now, we have only tried to help the dramatic through the eurythmic in our recurring rehearsals of scenes from Goethe's “Faust” by depicting them in eurythmy. We do this wherever Goethe – as he does so often in his “Faust” and in his other poems, wherever he points to the supersensible in what takes place only in the physical realm — where he presents these scenes, which shows us the connection between the human soul and the supersensible, as is the case with this first scene from the second part of 'Faust', in which Goethe has indeed been attacked so often.

It would be interesting if I could explain – but there is not enough time – how much this particular scene from “Faust” has been misunderstood. It is indeed difficult to understand, when Faust – and this is the result of the first part – is standing there with the most severe pangs of conscience, apparently laden, with terrible guilt on his soul, he is supposed to live life, he is supposed to strive “to the highest existence forever”. Yes, it is necessary to point out in the most intimate way what can enter the human soul from the spiritual world and heal it. This is what Goethe attempted in this scene, which we want to present here with the help of eurythmy.

Until now, we have always presented the actual scenes taking place in physical life dramatically, as is usually the case. Where the sensual passes over into the supersensual, we must resort to the eurythmic art. We hope that we will eventually succeed in translating the drama, the actual dramatic form into eurythmy. But, as I said, the eurythmic art is still in its infancy, and I would ask you to consider what we have already rehearsed as a beginning. We are, however, convinced that this beginning can be perfected – probably by others, in part we ourselves will still be able to do it – but we are of the essence of this eurythmic art believe that this eurythmic art will one day be able to stand as a full-fledged art alongside the other full-fledged sister arts.

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

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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