Embryo in Motion and Eurythmy – Forms in Gesture.
From the text:
Now what is the language spoken by the embryo? It is the language of form or even better; the language of form gesture. Now every form is ultimately to be regarded as a solidified movement and of every biological form the gesture of form should also be found. What gesture – what gesture – speaks from an oak or a birch, for example, expresses itself in or through the form of the tree? In embryonic existence, which for man only covers at most the first ten weeks of the nine months of his pre-born existence, forms are even still in motion. The form of the (becoming) human being is then constantly changing and metamorphosing, and one can even literally witness the emergence of the forms of the human body there. This must be food for phenomenologists. Now everyone is familiar with the fact of a series of photographs or memory images of a person in various successive stages of life and recognizes the amazement one can sometimes feel about the fact that one and the same being can change so much in appearance over time. But in case of this example, we still always speak of a more or less complete stature. The proportions of the various body parts may change (sometimes radically) in successive phases of life but the building plan, the stature and its “parts” is more or less the same and does not change. How different it is in embryonic existence! The changes in stature and appearance are much more radical there! Not only do relationships and relations constantly change dramatically, there is even the appearance and disappearance of body parts and organs. In all this, it must be considered that it is a question of human appearance: ‘Was sich ändert is die Erscheinung, nicht das Wesen’ (E. Blechschmidt). During the first four weeks, for example, there are no arms or legs yet. The body schema so familiar to us with an outside and an inside (intestines) is something that is completely missing in the first three weeks: the embryo then possesses only “outside. Only later, in a gesture of curvature and self-sufficiency that permeates the entire embryonic body, the proportions of inside (intestines) and outside (“guts”) characteristic of the adult human body are developed. The stature of the human embryo is a continuous and profound metamorphosis of form and appearance.
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