Visible speech and visible song. A movement art Rudolf Steiner developed between 1912 and 1924, practiced today on stage, in Waldorf classrooms, and in anthroposophic medicine as eurythmy therapy.
Eurythmy is a movement art in which the sounds of speech and the tones of music are made visible as precise gestures of the whole human body. Rudolf Steiner developed it between 1912 and 1924, calling it visible speech and visible song. It is performed on stage, taught in Waldorf classrooms, and prescribed therapeutically by anthroposophic physicians.
In Steiner's Own Words
This is what really lies behind eurhythmy. The human being as we see him is a completed form. But the form has been created out of movement. It has arisen from those primeval forms which were continually taking shape and again passing away. Movement does not proceed from quiescence; on the contrary, that which is in a state of rest originates in movement. In eurhythmy we are really going back to primordial movement. What is it that my Creator, working out of primeval, cosmic being, does in me as man? If you would give the answer to this question you must make the eurhythmic movements. God eurhythmetizes, and as the result of His eurhythmy there arises the form of man.
What it Means Today
Eurythmy lives now in two places that the casual observer rarely connects. The first is the performing-arts stage, where the Goetheanum Stage Ensemble in Dornach and independent companies in Stuttgart, The Hague, and Witten still mount full evenings of poetry and Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert rendered through the body. The second is the clinic. Eurythmy therapy (Heileurythmie) is one of the four core therapies of anthroposophic medicine, taught at the Ita Wegman Clinic in Arlesheim since 1921 and now practised by certified therapists registered with the Medical Section at the Goetheanum. A physician prescribes specific consonant or vowel movements, the patient repeats them daily, and the therapy is reimbursed by some statutory and private insurers in Germany and Switzerland under integrative-medicine schemes.
For the student of Steiner, the practical work begins with recognising that every sound of speech is already a gesture. The vowel a opens; the consonant b shelters; the r revolves. To learn eurythmy is to slow speech down until the etheric movement inside each sound becomes visible, then to perform that movement consciously with the arms and the whole body. Watch a single eurythmy figure attentively and you stop hearing speech as a transfer of meaning. You begin hearing it as form arising in the air. Complementing eurythmy's sound-gesture work in Waldorf schools is Soul Gymnastics (Bothmer Gymnastics), the spatial-direction movement-art developed by Fritz Graf von Bothmer in 1922. Marie Steiner-von Sivers developed a parallel speech-art alongside eurythmy: Speech Formation (Sprachgestaltung), the conscious shaping of vowel and consonant in service of recitation, drama, and therapy. Eurythmy was carried to the stage as a performing art above all by Marie Steiner, who also founded the allied art of speech formation. Eurythmy educates the sense of self-movement, the inner perception of one's own motion. Speech eurythmy makes visible what the sense of word inwardly grasps in spoken language. Eurythmy was first set down systematically as visible speech, the sounds of language made bodily gesture. Eurythmy enters the school as a continuation of the young child's natural play.
Where to Read More