Eurythmie Alphabet - Sound I

In this video, we show you Rudolf Steiner's eurythmy gesture for the sound i.

Rudolf Steiner: "Any stretching, wherever you feel it, be it in your arms, in your legs, be it [...] in your whole body, but also in your gaze, with your nose, your tongue, or just with one finger or, if you can, just with one toe. But it must be the experience of stretching. A very typical i is when you stretch one arm sideways upwards and the other downwards accordingly.‘

The sound i can be expressed by any stretching, with the feeling of ‘experiencing yourself suggestively within yourself’.
‘The i reveals the human being as a person.‘

Rudolf Steiner goes on to say about the sound i:

‘So suppose you make an i with both arms, this i does not appear correct to the outside world if you just look at the drawing, at the form, but you must at the same time – and you can see it in the person – have the feeling that while they are doing this, they feel the stretching forces within.’

Here you can see Rudolf Steiner's sketch of the eurythmy figure for the sound i. He describes the figure as follows: "[...] The eurythmist [can] go so far with his feeling [...] that when he makes this movement [eurythmy figure I], for example, he actually reaches out slightly in this direction with his arm, so that he feels the arm floating very lightly in the air, not filled with inner strength. He feels the other arm as if he were firing up all the strength of his muscles and putting a lot of force into it. This is an arm that is raised with ease (right arm), this is an arm (left arm) in which one feels a kind of quiet stinging in the muscles, which is tense. This brings character into the movement."

He specified the following colours: first for the movement (the dress) ‘yellow-orange’, then for the feeling (the veil) “red” and then for the character (muscle tension) ‘slightly tinged with blue’.

"And so, someone who is capable of such imagination feels that an I always presents itself to the soul in such an image, that the image expresses self-assertion, the awareness of the stretched muscle in the arm, for example. If someone is particularly skilled with their nose, they can do the same with their nose.

One can also do it with the gaze; but one does it naturally because the arms and hands are the most expressive, truly artistic with the arms. But what matters is that this feeling of stretching, this thrusting in with the outstretched limb, is expressed in the I."

"But anyone who is able to empathise with an I knows: there is something in this I which, when felt and sensed correctly, is something that gives us our own existence from the outside world."

‘When we say an I, we only have the right image if we see in this i the anchoring of our spiritual nature within ourselves, in a sense the fulfilment through that which comes into consideration from ourselves.’

"Let us feel what the i is, this curiosity and then this coming upon it.


Now we have the sound that comes even closer to human beings than the e, which represents, so to speak, the complete self-assertion of human beings, that is the i'. It is the purest self-assertion. […] This pure self-assertion is what we now feel. Isn't it true that with the a we move centripetally from two different sides, while with the i we move from the centre outwards and now feel not as if we were grasping something, but rather we feel the stretching, we feel the pull emanating from us, from the heart out through the arm and through both arms, or through the legs, or even through the direction of vision, with which one can also do the i, through the direction of the eyes, by looking consciously with one eye and letting the other be passive; this clearly creates the i.

There must be nothing a-like in the i, but the two arms must appear as if they are extensions of each other. But one arm is also sufficient. Essentially, however, it is important to note that one feels the stretching in the i [...]."


Literature/Source:
-Rudolf Steiner Eurythmie als sichtbare Sprache GA 279
-Eurythmie als sichtbarer Gesang GA 278
-Eurythmie - Die Offenbarung der sprechenden Seele GA 277
-Entwürfe zu den Eurythmiefiguren GA k 26
-Eurythmie - Die neue Bewegungskunst der Gegenwart tb 6420
-Die geistig-seelischen Grundkräfte der Erziehungskunst GA 305
-Tatiana Kisseleff Eurythmie Tagebuch 1914-1918
-Logos Eurythmie