By Coralee Schmandt

The art of eurythmy is a relatively new art, not even a hundred years old. So, the initial difficulty when asked what eurythmy is, is where exactly to begin? Eurythmy can be approached by many routes and each person may find their way from a different angle. However, whichever direction we come from toward eurythmy, eventually we find our way to the same source at the heart of the truly human. We may first meet eurythmy as a performing art in the theatre. Like other performing arts - ballet, for example - eurythmy attracts an audience from all walks of life who attend for the pleasure of being present at an artistic happening. But you can also participate more directly in eurythmy because it is also something everyone can do to live more fully and feelingly. 

In fact eurythmy comes in so many forms and offers such a range of benefits to humanity that it may seem fantastical to the uninitiated. For eurythmy is all of the following: a performance art; a revivifying artistic activity for adults; a movement art for school-children (offered in the curriculum of Steiner schools, from pre-school to class 12); a teaching aid for all kinds of children and adults with learning difficulties; it promotes health when practised therapeutically; it helps build social awareness and contributes beneficially to the life of organizations. Moreover, as a path of development, it stimulates the life forces, organizes the soul life and helps us be more present in ourselves.

What is the well-spring that nourishes all these different fields? Actually, one could ask this same question about the human being since the medium of eurythmy is the whole human being. "If we wish to enter into the true nature of eurythmy, we must perforce enter into the true nature of the human being. For eurythmy, to a far greater extent than any other art, makes use of what lies in the nature of man himself. (1) So, what is the wellspring of health, life, and spiritual growth in the human being?

To begin with, we can take this question quite literally. Dance and other movement arts “centre” the human being in the centre of the physical body, the solar plexus. In eurythmy, the physical form of the human being is embedded within and permeated by the other “bodies” : the life body (etheric body), the soul (astral body), and the spiritual being (the ego). As such, we could say that the centre is the soul. – which expresses itself in our thinking, our feelings, and impulses of will. And the “centre of  the centre” is feeling, whose “seat” is the rhythmic beat of  the heart and alternating in-breath and out-breath of the lungs.

This centre is the well-spring of forces that heal the disjointed relationship that so often exists between Self and World.  Mental and physical health are promoted when we  find ourselves warmly at home in ourselves in a breathing relationship with the world. In the movement language of eurythmy, joy and sorrow, yellow and blue, major and minor all express the contrasts of expansion and contraction, or soul breathing. Likewise all the rhythmic elements , in poetry or music, alternating “longs” (expansion) and “shorts” (contraction). But eurythmy is considerably more than learning to breathe as we shall see.

It is worth noting, however, that modern stress management techniques affirm the role of the heart in promoting well-being, both as an organ in the physical body and as a metaphor for the seat of the feelings. For example, the first step in the HeartMath Quick Coherence techniques for coping with stress is “focus your attention in the area of the heart”, then, “imagine your breath is flowing in and out of that area.” (2) Even a simple shift of attention into the region of the heart diminishes negative emotions like fear, anger, and resentment and increases the flow of feelings like compassion because the heart is the organ that strives to balance the physical and emotional opposites in our lives. In fact, Rudolf Steiner and other spiritual teachers have always placed inner quiet at the beginning of the path to higher knowledge: “Provide for yourself moments of inner tranquillity and in these moments learn to distinguish between the essential and the non-essential”.   (3) The path to a healthy balance, in the physical body and in the mind or soul, originates in the quiet breath and heart, as do the processes that expand the soul and free the spirit for higher activity.

Therapeutic eurythmy, a special branch of eurythmy, works with exercises appropriate for specific health conditions that are sequences of concentrated, or “potentised” consonant and vowel gestures and each of them supports the healing process by encouraging the life forces within the physical body to take on new shapes and processes that promote healing.

Each time we manage to balance the soul, we are delicately attuning it and increasing its capacity for balance in the future. Rhythmic repetition, or practice, is the way the soul gradually evolves into a harmonious relationship with the natural world and our companions on life’s journey.

In every branch of eurythmic activity it is necessary above all that the ... whole human being of the eurythmist should be brought into play, so that eurythmy may become an expression of life itself. This cannot be achieved unless one enters into the spirit of eurythmy, feeling it actually as visible speech. (4)

The performing art of eurythmy cultivates not only the breathing and the warmth of heart that bring about a healthy balance in the soul, but also challenges us to become one with all life's diversity and variety, the play of life itself: fast-paced as well as slow, dark and light, smooth and sharp, etc. Significantly, Steiner says of eurythmy that the whole human being must be brought into “play”, a word that captures a multiplicity of nuances, as the dappling play of light and shadow on the birch trunk in spring, or the frolicking play of infants or lambs, or the play between the different instruments in the orchestra, which are also “played” (and in all play great effort is exerted to create just the desired effect). My father also used the term in fishing: “give the line some play”, or “play a trout”. Play has to do with an invisible movement, as between characters or events in a Shakespeare play; or between tones in a chord, between fisherman and trout. Life is movement, the transition from one state to another, the dance of life that weaves in and through the manifest world, between the beech leaves and the breeze, the landscape and the sky-scape, the flock of birds and the air . According to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that .the soul becomes...”.(5)  In eurythmy the whole human being is brought into play, or enlivened, to express or speak the instant of the soul's becoming, which is also the essential nature of act of speaking or shaping our thoughts, or inspirations, into words. 

