47. Eurythmy Performance

And so you see that the instrument for eurythmy must be the human being itself. Just as one instrument or another is used in the other arts, eurythmy uses the human being itself as an instrument. And today we will still accompany that which appears as a silent language in music and recitation. But we use the human being in such a way that through him, who is in fact a microcosm, that which, I would say, the world itself wants to express as its riddles, as its secrets, and which can never be expressed through mere ideas or abstract understanding. In this way one achieves what I believe to be a Goethean artistic attitude, which he expresses in his beautiful book on Winckelmann when he says: “When man's healthy nature works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight - then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.” And indeed, if we truly bring to expression what man, placed at the summit of nature, can achieve by transforming his otherwise artistic nature, then we have attained something of that can be said to be the case when the individual human being does not express himself in his egoistic unity, but makes himself into a tool, a means of expression for what nature and the world want to convey to us. In this sense, eurythmy can indeed be considered the beginning of something promising, in the Goethean sense of art. Goethe says so beautifully: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to him, man feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Real art cannot be sought in the merely arbitrary, but real art can only be sought in representations of what has been overheard from nature's riddles. But all that we can offer you today through our silent language, which we call eurythmy, I ask you to take with indulgence. Because it is only a beginning, perhaps even just an attempt at a beginning. Everything still needs to be further developed. But we are convinced that if our contemporaries take an interest in the matter - we are our own harshest critics and can only see it as a weak beginning today - and if, based on this interest, suggestions can be received for further development , then through us, or probably through others, this eurythmic art will be developed to such an extent that it can stand fully justified, perhaps only after a long time, alongside other fully justified but older art forms.