Eurythmy as Speech Made Visible (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

RUDOLF Steiner laid the groundwork for the professional development of a surprising number of anthroposophical initiatives in 1924, including medicine, biodynamic farming, the Christian Community, curative education, speech and drama, and eurythmy. The ideas that helped establish these professions in the world flowed out of him as if he had achieved an overarching view that allowed him to see and communicate the essence of each profession, right into the practical details.

The two lecture series he gave on eurythmy in the first half of 1924, Eurythmy as Visible Singing (19 to 27 February) and Eurythmy as Speech Made Visible (24 June to 12 July) had this impact on the art of eurythmy. The eight lectures on music eurythmy added substantially to what was already developing. They were delivered to an intimate circle of eurythmists and close friends of the work, in a private room. By comparison, speech eurythmy had achieved a certain artistic niveau through earlier productions of the Mystery Dramas and Faust and international performances of poetry in English, Russian, and French as well as German. The second series of fifteen lectures on speech eurythmy, Eurythmy as Speech Made Visible, collected the body of indications that had been given to different people and, because of the great interest in this subject, was presented in the Carpenters’ Studio to a large audience of eurythmy students and eurythmists, Vorstand [Executive Council] members, and visitors attending other lectures that were being held simultaneously. According to a participant, they filled the room to the last chair.

Eurythmy was Rudolf Steiner’s creation, ‘a most beloved spiritual offspring’ according to Marie Steiner,1 and he lavished loving attention on it from the time of his first indications given to Lory Maier-Smits, the first eurythmist,2 until his death. His personal interest in the progress of eurythmy shows itself in small gestures. For example, despite his hectic schedule, he would sit down to draw a new form for a poem or piece of music during his lunch pause at the request of a eurythmist or Marie Steiner, or drop by a rehearsal in the evening and give a few essential indications to a single eurythmist or a group of them. Over the years, the art had developed organically, with indications given to other eurythmists besides Lory, notably to Tatjana Kisseleff,3 that expanded, and in some cases contradicted, earlier indications.

This led to the need for the definitive series of lectures in 1924 called ‘The Speech Course’, or when it came out as a publication, Eurythmy as Speech Made Visible. At the beginning of the first day, Steiner stated that this course would reiterate all the indications he had given over the preceding twelve years and ‘lay the foundations of an exact eurythmical tradition’.4 We can understand the word ‘tradition’ here to mean an articulation of the principles of this creative art as a basis for building and developing eurythmy further. That is, Rudolf Steiner’s intention was to gather all the indications he had given in a single bouquet as eurythmy approached twelve-and-a-half years of existence. By this time, eurythmy was truly blossoming and the tender shoot was beginning to form seeds of its own out of its own forces.

Indeed, Steiner did much more than simply bring together everything that had been given before. Rather, while re-combining and re-presenting these elements, he was also adding new material and, in a sense, re-creating everything, offering the audience an immediate, living experience of what the art had become and what it was capable of in the future. Annemarie Dubach-Donath, one of the young eurythmists present, captured this mood when she wrote in her autobiography:

While touching repeatedly on what had already been given, Rudolf Steiner led us in mighty steps far, far beyond these initial realms. His spiritual gaze surveyed the whole field of eurythmy: many seeds germinated, many blossoms opened, and lovingly he took one or the other in hand, freeing them from much that had, over time, come to constrict and hinder them; and then he grasped hold of a breathtaking wealth of new possibilities.5

According to Steiner’s opening comments in the course, it was Marie Steiner who had encouraged him to bring all the different threads together in one authoritative series of talks. In so saying, Steiner indirectly acknowledges her years of selflessly supporting the day-to-day development of eurythmy as a stage art, managing the daily rehearsing, programmeand tour-planning, speaking for practices and performances, and directing performances. One can easily imagine that, out of working hands-on with the art, she recognized a need for such an overview. If it is so that without her urging we would not have this course, we indeed owe a great deal to her because without these lectures we can question whether we would have the vital eurythmic tradition that we have today. Speech eurythmy could have gone the way of other dance movements from the early years of the twentieth century, whose initiators did not establish a ‘tradition’ on which future generations of dancers could build, and so their impulse remained stunted at a certain level or passed away with the originators.

The Speech Course had a quality unlike Steiner’s other lectures, which the transcription of the words cannot really convey. Imagine for a moment the bustle and excitement of these sessions, Steiner at the lectern with a blackboard behind him for illustrations, eurythmists and students in the audience with notebooks and pencils poised, and the eurythmists on stage ready to demonstrate whatever he asked for. Ralph Kux draws attention to the special animation that characterized Steiner’s demeanour during these lectures:

Especially fresh in my memory is the extraordinary vitality which he displayed . . . When, for instance, he was arranging the zodiac in movement forms, he himself would lightly leap up onto the stage and show each eurythmist the characteristic movement she needed to make for each constellation. Fervent enthusiasm lay in his eyes and gestures at such moments, as he moved amongst the performers with youthful vigour. One had the sense of a great educator who wished to kindle verve and energy in his students.6

Blackboard drawings and demonstrations enlivened the whole experience, so, as well as the words which the stenographer noted as he spoke, the spectators had visual experiences which can only be faintly reconstructed.

As Marie Steiner describes it:

. . . the whole bore the character of fresh and immediate improvisation; drawings were rapidly sketched on the board, exercises were performed by the young ladies to illustrate aspects of the work; everything was conversation and collaboration rather than lecturing.7

How can we possibly capture the mood of spontaneity and interchange that must have passed between Rudolf Steiner and the others simply from stenographers’ notes? This present edition includes a quantity of material to stimulate our imaginations, like the colour plates of his illustrations and the blackboard drawings in the appendix, as well as verbal accounts from participants, which give us the best chance of reproducing the event imaginatively.

The new German edition of Eurythmy as Speech Made Visible was justified on the grounds that it contains the results of in-depth research that resulted in many changes to the earlier editions. Stefan Hasler and Martina Maria Sam, the editors of the German text, researched every aspect of the original transcripts of the course. For example, the stenographic notes have been re-examined and corrections made. They rummaged the archived notes of the participants for unincorporated material and filled in omissions by earlier editors.

Today, eurythmists must, of necessity, be ‘researchers’, in the best sense of the word, because the eurythmists from Steiner’s time are no longer with us to pass on their first-hand experiences, as was the case earlier. Moreover, though previous generations may have been content with wisdom passed down from generations of teachers, today’s student can rightfully feel a sense of liberation from this mode of learning and wish to engage directly with original sources in a new spirit of enquiry. To this end, this modern edition offers extensive invaluable ‘data’. Moreover, we also discover that our teachers could be fallible or that the sources were not always in agreement. For example, primitive drawings made by audience members show that in some cases, the spectators ‘saw’ different things, although they were seeing the same thing at the same moment! In previous versions of this course, such contradictory information did not appear. Though initially one might feel somewhat destabilized, wondering which is the ‘correct’ version, one is also invited to discover for oneself. Ultimately, this attitude may more closely reflect Steiner’s own – if we view his indications as stimulants to our creativity rather than ‘rules’ for how to do eurythmy.

Ultimately, we can be deeply grateful to the effort and dedication to eurythmy of Hasler and Sam, who had the foresight to grip the moment, investigate all the extant sources, and create the most accurate version possible, thus aiding Steiner in his intention to lay down a tradition for future eurythmists.

Steiner states this intention to create an authoritative body of basic principles at the beginning of the course. But the...