46. Eurythmy Performance

As I always do before these performances, allow me to say a few words today as well – certainly not to explain the performance, that would be a very unartistic undertaking. Artistic things must work through their own impression and need no explanation. But since this is a new art form, created from special new artistic sources, it may be permissible to say a few words about this new artistic source. What you will see on the stage will consist of all kinds of movements, which will be performed by the limbs of the human body itself, movements of individuals or movements in groups, which will then be in a certain relationship to the relationship of the individual persons in the groups, and so on. What is all this that appears as movement of the human being and of groups of people? Well, it is nothing other than a kind of silent language, a real language, but one that is not arbitrarily constructed, not constructed in such a way that random gestures or pantomime have been taken to form a more complicated kind of sign language. No, that is not the case. Rather, it is a matter of creating something that is completely in the character of the human inner movements, in the sense of Goethe's view of art and Goethe's artistic attitude. So that the eurythmy you are about to see here actually uses the whole human being, indeed groups of people, as a means of expression, just as spoken language is otherwise used as a means of expression by the larynx and its neighboring organs.