The two polar styles of eurythmic form Steiner taught in 1915: the ecstatic central-and-chorus Dionysian, and the calm upward Apollonian carried out in stillness.
The Apollonian and Dionysian in Eurythmy in Anthroposophy is the pair of contrasting movement-styles Rudolf Steiner set out in two eurythmy courses given at Dornach in 1915, recorded in Eurythmy: The Revelation of the Speaking Soul (GA 277). The Dionysian style, modelled on the old Greek temple dance of Dionysos, is dynamic and energy-laden: a principal dancer at the centre eurythmises the vowels while a surrounding chorus carries the consonants, as in the energy dance and the peace dance. The Apollonian style is its quiet opposite, gestures drawn together as closely as possible and lifted upward, performed in stillness without any change of position. Between them the two poles bound the whole expressive range of eurythmy, the visible speech Steiner developed from 1912 onward. Eurythmy teachers and stage ensembles still work with both polarities today.
The Apollonian and Dionysian in eurythmy are the two polar styles of eurythmic form Rudolf Steiner taught in two distinct 1915 courses at Dornach. The Dionysian is ecstatic, energy-laden movement rooted in the old choral dance, where a central figure eurythmises the vowels while a surrounding chorus carries the consonants. The Apollonian is calm, contained, upward-formed gesture, drawn together and carried out in stillness.
In Steiner's Own Words
Maria moves in apollonian forms, which are drawn together as much as possible, and brings the soul-gestures Call, Longing and Communication or Knowledge to expression in the vowels I U A. I as Call, U as Longing, touching like AU in the word AUM, and A as Knowledge or Communication. In this way one can attain a very harmonious working-out of the formation for Maria. Philia seeks to bring her words to expression in answering-fulfilling movements toward Maria. She moves in apollonian forms and forms all the vowels as far up as possible; the chorus accompanying her supplements the consonants, likewise carrying the gestures upward into the heights.
What it Means Today
The polarity did not begin with Steiner. Friedrich Nietzsche set the Apollonian and Dionysian against each other in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), reading Greek drama as the meeting of Apolline form and Dionysian intoxication. Steiner knew that book closely. He wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (1895, GA 5) and spent stretches of 1896 ordering the library in the Nietzsche Archive at Naumburg, then in Weimar under Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. When Steiner returned to the pair two decades later in the August and September 1915 eurythmy courses, he gave Nietzsche’s aesthetic categories a concrete bodily grammar: the Dionysian became the central-figure-and-chorus form descended from the temple dance of Dionysos, the Apollonian the upward, drawn-together gesture carried out in stillness. Thalira synthesis: where Nietzsche left the two principles as warring forces of culture, Steiner asked a dancer to hold both in one trained body, the Dionysian discharge and the Apollonian restraint sounding the same cosmic word from opposite sides. Eurythmists trained at the Goetheanum Section for the Performing Arts in Dornach still rehearse the distinction when they choose between an expansive group form and a contained solo gesture.
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