Painting, sculpture, dance and music exist because they first arise in the human being who is the source of all the arts - and each attentive participant, each sensitive observer, re-creates the experience in him/herself. We become colours, shapes, composition, when we view painting, sculpt the shapes of a statue out of the substance of our own flesh and bone; we dissolve in the flow of music, guided through ethereal worlds by the composer's masterful hand; we inwardly enact the sounds of a poem, live in its pictures, and we unfold new soul faculties in ourselves by living other lives in a play; we soar in the space of a cathedral and cramp up in the crypt and the soul feels differently in each architectural form; and of course, we “dance” with the dancers. We are by nature synaesthetic: we transpose what can be perceived by one sense to another sense organ. We can feel with our eyes and listen with our whole being. Because we do this, we rejoice in eurythmy this “making visible” through our whole selves. 

Whether we create it or observe it, art enhances the sense of being alive. Something in us moves, is moved, so that after an artistic experience we feel uplifted, invigorated - if it is truly artistic - and can sense that art is also a kind of restorative. What is true of all the arts is very particularly true of eurythmy whose element is that animating principle in us that we have in common with the plants and animals, with the flow of rivers and the shape-shifting clouds in the blue sky. In eurythmy, we consciously engage that sense of life in human movement.

In art, in eurythmy, our richly differentiated souls find themselves again. We feel we can breathe; feel ourselves whole again and integrated into the greater whole. Our hearts are refreshed and our souls organised. It has been shown that even personal suffering can move on under the magic influence of art because through art our souls become “elastic” again.

Eurythmy brings healing and vitality and it can do this because every detail - how we stand, step, gesture, move in space - is expressive of the human soul. The words we use make this clear: we not only stand upright in physical terms but we also “take a stand” and an “upright” person is also moral and trustworthy. Stance is both an outer posture and an inner soul orientation. We can take a step physically but we also take steps inwardly, as we progress along a ‘path’ of development. Gravity is the force that brings us onto the earth and keeps us here, but a “grave” matter is also “weighty” or serious, whereas the counter-force of “levity” draws the plants and the human being toward the sun, “uplifts” us. We experience the contrasts between feeling “down” or “upbeat”, “depressed” (pressed down) or “delighted”.

Our stance, how we move, whether we are buoyant or burdened, speak of our state of soul in a language that can be more direct and immediate than words. Every gesture is the outward expression of the inward soul, as studies of body language also demonstrate. Gestures “speak” the soul, from the most elementary neediness of an infant, to the differentiated gestures that convey joy and grief, reverence, hope, or longing in the works of such artists as in Giotto. But eurythmy also strives to speak an even more elevated language: to make visible the human spirit and, through the human being, the activity of the divine beings or forces that created and sustain the world. The archetype that informs eurythmy is the Human Being itself. For within each human being, limbs, heart, and head are loci for the threefold soul: willing, feeling and thinking which, on a still more refined plane, reflect the threefold nature of the spiritual world: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Eurythmy stands against this background and, in its highest manifestation, aspires to make visible the formative powers at work in us and in the world. Our capacity for speech, to form sound so as to express outwardly what we experience inwardly, is the archetype of all creative activity, even the divine creative deed itself:

In his poem, “Ode to the West Wind”, Shelley compares the act of inspiration in poetic creation to the shaping “breath” of the wind which is both creator and preserver in nature. The genius of the language preserves the connection between “wind” and “breath”  in the Latin root of the word “spirit” which originally meant “air, breath, wind”. (“Inspiration” is likewise a “breathing in”.) The 3-way analogy between the invisible wind, our own breath which is formed into words, and the “breath” of the Creator who created universe is an analogy that persists in this word “spirit”. The poet's magic touch releases it again from its enchantment.

Here, the wind, the harbinger of autumn in Italy, metamorphoses continually, a picture of divine and poetic “inspiration”. 

We are the image of God in that we have been given the capacity to shape our thoughts, imaginations, inspirations into speech, creating outwardly the life of soul within. Steiner said to the first eurythmists that the sound gestures correspond with the divine gestures of God when He formed the world: "God eurythmetizes".2 

To conclude, we can say that eurythmy cultivates the human being as a being of body (health), soul (art), and spirit(path of development) beginning from the heart, the source within us. It is a “visible speech” and “visible music” expressed through the whole human being, or to quote Rudolf Steiner: 

1. Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmy as Visible Speech, 1955, Anthroposophical Publishing Co., p. 21
2. Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman, Transforming Stress, 2005, New Harbinger Publications, California, p.44
3. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of Higher Worlds, p.19
4. Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmy as Visible Speech, p.21.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Literary Classics,  Inc., New York, 1945, p.50
6. R. Steiner, Eurythmy as Visible Speech, p. 22 -3.