Carved wooden figures Steiner designed to show each speech-sound as one threefold whole of movement, feeling, and character, each painted in three colours.
The Eurythmy Figures are a series of carved wooden boards, cut to the silhouette of a single sound-gesture and painted in three harmonizing colours, which Rudolf Steiner devised at the Goetheanum to make visible the inner life of each sound. One colour carries the movement, one the feeling, one the character the performer must hold.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is therefore a good exercise to call up in one’s mind the connection existing between any special movement and its underlying character and colour ... (see eurhythmy figures). Here it will be of assistance to practise the sound in some such way as this. You might, for instance, take the vowel-sounds a, u, e, o, i, and allow the following colours to stream through the movements: blue-violet; blue-green; greenish-yellow; reddish-yellow; red-yellow-orange. You must experience the colour and make the movements simultaneously, thus working at the same time in the realm of colour and of sound. By this means: the movements will become noticeably flowing and supple, and you will soon see that a certain ‘style’ is being developed.
What it Means Today
Walk into a eurythmy training room at the Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, or at one of the conservatory programmes such as Eurythmy Spring Valley in Chestnut Ridge, New York, and the figures are usually on the wall: a row of small painted silhouettes, one per sound. A student learning the wonder-sound a does not only copy the raised arms. She looks to its figure, sees the blue-violet, and asks what that colour wakes in her, so that the gesture is felt from the inside before it is shown. The figure is a teaching instrument, not a costume diagram. Each one separates a single sound into three readable parts, the line of the movement, the colour-mood of the feeling, and the character or stance the body must keep, so a beginner can study one thing at a time and then knit the three back into one living gesture.
Here is the Thalira reading. The figures are a small piece of applied Goethean science: Steiner treats colour exactly as Goethe did, as the deed and suffering of the soul made outwardly visible, and then maps that colour-language onto the sounds the larynx already shapes. A practitioner does not memorise an arbitrary code. She rehearses by dressing in imagination in a sound's colour, blue-violet for a, brighter tones for the embracing o, until movement and colour stream together and what Steiner called style begins to appear. The sister-art of tone eurythmy keeps its own figures for the musical intervals, but the speech figures remain the original set, the place where a sound first stands still long enough to be studied as form, feeling, and character at once.
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