The eurythmic gesture is the visible etheric movement of speech: eurythmy reads the larynx's formative movements off the etheric body and renders them through the whole human being.
The Etheric Basis of the Eurythmic Gesture in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of where eurythmy comes from: the eurythmic gesture is read off the movements of the etheric body, the body of formative life-forces that becomes active when a person speaks or thinks. Steiner taught in Eurythmy: The Revelation of the Speaking Soul (GA 277, lectures from 1918 onward) that the etheric body has a definite articulation, one member of which corresponds to the larynx and comes into lawful, visible movement during speech. Eurythmy lifts those invisible etheric movements off the larynx and renders them through the limbs of the whole body, so the entire human being becomes a visible larynx. Today the artistic eurythmy schools, the Eurythmeum Stuttgart among them, train performers to make these formative movements visible on stage.
The etheric basis of the eurythmic gesture is Steiner's principle that every eurythmy movement originates not in the physical body but in the etheric body, the body of formative forces active in speaking and thinking. The etheric larynx moves lawfully when a person speaks; eurythmy makes that hidden movement visible by transferring it onto the limbs, so the whole person becomes a speaking, silent larynx in space.
In Steiner's Own Words
The etheric body of the human being has its definite articulation, and one partial articulation corresponds to the larynx and what is connected with it. The etheric body of the larynx and what belongs to it, the tongue, the palate and so forth, comes into quite definite, lawful movements in speaking, so that one sees this member of the etheric body in definite movements when the human being speaks. Now everything that comes to expression in one part can also be expressed through the whole human being. In movements of the whole human being one can express those movements which lie at the foundation of this member of the etheric body. This was done in eurythmy.
What it Means Today
Eurythmy did not stay a private exercise at Dornach. The Eurythmeum Stuttgart, founded by Marie Steiner in 1923 as the first eurythmy training school, became the place where the etheric basis of the gesture was carried into a professional stage art. From 1935 to 1991 the school and its ensemble were directed by Else Klink (1907 to 1994), who built a touring repertoire and trained generations of performers to work from Steiner's premise: the gesture is not invented choreography but a reading of the formative movement that the etheric larynx makes when speech sounds form. Klink's company premiered eurythmic settings of full orchestral works, including Schubert's Unfinished Symphony in 1961, and toured internationally; in 1992 the ensemble was renamed the Else Klink Ensemble in her honour. Thalira synthesis: what Steiner located in the invisible articulation of the etheric body, Klink's training made teachable as a craft, so that a beginner learns to hold back the large gesture until the smallest etheric movement of a single sound has become conscious, then habitual, then visible through the whole organism. The eurythmist's discipline is therefore a discipline of perception before it is a discipline of movement: the gesture is true only when it answers to the formative force already moving in the spoken word.
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