The Basic Principles of Eurythmy

A classic book about a new form of movement, written by a great teacher and performer of eurythmy. It gives a thorough exposition of the art form.

＂The art of movement known as eurythmy takes its start from Goethe’s view that all art is the revelation of concealed laws of Nature, which, without such revelation, would remain concealed. This thought may be connected with another Goethean thought. In each human organ there is an expression of the whole form of man. Each human limb is, as it were, the human being in miniature, just as, in Goethe’s view, the leaf is the plant in miniature. We may reverse this thought and see in man a complete expression of what one of his organs represents. In the larynx and the organs connected with the larynx in speech and song, these activities set up the movements or tendency to movements, which are revealed in sounds or combinations of sounds, although the movements themselves are not perceived in ordinary life. It is not so much these movements themselves but the tendencies to them which are to be transformed by eurythmy into movements of the whole body. What occurs imperceptibly in the formation of sounds and tones in a single system of organs is to become visible as movement and posture in the whole human being. The movements of the limbs reveal what takes place in the larynx and its neighboring organs in speaking and singing; in movement in space, in the forms and movements of groups, there is portrayed what lives in the human soul as tone and speech. Thus in eurythmy, this art of movement, there is created something, at the birth of which those impulses ruled which have been active in the development of all forms of art.

Eurythmy is intended to lead the art of dancing back to the source from which it originated but from which, in the course of time, it has wandered far. It would do this not through imitation or mere revival of the old, but in the true sense of a truly modern conception of art.＂

-- Rudolf Steiner, 1922